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Security Council’s Overdue COVID-19 Ceasefire Resolution Must Put Women & Youth at Center

Tue, 07/07/2020 - 08:56

In Bangladesh, Oxfam’s partner Shushilan has helped ensure that people receiving distributions of food and clean water are not put at risk of COVID-19 transmission. Credit: Fabeha Monir/Oxfam

By Fionna Smyth
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jul 7 2020 (IPS)

More than three months after UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres made an urgent appeal for a global ceasefire in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN Security Council has finally passed a resolution supporting his call.

As Oxfam stated in its report Conflict in the Time of Coronavirus, the virus is exposing and exacerbating existing issues in conflict-affected and fragile countries, further complicating efforts to help those in need. In Yemen, airstrikes have destroyed hospitals and other infrastructure, with now barely half of health centers fully functional and only a small number equipped to treat COVID-19 cases.

Displaced Rohingya people who have risked everything to flee conflict and persecution in their home country have been blocked from ports due to fear of the virus spreading.

In Colombia, one of the countries which initially endorsed the UN Secretary-General’s call for a global ceasefire, armed groups have ignored the risks of the pandemic and used the heightened insecurity to target human rights defenders, many of whom are indigenous and Afro-Colombian women.

While the resolution is welcomed, it is long overdue and highlights a remarkable situation where some non-state armed groups – like the Southern Cameroons Defense Forces, an armed wing of the African People’s Liberation Movement – responded to the UNSG’s call for peace before the UN Security Council did.

The resolution also falls far short of what civil society and the humanitarian community had called for. For one, the resolution only reinforces the global ceasefire call in “situations on the UN Security Council’s agenda,” leaving out many States.

In addition, it exempts “counter-terrorism efforts”. This is a notoriously vague term which can be used by some countries to quelle legitimate dissent and close civil society space. Too often civilians are caught in the crossfire and it is fueling humanitarian crises where COVID-19 cases are on the rise.

Finally, the process was so delayed that many fear the impact will be minimal. The difficulties in reaching consensus revealed the deficiencies of the Council, and calls into question how seriously the Council will take implementation.

It took 100 days and numerous initiatives from Member States, religious leaders, as well as international and national organizations for UN Security Council members to overcome their geopolitical tantrums.

In Yemen, families that have fled fighting in Hudaydah are living in this camp for displaced people. Oxfam and the Ability Foundation have provided cash to 500 of the 3,000 people in this area. Credit: Pablo Tosco/Oxfam

Despite these shortcomings, the resolution offers a key to not only responding to the virus, but also addressing ongoing conflict: civil society’s meaningful participation. This recognition of the need for civil society in efforts to curb the pandemic’s impact reinforces Oxfam’s experience of responding to disease outbreaks and our work across the world where we have found that the public health response is only effective if communities are actively involved.

From our experience with the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, we know that building and maintaining people’s trust – in themselves, their families, their communities and public health systems – is vital for reducing the spread of disease.

Women and young people’s meaningful participation are particularly important, as acknowledged in the resolution. We have found that when given prompt funding and a platform, women’s rights organizations and youth networks are key to maintaining the links with communities that are needed more than ever in these times of isolation.

They are also better placed to address gender-based violence and domestic violence which have been acknowledged as a “second pandemic” across the globe.

In Honduras, the Oxfam-supported Women’s Voice and Leadership project provides emotional and legal care to women survivors of violence, uses digital technologies for campaigns, and carries out social audits to monitor the inclusion of women in the government’s coronavirus response.

In West Africa – where 76% of West Africans are under 25, making it the youngest population in the world – young people are raising awareness of coronavirus, distributing hygiene supplies, and holding their governments accountable for spending public financial resources.

The impact of meaningful participation of civil society – and especially of women and young people – also extends to the design and implementation of national ceasefires and the 90-day “humanitarian pause” recommended in the Council’s resolution.

While their inclusion was not explicitly called for in the resolution, ceasefires or “pauses” will remain of little value for people trapped in conflict zones if they are just elite bargains negotiated between those who are otherwise spoilers of peace.

To truly impact people’s lives, ceasefires must be from the ground up, born of inclusive negotiations that involve local peacebuilders and the people most affected by the conflict – especially women and young women who are disproportionately impacted.

In numerous conflict-affected contexts, civil society has already been hard at work to secure local ceasefires despite the Council’s delay. In Yemen, 59 national civil society organizations called on all conflict parties to halt fighting, release detainees, and restart peace negotiations.

Women’s groups like Peace Track Initiative have taken these efforts a step further, holding consultations with Yemeni women in-country and in the diaspora to better understand what an effective ceasefire would look like.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 139 national civil society organizations signed onto a letter pressing for a national ceasefire. The group presented their call to Congolese armed groups as well as the UN Special Envoy to the Great Lakes.

As we work to build back better and address the root causes of conflict, civil society – and especially those most marginalized – must be recognized as the critical leaders they are.

While supporting peace is essential both to enable us to face the Coronavirus crisis now, and as a long-term investment to save lives and create a more stable future for all, the “how” is equally critical.

We cannot afford to wait another three months for the implementation of ceasefires and “humanitarian pauses” to happen, nor to address conflict and pandemics in the same ways as before.

Now is the time for governments to invest in women and young people’s meaningful participation in sustainable and inclusive peace processes, and in the design and implementation of COVID-19 responses.

We must do more than survive this pandemic – we can and must do better. This crisis has shown us that we are able to radically shift our systems to protect ourselves and each other – centering these voices must be a priority if we wish to come out of this global crisis with a more inclusive, healthy and peaceful world.

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The post Security Council’s Overdue COVID-19 Ceasefire Resolution Must Put Women & Youth at Center appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Fionna Smyth is Oxfam’s Head of Humanitarian Campaigns and Advocacy, based in Nairobi

The post Security Council’s Overdue COVID-19 Ceasefire Resolution Must Put Women & Youth at Center appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Impact of COVID-19 on Women and Children in South Asia

Mon, 07/06/2020 - 16:21

Raghbendra Jha is Professor of Economics, and Executive Director Australian National University.

By Raghbendra Jha
CANBERRA, Australia, Jul 6 2020 (IPS)

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020 set off a series of health and economic crises that feed upon each other. The health crisis exacerbates the economic crisis by disrupting supply chains, throwing large number of people (particularly those working in the informal sector) out of work and closing down large numbers of enterprises – particularly micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME). The economic crisis, in turn, exacerbates the health crisis for a number of reasons – not the least of which is the fact that the economic slowdown reduces the resources needed to combat the health crisis. Furthermore, the needs of both the health recovery and the economic recovery are competing for the same resources. The fact that this virus has had a global impact and some of the richest countries in the world (e.g. the US and Western Europe) are among the worst affected implies that the short-run effect of the crisis does not impact less developed countries (LDCs) unduly. However, the longer-term effects of the crisis may have deleterious effects on LDCs (particularly women and children in these countries) more than in richer countries.

Raghbendra Jha

This essay analyses some of the short-run and medium-terms impacts of the corona crisis in South Asia, particularly on the women and children of the region.1 As unemployment rose sharply in the wake of the onset of the crisis the household budget was thrown off-gear, particularly because a large proportion of workers in the region are in the informal sector.. Preliminary estimates indicate that job losses for this category of workers ranged from 25 % to 56%. . Even in the formal sector, there was substantial job loss as long lockdowns and social distancing norms took their toll. Consequently, large numbers of migrant workers left their places of work to return to their villages of origin. At this point, two good shock absorbers were introduced in India. First, the allocation to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Program was enhanced by ₹ 400 billion over budgeted amounts in order to boost employment opportunities in the villages. Furthermore, the Prime Minister announced an allocation of ₹ 500 billion for the specific purpose of providing employment to returning migrant workers.2

Another safety net in operation in India was free allocation of food for the poor. Even under normal conditions within household allocation of food in the region sometimes discriminate against women and (particularly female) children.3 Against this background the government of India extended free rations of basic grains for the poor until end November 2020.4 It is fortuitous that the winter (rabi) crop in India was abundant and the summer (kharif) crops is likely also to be good across the region. Thus, widespread hunger should not be an issue, at least in India.

There is evidence to suggest that in Bangladesh and Pakistan women are less likely to receive information about COVID-19 than men.5 This is particularly worrying because traditionally women have had primary responsibility for household hygiene and care for family members. In addition, women in Bangladesh and Pakistan are less likely to be covered by health insurance. This problem is likely to be less acute in India because of the PM-JAY health insurance scheme.6 Although women have a genetic advantage in immunity from COVID7 their emotional health may be adversely affected as compared to men for the above reasons.

It has been observed, however, that with the lockdown men and children are helping more with the housework than before. This should alleviate some pressures on women, although women continue to provide most of the services at home.

However, over the longer term there are some deep concerns. First, if the pandemic induced economic crisis becomes long drawn out there might be a substantial rise in poverty, particularly chronic poverty. The efforts of many decades of poverty reduction through economic growth and supportive measures may be wiped off. Government budgets are already under considerable stress because of various fiscal stimuli in the countries. The possibilities of enhanced economic aid are also remote since most developed countries are running huge budget deficits. If the increased poverty spells get protracted there will be serious consequences for households, particularly women and children in these households.

Also, the education of children in South Asia is facing considerable challenge in the COVID era. Sources note that even before the COVID crisis more than 95 million children were out of school in South Asia and it is likely that some more of the total of 430 million children in South Asia may face difficulties in continuing their education.8 Although the well known digital divide between rural and urban sectors has been bridged somewhat with rural India having more internet users than urban India speed and reliability of internet connections are still a concern. Whether existing internet platforms can provide enough opportunities for on line education of all children and adults is still an open question at best and more likely a serious challenge.

To conclude, while the short-term impacts of the corona crisis are still playing out, there is apprehension that a long drawn out crisis may exacerbate poverty, health and education challenges in South Asia. History suggests that women and children will be particularly vulnerable in such situations.

1 https://www.unicef.org/rosa/stories/gender-equality-during-covid-19
2 https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/pm-modi-to-launch-rs-50000-cr-job-guarantee-scheme-for-migrant-workers/articleshow/76447151.cms?from=mdr
3 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mcn.12739
4 https://indianexpress.com/article/india/pm-modi-coronavirus-lockdown-free-ration-scheme-6483474/
5 https://data.unwomen.org/resources/surveys-show-covid-19-has-gendered-effects-asia-and-pacific
6 https://pmjay.gov.in/about/pmjay
7 https://www.mysciencework.com/omniscience/covid-19-women-genetic-advantage
8 https://thelogicalindian.com/news/internet-usage-rural-urban-india-20946

The post Impact of COVID-19 on Women and Children in South Asia appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Raghbendra Jha is Professor of Economics, and Executive Director Australian National University.

The post Impact of COVID-19 on Women and Children in South Asia appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Why Does Racism Prevail? Leading Scholars Apply their Minds

Mon, 07/06/2020 - 11:52

Credit: United Nations

By External Source
Jul 6 2020 (IPS)

All people belong to one biological species and there are no human “races”. So why does belief in race persist? It may be a scientific misconception, but it is real. It defines the lived experience of many people and determines how governments act and how people treat one another. How did race come to have this power and this durability?

A project was undertaken to address these very questions and to get at the heart of the “everydayness” of race in South Africa and elsewhere. Called the Effects of Race Project, it was started at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa in 2013 as part of a broader project at the institute called Being Human Today.

One of us (Jablonski) along with political sociologist Gerhard Maré organised and convened the project. Our goal was to create new scholarship that could eventually inform outlooks and policy on “race thinking”.

Seven years later, we wanted to present a brief summary of some of the outcomes of the project and why they matter. When we began the project, we couldn’t see exactly what the future held in store, but we knew that the poisons of race-thinking and racism were killing people. Temporary antidotes were no longer going to work. Soon, the toxic nature of race thinking and racism would be exposed and fully understood so that they could be expelled from the body of humanity.

Act of discussion

We gathered together scholars from South Africa, the US and Europe who had years of experience in thinking about race. They came from sociology, anthropology, geography, law, the humanities, and education. Some of them were anti-apartheid leaders and are still engaged in efforts to raise South Africans out of that chasm of injustice.

The group met for about two weeks each year from 2015 to 2017, in the cold of the winter in the Western Cape. At the beginning of our work we had little more than hope. We fully appreciated that race-thinking and racism were big and powerful topics that had defied and defeated many previous expectations. We also recognised that we needed to inspect common misconceptions about race and understand how these continued to exist in public policy ecosystems.

The perspectives on race and racism that each of us brought to the group were never the same, but we listened carefully and responded thoughtfully. Through successive discussions, we cultivated the mutual respect and trust that made it possible to venture into the most difficult and sensitive subjects at length without fear of judgment or reprisal. As one of our members, Njabulo Ndebele, put it one afternoon:

The elephant is in the room, and we are petting it.

We mused over whether we were not just being indulgent academics, failing to respond practically to matters that affect the lives of ordinary people. But we then realised that much of what we accomplished was the act of discussion itself. Significant insights and realisations emerged from honest, probing discussions among trusted parties. The process was as important as the subject matter.

We realised people of all ages and sorts, and especially children and youth, who had long been segregated by the weight of the built environment, needed more opportunities to mix in formal and informal settings, and share their experiences, dreams, and aspirations. This was not a new insight, but the fact that all of us felt its impact, to our bones, made it profound.

Constructive discussion could disable the reflexivity that paralyses much of the discourse about race and racism in South Africa and make it possible for us to grow in our appreciation of common humanity.

The questions that need to be asked

Through our many discussions, we did not solve many problems, but the exercise of discussing the roots and manifestations of race-thinking gave us such discomfort about the status quo that we are obliged to look for transcendent and transformational alternatives. We cannot in all honesty claim that we met our goal of creating “new scholarship” that will inform public policy as we had stated at the beginning of this project.

The more we examined this age-old matter the more we realised that race-thinking in South Africa and elsewhere was embedded in the consciousness of societies, even more so those societies that are racially mixed. South Africa’s constitution does not command us to live in a race-neutral or colour-blind society. All that it does in the preamble to the constitution is to enjoin us to

heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights.

While our work does not provide solutions, it raises the questions that need to be asked, and provides some conceptual tools for understanding the complex dynamics of race in our society. We believe that we can be spared the absurdity of Sisyphus in Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus and instead be imbued with the determination to revolt and to overcome dependence on the futility of race. We hope that the sampling of our work will lead you to the same conclusion.

Nina G. Jablonski, Evan Pugh University Professor of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University and Barney Pityana, Professor Emeritus of Law, University of South Africa

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

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Categories: Africa

Has COVID-19 Pushed Women in Politics off Kenya’s Agenda?

Mon, 07/06/2020 - 08:54

Asha Abdi, a former member of Nairobi County assembly, says progress for the increased participation of women in politics in Kenya has been painfully slow. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Jul 6 2020 (IPS)

In 2013, Alice Wahome ran in her third attempt to win the hotly-contested Kandara constituency parliamentary seat in Murang’a County, Central Kenya. As is typical of rural politics, the field was male-dominated, with the stakes being high for all candidates but more especially so for Wahome — no woman had ever occupied the Kandara constituency parliamentary seat.

“It was a very brutal campaign. I was harassed, verbally abused, threatened with physical violence and many unprintable things were [said to me] even in public,” Wahome tells IPS.

She says that attributes that are considered admirable and desirable in male politicians were weaponised against her and other women in politics.

“When we vocalised our opinions they said we talk too much and the underlying message is that decent women do not talk too much. When you have a stand, and are firm in your political beliefs and values, they say you are combative, intolerant and aggressive. The same qualities in men are acceptable,” Wahome says.

So vicious was the contest for the hearts of Kandara’s voters that on the morning of the 2013 general elections, the community woke to find packets of condoms branded with Wahome’s name. On the packets were messages, purportedly from Wahome, encouraging voters to embrace family planning.

“This was a smear campaign to show my people that I was not fit to be their leader. There are many things that politicians give to voters, such as food items. Distributing condoms in a rural, conservative society on the day of the elections is political suicide,” Wahome, a lawyer, says.

Fortunately, she had spent years interacting with the community, promoting health initiatives, education and the empowerment of women and girls. So despite the smear campaign, Wahome became the first woman to win the Kandara seat and is currently serving her second term in the national assembly after her 2017 re-election.

Propaganda, threats of violence and especially sexual and physical violence, public humiliation and unrelenting vicious social media smear campaigns are a few of the challenges that women in politics, like Wahome, have to overcome to win and sustain political leadership.

This is in addition to overall campaign challenges such as limited financial and human resources and vicious internal politics. But even at the political party level, the system is still skewed in favour of men who own and finance these parties.

“The political arena is very hostile towards women. The campaign trail is littered with lived experiences of women who have been brutalised for seeking leadership,” Wangechi Wachira, the executive director of the Centre for Rights, Education and Awareness (CREAW), tells IPS.

CREAW is a local partner for Deliver For Good global campaign that applies a gender lens to the Sustainable Development Goals and is powered by global advocacy organisation Women Deliver. The Deliver For Good campaign partners advocate to drive action in 12 critical investment areas, including strengthening women’s political participation and decision-making power.

Wangechi has been at the forefront of holding the government accountable for gender equality and equity, as provided for by Kenya’s 2010 gender-progressive constitution, which demands that all appointed and elected bodies constitute one-third women.

Article 27 (8) of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights says: “The State shall take legislative and other measures to implement the principle that no more than two thirds of the members of elective or appointive bodies shall be of the same gender.”

The national assembly is obligated to enact the Constitution of Kenya (Amendment) Bill 2018, also known as the Gender Bill, to realise this provision. But 10 years down the line, this obligation remains unfulfilled. In 2019, parliament did not even have the required two thirds of members present in the house — the requisite quorum for a constitutional amendment — to vote on the bill.

“The national assembly has failed the women of Kenya. We have gone to court to push for the national assembly to enact legislation to correct blatant gender inequalities. There is too much resistance and push back from a patriarchal system,” Wangechi says.

It is this resistance that women in politics find themselves up against in their quest for leadership. Women account for just 9.2 percent of the 1,835 elected individuals in 2017, a marginal increase from 7.7 percent in 2013, according to a report by National Democratic Institute and the Federation of Women Lawyers-Kenya, the latter being another Deliver For Good local partner.

This report shows that in the 2017 elections, 29 percent more women ran for office than in the 2013 general elections and there are now more women in elected positions across all levels of government. But Asha Abdi, a former member of the Nairobi County Assembly, tells IPS that progress has been painfully slow.

Overall, there are now 172 women in elective positions — up from 145 in 2013. In the 2017 general elections, 23 women were elected to the national assembly compared to 16 in 2013, and another 96 were elected to the county assemblies compared to the 82 women in 2013.

As such, women account for 23 percent of the national assembly and senate, with this figure including the 47 seats reserved exclusively for county women representatives.

Human rights campaigners say that the momentum to hold the national assembly accountable had picked but as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, concerns are rife that the gender agenda is no longer a priority.

“COVID-19 has not slowed down political activities in this country. In fact, leaders are behaving as if we are going into elections tomorrow and not 2022. We have serious political re-alignments and nobody is speaking for women,” Grace Gakii, a Nairobi-based gender and political activist, tells IPS.

“Ordinary Kenyans are more concerned with staying safe from the virus and feeding their families. So some of the small gains we have made could be lost during this pandemic because there is no one to hold political parties and powers that be accountable,” she says.

Recognised as East Africa’s economic powerhouse by the World Bank, this economic giant lags behind its neighbours in as far as women representation across government bodies is concerned.

In South Sudan, the figures for women in politics are higher, with 28.9 percent in elected positions. Uganda has 34 percent, Tanzania and Burundi 36 percent, and Rwanda 61 percent.

“Political campaigns and the intense lobbying that goes with it are very difficult for women. There are many meetings at night and exclusive meetings in ‘boys’ clubs’. Society is warming up to women but too slowly. When you vie against men, all the male opponents gang up against you, because it is considered a big insult to be defeated by a woman,” Abdi says.

While the 2017 general elections showed a small shift in the political landscape, resulting in the election of the first three female governors and the first three female senators, Wahome says that the road ahead remains long and winding.

She says that women in politics should and can successfully rise to the challenge.

Wahome encourages women to draw strength from others who have tried and succeeded, saying that with time, patriarchal attitudes and customs will shift. She particularly encourages women to engage in grassroots transformative projects with their communities.

“There are many areas to choose from including education and community health. Let the people see what you can do and later, they will back you all the way to the top.”

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Categories: Africa

The Missing SDG: Ensure the Digital Age Supports People, Planet, Prosperity & Peace

Mon, 07/06/2020 - 07:17

Credit: Future Earth

By Amy Luers
MONTREAL, Canada, Jul 6 2020 (IPS)

As the nations of the world prepare to gather virtually to assess progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), society is just beginning to imagine what a post-COVID world might be like.

While many uncertainties remain, one thing is clear, the lives of people and the transactions of our economy and government will move more and more online. In 2015, 193 nations committed to the SDGs, which set out a transformative agenda that linked human health and prosperity to environmental health and equity.

This holistic agenda is critical. But the current crisis highlights that it is incomplete. The SDGs failed to address the governance of one of the most powerful forces defining humanity’s future: the digital age.

The digital age is disrupting social systems and driving transformations at a scale and pace unparalleled in history. Decades ago, philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan inspired the aphorism “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Indeed, today digital technologies are shaping what we read and consume, our votes, and how we interact with each other and the world around us. Many risks and uncertainties are emerging, including threats to individual rights, social equity, and democracy, all amplified by ‘the digital divide’ – the differential rate of internet penetration and access to digital technologies around the world.

Along with the great risks of harm comes massive opportunities to leverage the capabilities of the digital age to steer society towards our common goals as expressed through the SDGs, including net-zero carbon emissions and a more equitable global society. In the digital age, power can be decentralized from the top to stakeholders, social norms of consumption can be shifted towards low carbon products, and society’s mindset shifted from fossil fuels to renewables.

We need a new SDG — SDG18 — focused on the digital age, which outlines clear targets for leveraging this transformative force to benefit both people and the planet.

Sustainability in the Digital Age

The United Nations recently released a roadmap for enhancing global digital coordination in support of humanity. This sets out a much needed framework to begin to address the digital governance gap and lays a base to effectively leverage the digital sector to tackle the climate crisis and broader sustainability goals.

In parallel, a collective statement has just been issued by leaders from business, government, civil society, and researchers: The Montreal Statement on Sustainability in the Digital Age. This Statement calls on society to recognize that tackling the climate crisis, building a sustainable world, and working toward a just and equitable digital future are inherently interconnected agendas. It lays the foundation for what could define an action agenda for the missing SDG 18.

The statement outlines five near-term actions to overcome profound risks of the digital age and leverage its transformative capabilities to build a climate-safe, sustainable, and equitable world.

These include the need to:

●Build a new social contract for the digital age, which addresses individual rights, justice and equity, inclusive access, and environmental sustainability;
●Ensure open and transparent access to data and knowledge critical to achieving sustainability and equity;
●Foster public and private collaborations to develop and manage AI and other technologies in support of sustainability and equity;
●Promote research and innovation to steer digital transformations toward sustainability and equity; and
●Support targeted communication, engagement and education to advance the social contract.

The statement was first formulated during an international workshop in Montreal last September as part of the CIFAR AI & Society series. It was subsequently shared, reviewed, and revised by others worldwide working in the digital and sustainability sectors.

Statement collaborators will also be gathering during the UN High-Level Political Forum in July, to explore collaborative action for digital capacity-building to implement the UN’s 2030 SDG Agenda.

Motivating all this work is a realization that the initial aspirations of the digital revolution – democratization of information, the strengthening of governance through broader citizen engagement, a more equitable and greener sharing economy – were never fulfilled because we, as a society, failed to anticipate how the digital revolution would unfold.

We did not foresee the scale of changes that would result from the new business models, governance systems, and communications systems, nor the new types of societal challenges posed by such large-scale change.

As a result, we now live in a digital age that threatens individual rights, has facilitated the propagation of disinformation, undermines trust, and can ultimately threaten democracy.

We are in a moment of unprecedented disruption, which opens up opportunities for transformative change. Among the most powerful forces defining our future are those of the digital age. We must put this force to work for people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnerships.

https://futureearth.org/the-missing-sdg-ensuring-the-digital-age-supports-people-and-planet/#survey

Survey: Imagine a new SDG – SDG18: Ensuring the digital age serves people, planet, peace, prosperity and partnerships. What targets would SDG18 encompass?

The post The Missing SDG: Ensure the Digital Age Supports People, Planet, Prosperity & Peace appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Amy Luers is Executive Director of Future Earth, Director of Sustainability in the Digital Age Initiative, former Assistant Director for Climate and Information in the Obama White House, and former Senior Environmental Manager at Google

The post The Missing SDG: Ensure the Digital Age Supports People, Planet, Prosperity & Peace appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

A Pathway to Universal Healthcare in India

Sun, 07/05/2020 - 18:58

An infant in intensive care at the Holy Family Hospital in New Delhi. Credit: Holy Family Hospital.

By Nachiket Mor
BANGALORE, India, Jul 5 2020 (IPS)

Universal healthcare (UHC) is an important global goal because of its close links to poverty reduction and enhancement of the growth potential of countries. While several countries can now be said to be well on their way towards achieving this goal, several others, most notably large ones such as India and Nigeria, are decidedly not.

Though there are a number of reasons for this, perhaps the most important one has been the position taken by the international development community that an essential prerequisite for beginning work on UHC is government financing of all health expenditures through taxes.

This position is untenable, because these governments (including Indian central and state governments), prefer to spend on other development priorities. They also have a low tax base, as a high proportion of the working-age population is employed in the informal sector.

Despite the fact that residents of these countries spend large amounts on healthcare, they continue to experience very poor health outcomes

As a result, these governments have, for decades, either been unable or unwilling to provide the necessary financial resources for UHC. This has meant that not only has there been no progress on UHC, but there has perhaps even been a regression away from it.

A direct consequence of this rigid global position is that scant attention has been paid to the actual expenditures on healthcare by the populations of these countries, and that despite the fact that residents of these countries spend large amounts on healthcare, they continue to experience very poor health outcomes.

For instance, in India, seventy percent of healthcare expenses are met by out-of-pocket expenditure—an amount that could ensure high-quality care for everyone. Instead, one sees a proliferation of low-quality and informal primary care and several small- to medium-sized formal sector players, and the inability of most of the population to access high-end tertiary care even when needed.

Given these realities, it becomes important—now more than ever—to find a way forward that is not only feasible, but also one that can benefit from increased government allocations to health whenever they become available, without being held hostage to it.

There are many different pathways to achieving this, and this article proposes one that could have the potential to add value to citizens in the short-run, even if it does not immediately address all of the underlying issues, such as high out-of-pocket expenditures.

In the longer-run, such an approach could gradually move the entire health system, in a dynamic way, closer towards the classical UHC end-state of 100 percent financial protection, 100 percent population coverage, for 100 percent of patient conditions. Some of the key stepping-stones comprising this pathway include:

1. Begin with primary care and ensure that people get more value from their current out-of-pocket expenditures

This can be done by using a careful process of vetting and organically growing the current mass of thousands of independent primary care facilities into a high-quality primary health care network. While consumers will continue to pay for it on an out-of-pocket basis, it will deliver good value and strong health outcomes to them in exchange for these expenditures.

At the end of this journey, these primary care providers would not offer only walk-in services. Instead, they would seek to enrol a defined set of individuals; offer every enrolled individual a comprehensive set of highly protocolised primary care services; identify at-risk individuals from amongst these and proactively seek to bring their risk levels down; coordinate higher levels of care should any member require more advanced care; and take responsibility for all the public health functions for their members.

2. Connect these primary care providers to local networks of secondary care providers

These secondary care providers would also be paid for on an out-of-pocket basis and would work closely with primary care networks to ensure good referral services. They would get deeply engaged with these networks in a symbiotic way to build the capacity and confidence of the primary care providers to provide comprehensive services.

However, this fee-for-service approach has a number of problems which will need to be kept in mind. In primary care it could result in lowered demand for essential healthcare services and in secondary care it has the real risk of over-provision of services such as caesarean sections (C-Sections).

These problems may not be able to be addressed in the near-term, but any dynamical approach would have to find a way to gradually eliminate them over time.

3. Offer universal tertiary care insurance

With the proliferation of microlending and small-finance banks, even low-income families are now able to pay for primary and secondary care using savings and loans. However, tertiary care is simply out-of-reach for most, even middle-income families.

The only way to address this issue is to build out a very thin tertiary care insurance package which is not comprehensive (it will exclude for example, routine deliveries and C-Sections) but covers only very high-cost and very low-volume conditions, such as by-pass surgeries and advanced cancer treatments.

As a result, such an insurance scheme is likely to cost very little and could be affordable to all but the lowest-income families, for whom, potentially, the government could pay the premium. Primary care providers could potentially offer such a package to their members.

And, as mutual trust and confidence builds in their offering, they can gradually offer their members a more comprehensive coverage, building towards a comprehensive package covering all the three levels (primary, secondary, and tertiary) of healthcare.

As the government decides to increase its allocation of funds towards healthcare, it could potentially choose to pay for this coverage, starting with the universal adoption of the thin tertiary care insurance package for all citizens.

4. Connect the entire system using a strong technology layer

This can be done by building out a strong technology backbone (a ‘Health Stack’ such as swasth.app) which allows all kinds of providers, pharmacies, and diagnostic chains, among others, to be connected to each other, and to have the ability to offer, among other things, automated e-prescribing, e-claims, and e-referral.

Membership of the ‘Health Stack’ could become a prerequisite to becoming a part of the national primary network, and would give the member access to a number of shared services such as a free Electronic Health Records (EHR) system and a protocol engine comparable to Babylon.

While each of these four steps are eminently feasible, there are several significant challenges that would need to be addressed in order to progress along this journey and to cross each step. Three are mentioned below:

1. Doctor-shopping

While Indians spend an adequate amount on primary care and medicines, they engage in a very high degree of doctor-shopping, making it difficult for any single provider, particularly one interested in offering comprehensive primary care, to remain viable.

This is perhaps the principal reason why, unlike in other product-markets, good primary care has not spontaneously evolved in many low-income countries, despite such high expenditures on it. Understanding what leads to this kind of ‘excessive switching’ behaviour and addressing it will need careful on-ground research.

The problem could either be a behavioural one from the customer-end, or could be linked to the fact that the quality of the supply of primary care has proved to be inadequate, or could be a combination of the two.

2. No tertiary care insurance product in the market

Despite its importance, such a low-cost product has not yet been offered by insurers. For this product to work, it needs a very large number of diverse subscribers and very low distribution costs. Such a product needs to be designed by actuaries and distributed by insurers using very low-cost channels such as mobile phones and networks of healthcare providers themselves.

3. Low technology usage by doctors and hospitals

Despite the proliferation of devices and discrete technologies, there is a very low affinity among medical professionals in India towards the use of services such as electronic health records and automated decision tools.

Additionally, the unique business model of most Indian hospitals, where they essentially provide appointment-booking and infrastructural support services to their ‘star’ doctors and surgeons, has meant that even hospitals have, for the most part, not bothered to invest in even rudimentary electronic health record technologies since the patient, for all intents and purposes, ‘belongs’ to the doctor and not to the hospital.

Changing this attitude is likely to be a herculean task, but given its importance, every effort will need to be made to do it. Otherwise building sophisticated technology backbones will not be worthwhile.

It is extremely important for countries like India to finally start to move towards UHC. But a rigid insistence on full government financing of it as a prerequisite, in an environment where the government has, for decades, been unwilling or unable to provide it has proven to be highly counter-productive.

Alternate and more feasible pathways, like the four-step approach outlined in this article—while not without their own share of difficulties—do exist and could potentially offer a viable way forward towards UHC for countries like India.

Dr Nachiket Mor is a visiting scientist at the Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health, and a senior research fellow at the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy at IIT Bangalore

This story was originally published by India Development Review (IDR)

The post A Pathway to Universal Healthcare in India appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

When Women and Children Cannot Escape their Abusers

Fri, 07/03/2020 - 12:34

Source: www.bloncampus.com

By Sabine Saliba
BEIRUT, Jul 3 2020 (IPS)

Reports of escalating violence against women and children made the news almost everyday in March and April following the announcement of lockdowns to control the spread of Covid-19. The main concern has been that victims cannot escape their abusers or seek help when they share a confined space and are under constant scrutiny and the threat of violence.

In countries where schools were shut, children experiencing violence in the home now have little to no recourse to protection, such as reporting abuse to their teachers.

There has been an average 32-percent increase in the number of calls to domestic violence helplines globally. Country figures range from a 12 percent increase in Spain and 27 percent in Montenegro, to a 33 percent rise in Singapore, 50 percent in Lebanon and 75 percent in Chile

Despite the concerns, we hear less about the issue now. But while the interest in the media may have decreased, it is doubtful that the reality for children has changed. As the United Nations warned in April, violence by caregivers is the most common form of violence experienced by children. And if we look away now, the problem will not disappear.

The rise and drop in numbers are of equal concern

Perhaps the best indicator of changes in domestic violence rates are national helplines, which have recorded both a rise and fall during lockdowns. Most helplines which have recently released figures have reported a sharp increase in reports of domestic violence generally.

According to a recent World Vision report that collated available data, there has been an average 32-percent increase in the number of calls to domestic violence helplines globally. Country figures range from a 12 percent increase in Spain and 27 percent in Montenegro, to a 33 percent rise in Singapore, 50 percent in Lebanon and 75 percent in Chile.

The data does not disagregate according to who the victims are, but we know that when children live in a home where violence against women is perpetrated, they are exposed to the violence and may also be victims of it.

Specifically concerning direct violence against children, some child helplines have also released disturbing figures. In only 11 days, India’s child helpline received more than 92,000 calls requesting protection from abuse and violence, which represent 50 percent more calls than usual. By mid-May, the Uganda Child Helpline had dealt with 881 cases since the lockdown began in late March – the average of cases received is usually 248.

The United Kingdom’s ChildLine noted an “unprecedented” rise in the number of calls in late March. Figures show that calls about children facing potential emotional abuse rose from 529 to 792 in the first month of the lockdown.

In April in Bangladesh, there was a 40 percent increase of calls to the child helpline, while cases of children being beaten by parents or guardians rose by 42 percent. And in Kazakhstan, in March alone, the national child helpline provided psychological, legal and social support to 16,310 children. The UN expert on violence against children explained that the “stress and anxiety parents and caregivers are feeling, including job loss, isolation, excessive confinement, and anxieties over health and finances – are a serious driver of violence in the home”.

Equally worrying is a decrease in reports of violence against children because it raises fears of children’s inability to report abuse. Bolivia reports an exponential drop in complaints of violence against women and girls since March compared to figures from last year.

To show the progression, there were 2.5 percent fewer complaints in January, 4.5 per cent fewer in February, 24.5 percent fewer in March, 65 percent fewer in April, and 59.5 percent fewer in May.

In Russia, the number of calls from children to the national helpline decreased during daytime hours, but increased during the night, which is thought to be because during the day children are in the company of their parents.

In March in the United States, despite the national hotline seeing a 23 percent increase in calls and a 263 percent increase in texts compared to the previous year, drops in complaints have been recorded in Colorado, Texas, Illinois and California. Caseworkers say the people trained to recognise abuse, like teachers and child care workers, were no longer able to see children after stay-at-home orders were announced.

When poverty leads to more violence

A particularly concerning cause of abuse is the growing financial crisis that many families are facing. In the Philippines, for instance, cases of online child sex abuse have tripled under the lockdown, with campaigners warning that cash-strapped relatives are among those exploiting children online for money in what has been called a “family-based crime”.

In almost three months, there were 279,166 cases of online child sex abuse in the Philippines, while there were 76,561 cases during this timeframe in 2019.

In other parts of the world, aid groups have warned that forced child marriages could be on the rise due to school closures, food insecurity and economic uncertainty triggered by the pandemic.

In Ethiopia, more than 500 girls have been rescued from forced marriages since March, while anecdotal evidence suggests spikes in other countries such as Afghanistan, India, South Sudan and Yemen. Faced with growing challenges to support their family, parents may marry off their daughters to reduce the number of mouths to feed or to access dowries.

“It really is a survival mechanism,” one expert said. The UN Population Fund has predicted 13 million more child marriages will take place in the next decade as a result of the anticipated economic consequences of the pandemic, as well as because of efforts to end child marriage being disrupted.

Positive responses

With many child protection services operating at a reduced level due to the infection, there is the risk that violence against children in the home will go unreported and therefore unnoticed. But some countries are trying to challenge this.

For instance, a few weeks into the lockdown, Germany classified child protection staff as essential workers who are allowed to continue working. Canada is investing in shelters for those fleeing gender-based violence. And in France, victims are being asked to report domestic abuse at pharmacies and to use code if they happen to be accompanied by their abusers, so that the pharmacies can in turn inform the police.

These are just some examples, but they represent the political will to not leave an ongoing social problem like domestic violence unchecked during a pandemic like Covid-19. We should not forget that domestic violence itself is an age-old pandemic that affects all societies.

The post When Women and Children Cannot Escape their Abusers appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

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

The post When Women and Children Cannot Escape their Abusers appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

How do we get out of lockdown?

Fri, 07/03/2020 - 12:10

By External Source
Jul 3 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Dr David Nabarro is a Special Envoy of World Health Organization Director-General on COVID-19, Co-Director of the Imperial College Institute of Global Health Innovation at the Imperial College London and Strategic Director of 4SD. His Narratives are being written with the 4SD team to help readers to make sense of the fast-evolving pandemic and its multiple consequences and to identify the questions to consider when making decisions about measures to contain and suppress outbreaks. They provide readers with insight from David’s leadership and continuous learning, as a public health and development professional with over 40 years’ experience across many countries and contexts, as we navigate this complex, multi-faceted crisis.

Video production: A very special thanks to Arti Jain, BJ Golnick, Jeffrey Daniels, Derek Owen, Undivided Attention, Brothers Golnick Productions.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global emergency caused by a new coronavirus that requires a coordinated global response. Large-scale outbreaks have led to many needing hospital-care. As health care workers are struggling to cope with the rapidly accelerating demands on them whilst trying to keep themselves safe, hospitals are quickly overwhelmed.

Extraordinary efforts are underway to limit outbreaks by interrupting transmission from person to person. This involves detecting and isolating those with the disease, so they are not able to infect others. Small outbreaks require prompt action at the community level and are much easier to suppress than those that have become intense with widespread community transmission.

If outbreaks are being detected early through community-level public health action, lockdowns will be a short and sharp shock to society. Containing larger outbreaks may call for several weeks of enforced physical distancing and varying degrees of lockdown: this will lead to a longer and more drawn-out process. All of these challenges provoke strains in our systems: stress among staff, personal anxiety, financial challenges and logistical difficulties. All will need to be relieved.

While containment of COVID-19 requires that people the world over physically distance themselves from each other, social cohesion and connectedness are more important than ever to ensure that we come together to be part of the response.

Source: 4SD Sustainable Development

The post How do we get out of lockdown? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Q&A: Child Marriage, FGM and Harmful Practices on Women’s Bodies to Increase Because of COVID-19

Fri, 07/03/2020 - 11:01

Studies have shown that the longer a girl stays in school, the less likely she is to be forced into child marriage. With many schools currently shut down and girls are not going to school, an increase in child marriage is expected. Credit: Ahmed Osman/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 3 2020 (IPS)

An additional 5.6 million child marriages can be expected because of the coronavirus pandemic, which resulted in a short-term increase in poverty and the shutdown of schools.

The current pandemic is also expected to have a massive impact on the projected growth of harmful practices on women’s bodies.

According to a recent report released by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), titled “Against My Will: State of World Population 2020”, an additional two million cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) will occur by 2030.

“A big protective factor in preventing child marriage is education,” Richard Kollodge, Senior Editorial Adviser of the report, told IPS. “Studies have shown that the longer a girl stays in school, the less likely she is to be forced into child marriage. [Now] if schools are shut down and girls are not going to school, that’s a loss of a protective factor and that could contribute to an increase in child marriages.”

Other contributing factors include people’s inability to go to work, which in turn is affecting livelihoods. In such circumstances, some parents might feel encouraged to marry off their daughter as it’s one less mouth to feed or because they believe it might be safer, Kollodge said.

It is significant then that this year UNFPA began its 10-year agenda to end harmful practices by 2030 in every country. IPS spoke with Tharanga Godallage, a results-based management advisor at UNFPA, on how the current pandemic affects this agenda and how it exacerbates the crises of FGM and child marriage across the world.

Tharanga Godallage, a results-based management advisor at UNFPA.

Inter Press Service (IPS): You report says, “Getting to zero harmful practices will require much faster progress. It demands a society-wide effort, where everyone who has a role in stopping these practices steps up to do so.” What steps can different actors in a society take to address this issue?

Tharanga Godallage (TG): The “harmful practices” are a multi-stakeholder commitment because no single stakeholder can solve this problem. It’s actually not only a country level problem — they exist across borders. For FGM in particular, cross-border stakeholder advocacy is really important.

In the eradication of FGM, and overall, the most important factor is strong political commitment from the government. The second one is law enforcement because we need to create new laws and policies if you really want to have sustained change.

The third one is the involvement of multiple ministries, because this is not a single-ministry show. The approach is to have the whole government involved.

Our observation and recommendation is to look at it in a more holistic way, especially the sustainable change.

There’s also the need for a change in social norms, which is the most critical and the most difficult as well. That’s why you need a huge advocacy campaign.

Social norm is the root cause of most of these cases, and that needs community level engagement, including leaders, who have a bigger role to play, and formal and informal community leaders.

And then there’s a socio-economic link to child marriage, and FGM, and son preference. We need to bring the policy makers and stakeholders together and have all these translated to policy change.

IPS: Your report says “If the pandemic causes a two-year delay in FGM-prevention programmes, researchers projected that two million female genital mutilation cases would occur over the next decade that would otherwise have been averted.” Can you break down how such a delay would lead to two million lives affected?

TG: Based on the historical trend and projections, we knew that the estimated FGM cases by 2030 without COVID-19 impact would be around 34 million.

Then we looked at the reduction of scale-up programmes and the new cases to determine how many cases those adjustments would lead to, and we projected 36 million.

Overall, this COVID-19 impact has been observed in two ways: one is the effect on scaling up prevention programmes, as we will not be able to do prevention programmes the way we planned, and then there might be new cases coming up on top of that.

IPS: What factors are you counting when accounting for this change in the projected number owing to COVID-19?

TG: The restrictions on group gatherings and travel have reduced availability of technical staff and delay of starting international programmes or prevention programmes.

The second one is economic impact. In the economic impact, according to the data we found, there was a 10 percent reduction on GDP overall and then because of the GDP [drop] there was an increase in poverty.

Usually we know increased poverty has 32 percent impact on child marriage, it’s very closely related. Hence, because of the economic factor, and the short-term poverty increase because of COVID-19 that was factored into the modelling, there will now be an additional 5.6 million child marriages.

IPS: Your report says “Ending harmful practices by 2030 in every country and community—an objective of UNFPA, will require rapid changes in mindsets that still sanction violence against women and girls and deny their rights and bodily autonomy.” How has this target been affected by the pandemic, and how do you aim to go forward in these circumstances?

TG: So far we have done our internal analysis of overall challenges. So, community mobilisation related research is going to be a very big challenge especially as we are trying to see how to [address that], especially the commitments relating to community mobilisation like social norms change and the comprehensive sexual education programmes (i.e.informal education). Those kinds of programmes will be heavily affected, and data generation is going to be a challenge.

People are used to the new normal now and people have come up with alternative strategies: call centres, telemedicine, and e-meetings. These are new innovative alternatives so maybe over time we might come to a new normal in our approaches to address these issues.

Safety of Children an Afterthought for Tech Companies

The post Q&A: Child Marriage, FGM and Harmful Practices on Women’s Bodies to Increase Because of COVID-19 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Beyond Ending Conflict in Africa, We Must Tackle its Root Causes

Fri, 07/03/2020 - 07:33

Hanna Tetteh. Credit: Africa Renewal

By Kingsley Ighobor
Jul 3 2020 (IPS)

Hanna Tetteh is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Special Representative of the Secretary-General to the African Union.

As head of the UN Office to the African Union (UNOAU), she spoke with Africa Renewal’s Kingsley Ighobor on, among other issues, the current state of the UN-AU partnership and how women and young people can help resolve conflict.

Excerpts from the interview*:

How is the partnership between the United Nations and Africa Union going?

There are currently three partnerships between the UN and the AU: There’s the Partnership on Africa’s Integration and Development Agenda (PAIDA), one on Peace and Security, and another on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the African Union’s Agenda 2063.

A fourth partnership framework, on human rights, has been negotiated but not yet signed. The partnership that’s largely implemented by the UNOAU is the one on peace and security, and it plays to the strength of the AU because it has been more successful so far as a political organization than as an economic integration organization. We do common analyses and take common positions, and we have achieved progress.

What are some of the challenges or opportunities in the UN-AU partnership?

With every partnership, you’re not going to agree on every issue. But we have had more consensus than disagreements. We worked closely together, and with IGAD [Intergovernmental Authority on Development in Eastern Africa], to help resolve the second round of conflict in South Sudan. That resulted in the establishment of a new transitional government this year.

Last year, we worked together on the Central African Republic to negotiate a new peace agreement. We look forward to elections in that country later this year, assuming COVID-19 will allow. We support AMISOM [African Union Mission in Somalia].

The AU force is providing military support for the transition process. UNSOM [the UN Assistance Mission in Somalia] and AMISOM help with political engagement and logistics.

We have been challenged by the Libya process where the AU would like to be more proactive in resolving the conflict. Even then, we have made significant progress there following a peace summit in Berlin in January 2020.

Kingsley Ighobor

How is COVID-19 impacting peace and security in Africa?

Countries in conflict already have infrastructure and resource challenges: inadequate healthcare facilities and low number of medical personnel, and so on. And then COVID-19 arrived on our doorsteps. In addition, most African countries, in conflict or not, have large informal economies wherein if people don’t work in a day, they can’t feed themselves.

So, lockdowns have put a strain on people’s lives, especially those in the informal sector. In countries with elections coming up, the pandemic is challenging because the virus is passed through human contact, which happens at campaign events. We have about 15 or so more elections to go this year, and appropriate healthcare protocols will be needed to protect people.

Could post-COVID-19 recovery be an opportunity for Africa to build back better?

Yes, but it will depend on the policy choices member states make, as well as the resources available to them. A few countries are middle income countries—higher middle-income or lower middle-income. Those countries have the resilience and the resources to undertake prevention, response and recovery measures.

But the LDCs [Least Developed Countries], whose economies are much more fragile, will need a lot of preparedness to develop appropriate policy responses that don’t require a huge outlay of resources. The international development community can help such countries build back better.

Is there a role for pan-African institutions such as the AU in building back better?

As I mentioned, the AU has been more of a political organization than an economic organization. But its development agency [African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD)] and other pan-African institutions such as the African Development Bank and, on the UN side, the Economic Commission for Africa, can help countries develop policy responses.

How is the Silencing the Guns 2020 campaign going?

‘Silencing the Guns 2020’ is the theme of the AU for this year, which is why it’s getting a lot of attention. But the Silencing the Guns campaign started in 2013, on the 50th anniversary of the AU [formerly, the Organisation of African Unity]. The idea was to accelerate efforts at ending conflicts through mediation.

In some cases, as with South Sudan, progress has been made. In others, as with the Sahel, we haven’t made the desired progress. We also see that conflict is spreading to other countries outside of Mali—Niger and Burkina Faso being the most vulnerable lately. I don’t think we can silence all the guns this year because of all the challenges, but it is a valid aspiration.

What more work can be done to silence the guns in Africa?

There needs to be an acceleration of mediation efforts. It is not easy to mediate in the way in which we are having this conversation [via video link]. When you want to bring political actors and communities together, you organize face-to-face discussions that enable people to come to agreements, and then you support them to implement such agreements. COVID-19 is challenging that kind of support and intervention.

Do you envision an Africa without war?

There is potential because the last two or three decades have witnessed considerable political progress and economic growth, and several conflicts have ended. But we need to look beyond simply ending conflicts to addressing the root causes of conflicts.

And the root causes of conflict lie in bad governance which creates inequalities and does not promote growth and development. It’s important that we realise that peace is not a state that once achieved, can be taken for granted.

Even countries that are relatively stable need conditions that help consolidate and enhance peace and stability—good governance, inclusiveness, strong institutions, the rule of law, etc.

Is Africa moving in the right direction, considering there are more democracies today than, say, 20 years ago?

The fact that we have more democracies today than previously is a good sign. But regular elections in and of themselves do not mean democracy. Democracy is about respect for human rights, good governance, responsive institutions that people can interact with, including a framework for the protection of stability through law and order, so people can go about their daily lives and achieve their dreams and their aspirations.

How is COVID-19 affecting refugees, migrants and internally displaced persons in Africa?

In some instances, the pandemic has worsened the situation. As cases increased in some countries, the response has been to deport irregular migrants. And in the refugee camps, especially in areas in conflict or coming out of conflict, it’s been difficult to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The IOM [International Organisation for Migration] has urged countries to respect the rights of refugees and to provide necessary facilities that safeguard them from the disease. The IOM also called for a halt to the deportation of irregular migrants at this time of COVID-19.

From a peace and security perspective, what are the challenges that may impede successful implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA)?

The challenge for AfCFTA is not so much peace and security; it’s concluding negotiations for the rules of origin. It is also ensuring the agreement is implemented in a way that benefits economies. Because, remember, the AfCFTA is a very ambitious experiment to encourage trade among African nations. Some countries may lose customs revenues, and so those countries need to see the benefits of free trade.

What are your views on the role of women in peace and security in Africa?

Unfortunately, women are not included enough, and that needs to be addressed. Creating lasting peace and security in countries or communities in conflict involves negotiating a peace agreement and a process of reconciliation—that involves men and women. In situations where you are trying to rebuild communities, it requires the participation of the entirety of the community to make sure that the peace is consolidated.

The UN has supported the AU’s project of developing a cohort of female mediators—FemWise Africa—for deployment in countries to ensure more women and young people are brought into the processes of mediation and peacebuilding.

Do young people have a role to play in conflict prevention, possibly resolution?

Absolutely. You can’t build peace without encouraging young people to be part of the peacebuilding process. They are the ones recruited as irregular fighters. You have to think about disarmament, demobilization and reintegration into communities. You make sure they don’t have the incentive to be part of organizations that terrorize communities. You want them to be part of the productive economy.

What is your message to Africans in these trying times?

We are a very strong and resilient continent. We have been through difficult times before. We have more democracies now and we’ve also seen economic growth. We need to be engaged in rebuilding our countries and creating an inclusive platform for integration.

We are a continent of multiple ethnicities, and our diversity should be our strength. In the same way we condemn acts of discrimination in other parts of the world, we should not discriminate amongst ourselves on the basis of ethnicity. That’s an important aspect to promote our growth and development and to strengthen peace.

*This interview was originally published in Africa Renewal—a UN publication focusing on African news and analysis. www.un.org/africarenewal.

The post Beyond Ending Conflict in Africa, We Must Tackle its Root Causes appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Kingsley Ighobor, Africa Renewal*, in an interview with Hanna Tetteh, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General to the African Union

The post Beyond Ending Conflict in Africa, We Must Tackle its Root Causes appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Global E-waste Surging: Up 21% in 5 Years

Thu, 07/02/2020 - 17:03

A record 53.6 million tonnes (Mt) of e-waste was produced globally in 2019,
the weight of 350 cruise ships the size of the Queen Mary 2;
$57 billion in gold and other components discarded - mostly dumped or burned

By External Source
Jul 2 2020 (IPS-Partners)

A record 53.6 million metric tonnes (Mt) of electronic waste was generated worldwide in 2019, up 21 per cent in just five years, according to the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor 2020.

The new report also predicts global e-waste — discarded products with a battery or plug — will reach 74 Mt by 2030, almost a doubling of e-waste in just 16 years. This makes e-waste the world’s fastest-growing domestic waste stream, fueled mainly by higher consumption rates of electric and electronic equipment, short life cycles, and few options for repair.

Only 17.4 per cent of 2019’s e-waste was collected and recycled. This means that gold, silver, copper, platinum and other high-value, recoverable materials conservatively valued at US $57 billion — a sum greater than the Gross Domestic Product of most countries – were mostly dumped or burned rather than being collected for treatment and reuse.

According to the report, Asia generated the greatest volume of e-waste in 2019, some 24.9 Mt, followed by the Americas (13.1 Mt) and Europe (12 Mt), while Africa and Oceania generated 2.9 Mt and 0.7 Mt respectively.

For perspective, last year’s e-waste weighed substantially more than all the adults in Europe, or as much as 350 cruise ships the size of the Queen Mary 2, enough to form a line 125 km long.

E-waste is a health and environmental hazard, containing toxic additives or hazardous substances such as mercury, which damages the human brain and / or coordination system.

Other key findings from the Global E-waste Monitor 2020:

• Since 2014, the number of countries that have adopted a national e-waste policy, legislation or regulation in place has increased from 61 to 78. While a positive trend, this is far from the target set by the International Telecommunication Union which is to raise the percentage of countries with an e-waste legislation to 50 per cent

* * * * *

The Global E-waste Monitor 2020 (www.globalewaste.org) is a collaborative product of the Global E-waste Statistics Partnership (GESP), formed by UN University (UNU), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA), in close collaboration with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). The World Health Organization (WHO) and the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) also substantially contributed to this year’s Global E-waste Monitor 2020.

* * * * *

Comments

“The findings of this year’s UNU-affiliated Global E-waste Monitor suggest that humanity is not sufficiently implementing the SDGs. Substantially greater efforts are urgently required to ensure smarter and more sustainable global production, consumption, and disposal of electrical and electronic equipment. This report contributes mightily to the sense of urgency in turning around this dangerous global pattern.”
– David M. Malone, Rector United Nations University (UNU) & UN Under Secretary General

“Far more electronic waste is generated than is being safely recycled in most parts of the world. More cooperative efforts are required to make aware of this increasing issue and take appropriate countermeasures supplement by appropriate research and training. I am pleased that UNITAR now joins this important Global E-waste Statistics Partnership of UNU, ITU and ISWA, illustrating how valuable these activities are.”
– Nikhil Seth, Executive Director, United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) & UN Assistant Secretary-General

”The Global E-waste Monitor highlights the pressing issue of e-waste management in today’s digitally connected world in that the way we produce, consume, and dispose of electronic devices has become unsustainable. Monitoring e-waste streams will contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and tracking the implementation of the ITU Connect 2030 Agenda. The Monitor serves as a valuable resource for governments to improve their global e-waste recycling rate by developing the necessary/needed/required e-waste policies and legislation. ITU will continue to support the efforts made in this report towards the global response required in identifying solutions for e-waste.”
– Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Director, Telecommunication Development Bureau, International Telecommunication Union (ITU)

“E-waste quantities are rising 3 times faster than the world’s population and 13 per cent faster than the world’s GDP during the last five years. This sharp rise creates substantial environmental and health pressures and demonstrates the urgency to combine the fourth industrial revolution with circular economy. The fourth industrial revolution either will advance a new circular economy approach for our economies or it will stimulate further resource depletion and new pollution waves. The progress achieved in e-waste monitoring by the Global E-waste Statistics Partnership is a sign of hope that the world can manage not only to monitor closely the e-waste rise but also to control their impacts and set up proper management schemes”
– Antonis Mavropoulos, President, International Solid Waste Association (ISWA)

“Informal and improper e-waste recycling is a major emerging hazard silently affecting our health and that of future generations. One in four children are dying from avoidable environmental exposures. One in four children could be saved, if we take action to protect their health and ensure a safe environment. WHO is pleased to join forces in this new Global E-waste Monitor to allow evidence, information about health impacts and joint solutions and policies to be made available to protect our future generations’ health.”
– Maria Neira, Director, Environment, Climate Change and Health Department, World Health Organization (WHO)

* * * * *

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Excerpt:

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Categories: Africa

Global Economic Recovery must Prioritise Restructuring of Debt for Developing Countries

Thu, 07/02/2020 - 11:22

The textile industry in Pakistan, the largest manufacturing industry in the country, had been producing at full capacity this February. Prior to the worldwide coronavirus lockdown the government had lifted taxes and duties on the import of cotton. Currently thousands of garment and textile workers have been laid off and factory production has almost halted. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 2 2020 (IPS)

Unless there is a restructuring of debt for developing countries, the servicing for this debt will take away valuable resources from these nations that are needed to prevent the further suffering of people during the coronavirus pandemic — particularly with regards to safeguarding the health systems, and protecting the “integrity and resilience of economies”.

This is according to Bogolo Joy Kenewendo, former minister of trade of Botswana, who was speaking to IPS on Wednesday, Jul. 1, after a roundtable discussion at the United Nations over the post-lockdown economy.

In order to prevent economies of developing countries from suffering disproportionately under the current pandemic, it’s crucial that there’s less protectionist thinking and that developed countries approach the economic downturn through means that empower developing countries, said Kenewendo, who is also a former member of the U.N. secretary-general’s high level digital cooperation panel.

“What’s important is that we have debt freeze and restructuring immediately, particularly for the developing countries because our resources are currently on so much pressure with the demand for social welfare to be extended, subsidies to be extended and then having some infrastructure needing to be put in place and paying interest on loans’.

“[This is] really putting a lot of pressure on the fiscal positions of many developing countries,” she told IPS.

At the roundtable titled “Rebirthing the Global Economy to deliver Sustainable Development”, numerous distinguished female leaders spoke on the issue, reiterating solutions that focused on how to accommodate the needs of developing countries.

Vera Songwe, executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, shared an incisive analysis on the importance of removing intermediary parties from trade exchanges during the discussion.

She stated that one of United States tech company, Apple’s, main imports is cotton. However, 80 percent of cotton imports are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which is in a debt crisis.

“The DRC sells cotton at $40 – $80, [but] on the market cotton goes for $400,” she said, adding that one priority for the next steps should be to brainstorm ways in which intermediation can be reduced.

“My posit for trade and the new trade environment is that we do everything we can to take away every intermediary that exists between the original product and the end product,” she said.

Kate Raworth, the senior visiting research associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, brought up the “ecological debt” that high-income countries owe to low-income countries.

She said this kind of debt is much longer term, claiming that advanced regions such as Europe and countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, U.S. and Japan are living “beyond planetary impact”.

“We are destroying the climate system, we are destroying the ecological system, and that is the debt we owe to the lowest income countries of the world because we are undermining all prospects of development for them,” she said in an impassioned speech.

“They will have no fertile soils, no monsoon rains, no stable climate and they will have no capacity to develop.”

Kenewendo told IPS that this is also a matter of the “capital flight” to developed countries that takes place during a crisis.

“The real issue is that there’s a lot of [foreign direct investment] FDI that has been attracted to developing countries and emerging markets,” she said.

“And when there is such a crisis, you find this capital flight back to developed countries or to the west.”

This, she said, means the manufacturing income that developing economies had expected earnings from will suddenly be redirected to developed countries.

“And it’s mainly because during a crisis, people look at the political and economic stability of economies and it might be found that in Africa, for example, our political instability becomes a problem,” Kenewendo said.

These kinds of protectionist policies can really harm low-income or developing countries, and thus advocates suggest that not taking a “beggar thy neighbour” approach that only makes it less efficient.

“Those kind of ‘inward-looking’ policies make the situation more difficult for everybody and they deepen and prolong the crisis for the global economy,” Kenewendo said, adding that it’s crucial that free flow of capital is maintained and a trading relation is established rather than an aid-based relation.

She further noted the importance of digitalisation that the pandemic has highlighted and said it has a massive role to play in our economies going forward.

“Digitalisation is not all about being online, but it’s also about using the mobile technology resources that exist in order to ensure a much broader level of inclusivity in its delivery,” she said.

Citing Songwe’s example, Kenewendo said that in the conversation about reform, it’s key to ensure that “we are incentivising and stimulating investment”.

“It’s very important that we provide capacity for countries to tap into domestic capital and to also make sure that we’re safeguarding [small and medium-sized enterprises] SMEs and the resiliency of the informal sector,” she said.

The post Global Economic Recovery must Prioritise Restructuring of Debt for Developing Countries appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Rethink Food Security and Nutrition Following Covid-19 Pandemic

Thu, 07/02/2020 - 08:38

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Wan Manan Muda
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jul 2 2020 (IPS)

The Covid-19 crisis has had several unexpected effects, including renewed attention to food security concerns. Earlier understandings of food security in terms of production self-sufficiency have given way to importing supplies since late 20th century promotion of trade liberalization.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Transnational food business
Disruption of transnational food supply chains and the devastation of many vulnerable livelihoods by policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have revived interest in earlier understandings of food self-sufficiency. But, even if successful, winding back policy will not address more recently recognized food challenges such as malnutrition and safety.

All too many food researchers have been successfully compromised, e.g., with generous research and travel funding, by food and beverage businesses to discourage criticisms of their lucrative business practices.

It is important for authorities to make sure that food is produced safely for consumers. The authorities should not only be concerned when food exports are blocked by foreign importers for failing to meet phyto-sanitary standards.

Is food safe for consumption? Are toxic agro-chemicals putting consumers at risk? Are anti-biotics, used for animal breeding, putting animal and human health at risk of antimicrobial resistance? Are food processing practices compromising consumers’ nutrition?

Malnutrition threat looming larger
The world has to deal with three major types of malnutrition, i.e., dietary energy undernourishment, or hunger; ‘hidden hunger’, due to micronutrient deficiencies of vitamins, minerals and trace elements; and diet-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs).

Many of the poor typically lack means to improve their condition, with the poorest often lethargic, due to not getting enough to eat, or not being able to gain sufficient nourishment from food due to gastrointestinal diseases, typically due to poor sanitation and hygiene.

Although hunger and starvation have reportedly been declining in recent decades, dietary energy undernourishment has been falling more slowly than poverty although the poverty line is supposedly defined by an income level to avoid hunger.

The nutrition situation in the world remains worrying as other manifestations of malnutrition — including stunting, obesity, diabetes and anaemia — have been growing, or declining slowly at best, according to available official evidence.

Micronutrient deficiencies
Micronutrient deficiencies threaten human health and wellbeing, but rarely get much public policy attention. ‘Hidden hunger’ is due to diets lacking essential micronutrients — vitamins, minerals, trace elements — vital for the body to develop and function well.

Wan Manan Muda

Insufficient vitamin A, iron, calcium and zinc seem to be the major micronutrient deficiencies of public health importance. All too many people are anaemic, with especially serious consequences for women of reproductive age.

In many countries, iodine deficiencies have been successfully tackled by iodizing salt, while vitamin A is typically tackled with costly supplements for children under five. Such hidden hunger is usually better addressed by dietary diversity to consume food with the needed micronutrients.

Biofortification can help, but for this to work well, close collaboration is needed between nutritionists and dieticians on the one hand, and scientists working to improve food crops and animal-source foods on the other.

Child undernutrition
Most parents are not aware that the ‘first 1000 days’, from conception until the child is two, is most critical for child development. Maternal and infant malnutrition start during pregnancy, especially with pregnant mothers suffering micronutrient deficiencies or diet-related NCDs.

We can and must do much more to enable and promote ‘exclusive breastfeeding’ for the first six months of every child’s life. Various work and maternity leave arrangements as well as childcare facilities should be made available to enable widespread adoption of such practices.

While international measures suggest that wasting, stunting and underweight among children are declining all too slowly, child undernutrition remains high, with national shares still rising in many, including middle income countries.

Child stunting not only adversely effects children’s physical development, but also their cognitive development. How can societies and economies progress if future generations continue to be handicapped from the outset.

Non-communicable diseases
The crises of obesity, diabetes and other diet-related NCDs in middle income countries remains alarming, with NCDs among the leading causes of premature death and disability. The prevalence of overweight, obesity, diabetes and related morbidities has increased in most countries.

Overweight and obesity are risk factors for NCDs, such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and cancers, which reduce the quality of life and productivity, unnecessarily raising health costs, both private and public.

Often, people are not aware of the consequences of eating much more carbohydrates, calories or ‘dietary energy’ than they normally use or need. Over-eating — often wrongly termed over-nutrition or over-nourishment — often leads to diet-related NCDs and their consequences.

Various non-infectious diseases are due to what we have eaten or drunk in excess, especially processed sugars. Excessive consumption of ‘starchy’ foods or carbohydrates raises blood sugar levels which cause diabetes and other problems including excessive weight gain. Thus, sugar ‘addiction’ directly contributes to various malnutrition problems.

Meanwhile, excessive salt consumption contributes to hypertension or ‘high blood pressure’ which, in turn, causes various other health problems. Meanwhile, deep fried food has become the most popular type of ‘fast food’, concealing possible staleness or even ‘rotting’, as more prepared meals are increasingly purchased and consumed, not prepared at home.

Balanced, healthy diets
The consequences of not eating properly need to be widely understood. Healthy eating requires dietary diversity. Healthy diets should be adequately diverse, to ensure consumption of various foods. Consuming a variety of nutritious foods can supply all the nutrients people need.

We all need macronutrients (carbohydrates, protein, fats), without overeating staples like rice or bread, or fatty, sugary and salty food, and micronutrients, especially vitamins and minerals.

Governments, employers, family and peer pressure can help encourage better eating. Food regulations and meal arrangements can thus improve eating practices, behaviour and habits.

When people better understand the effects of their food behaviour, and have relevant, easily comprehensible and actionable knowledge and information, many will try to improve their food behaviour. But misleading ‘information’ from food and beverage companies and advertising firms is widespread and influential in popular culture.

The problem is made worse by popular, even iconic figures who dispense misleading ideas, even half-truths, as part of their own discourses and narratives, often without meaning to do harm, but as part of their own efforts to gain or retain popularity, legitimacy and authority.

Various media and popular culture — at the workplace, at worship and at home — as well as peers, family and friends greatly influence food behaviours. Women, typically the main caregivers, are particularly important, often choosing the food purchased, prepared and consumed.

Transforming food systems
Food systems need to be repurposed to better produce and supply safe and nutritious food. Ensuring that food systems improve nutrition is not just a matter of increasing production. The entire ‘nutrition value chain’ — from farm to fork, from production to consumption — needs to be considered to ensure the food system better feeds the population.

Food systems have to improve production practices, post-harvest processing and consumption behaviour. Resource use and abuse as well as environmental damage due to food production and consumption need to be addressed to ensure sustainable food systems.

Governments must realize that improving nutrition is crucial for economic and social progress. No country can achieve and sustain development with a malnourished population. Without healthy people, future productivity and progress will be severely compromised.

Good nutrition and food safety are necessary for healthy societies and future progress. Governments should use the Covid-19 induced reconsideration of food security in relation to supply chains to better address malnutrition and safety issues.

Food security initiatives prompted by pandemic considerations should promote food system changes that will encourage more sustainable and healthy diets. This opportunity to strengthen food systems must also prioritize nutrition, food safety and dietary diversity.

Professor Wan Manan Muda is Visiting Professor at Alma Ata University in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. He was Professor of Public Health and Nutrition at Universiti Sains Malaysia, and long active in Malaysian university reform efforts.

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Categories: Africa

Why Accelerating Implementation of AfCFTA Must Remain a Top Priority

Thu, 07/02/2020 - 08:22

Economic activity in Benin. Credit: @UNDPBenin

By Ahunna Eziakonwa
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 2 2020 (IPS)

1 July 2020 was supposed to be the official date to start trading under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). It was a much-anticipated follow up to the 2019 African Union Summit, that launched the operational phase of the AfCFTA in a colorful ceremony in Niamey – Niger.

The world was watching as Africa purposely marched on in its drive for integration.

We had grown accustomed to the projections – that intra-African trade – standing at about 18 per cent (in 2019) – will double by 2040.

We knew the projections were an understatement – for their focus on trade in goods alone – amidst a highly informal African marketplace, of thriving but un-captured trade at borderlands, and a vibrant services sector.

And so, we started to look at bringing the promise to life. At UNDP, based on consultations with key stakeholders, thanks to our presence on the ground in 54 African countries, we focused on enabling environments and productive capacities for women and youth as a central piece of our Renewed Strategic Offer in Africa – shaping a signature initiative on women and youth in the AfCFTA.

We, like others, were exuberant about Africa’s promise that was expected to be leapfrogged by the machinery of boosted intra-African trade.

COVID 19 has set this back – not the promise, but the start of trading. This, for many reasons, not least the unfinished negotiation business on rules of origin and the still-to-be exchanged offers for preferential treatment that will be the basis for new trading arrangements.

We have seen demand for Africa’s commodity exports plummet, and their prices tumble. We have seen global and regional supply chains break – causing fear for food insecurity and critically needed medical supplies.

Ahunna Eziakonwa. Credit: UNDP

But it is precisely COVID 19 that must impress on us the sense of urgency to accelerate implementation of the AfCFTA. Africa’s place in global value chains requires critical upgrade – from the export of raw materials and low-processed goods, to higher value – added products.

COVID 19 has shown that production value chains structured around extraction must now give way to approaches that privilege diversified industrialization on the continent, to promote structural transformation in Africa.

And this is not just economic orthodoxy. It is central to development policy – that Africa’s resources (that are the raw materials for many of the world’s most prosperous industries) can and must form the basis for an industrial drive within Africa, crowding in Africans: women and youth – into decent jobs, thereby promoting inclusive growth and sustainable development in Africa.

No nation has broken the poverty trap without creating jobs in productive sectors. Africa’s productive sectors – agriculture, industry, services, and the digital economy, should be supported to create products for local, regional, and global markets.

So, what has changed?

COVID 19 has demonstrated Africa’s ingenuity and surfaced the footprints of the productive capacity we long sought. Necessity has birthed innovation – from Ghana’s hand sanitizers, to Rwanda’s facemasks – and similar production all across Africa, to ventilators in Kenya, to testing kits in Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire.

These inventions were literally unimaginable in the pre – COVID 19 environment.

The power of a mindset and a narrative can change a reality. COVID 19 allows us to embrace the reality that ingenuity is distributed in equal measure. If there is a silver lining out of COVID 19’s stormy clouds, it is that Africa can – industrialize.

There is an important role for trade policy in ensuring that such mindset shifts take place, and that new stories of jobs for women and youth in trade, gain momentum.

For the development professional, the challenge is how to nurture this footprint – to ensure that it was not just a passing phase. The goal must be to support scaling up of what is evidence of a proven concept (which has a ready market in the new-normal COVID 19 economy). This can be done in at least six ways:

• Using government procurement to provide markets to the products of women and youth.

The overarching architecture of enabling environments is the business of governments. Investing in measures to facilitate trade within and at borders will need to become a top priority of Africa’s strategies to resuscitate economies from the development reversal occasioned by COVID 19.

Speaking to innovators and producers about the support they need to get ahead, is essential in zoning in on how their footprint can be scaled, so that models used for capacity building respond to those specific needs, even where it calls for getting off the beaten track.

Investing in agriculture, services and the digital economy is inescapable, as the pandemic has laid bare the risks of not doing so.

Amidst broken global supply chains and export bans, Africa has been forced to fill the gap. Scientists, research institutions, women entrepreneurs and young people have stepped up to the plate to provide homegrown solutions that are working well in context.

And while questions remain as to whether these are firmly rooted green shoots of recovery, the answer lies in what African governments do in responding to this footprint.

Investing in the new wave of African entrepreneurs scores on the twin objective of resuscitating incomes and livelihoods, while preparing the body of products that would find markets in the AfCFTA.

We must read and write about these innovations. Even more, we must recognize and lift them up – targeting them for programme support – and ensuring that they become part of Africa’s development 2.0 model.

While COVID 19 has led to a postponement of the start of trading under the AfCFTA, we must continue to advocate for an early commencement of stronger intra-African trade. For therein lies an important part of attaining Africa’s development promise.

The post Why Accelerating Implementation of AfCFTA Must Remain a Top Priority appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Ahunna Eziakonwa is Assistant Secretary General, Assistant Administrator and Director of the UNDP Regional Bureau for Africa – where she oversees development programmes across 46 countries in Sub Saharan Africa.

The post Why Accelerating Implementation of AfCFTA Must Remain a Top Priority appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

Nuclear Testing, Never Again

Wed, 07/01/2020 - 07:25

Credit: United Nations

By Daryl G. Kimball
WASHINGTON DC, Jul 1 2020 (IPS)

Seventy-five years ago, on July 16, the United States detonated the world’s first nuclear weapons test explosion in the New Mexican desert. Just three weeks later, U.S. Air Force B-29 bombers executed surprise atomic bomb attacks on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing at least 214,000 people by the end of 1945, and injuring untold thousands more who died in the years afterward.

Since then, the world has suffered from a costly and deadly nuclear arms race fueled by more than 2,056 nuclear test explosions by at least eight states, more than half of which (1,030) were conducted by the United States.

But now, as a result of years of sustained citizen pressure and campaigning, congressional leadership, and scientific and diplomatic breakthroughs, nuclear testing is taboo.

The United States has not conducted a nuclear test since 1992, when a bipartisan congressional majority mandated a nine-month testing moratorium. In 1996 the United States was the first to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which verifiably prohibits all nuclear test explosions of any yield.

Today, the CTBT has 184 signatories and almost universal support. But it has not formally entered into force due to the failure of the United States, China, and six other holdout states to ratify the pact.

As a result, the door to nuclear testing remains ajar, and now some White House officials and members of the Senate’s Dr. Strangelove Caucus are threatening to blow it wide open.

According to a May 22 article in The Washington Post, senior national security officials discussed the option of a demonstration nuclear blast at a May 15 interagency meeting.

A senior official told the Post that a “rapid test” by the United States could prove useful from a negotiating standpoint as the Trump administration tries to pressure Russia and China to engage in talks on a new arms control agreement.

Making matters worse, in a party-line vote last month, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved an amendment by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to authorize $10 million specifically for a nuclear test if ordered so by President Donald Trump.

Such a test could be conducted underground in just a few months at the former Nevada Test Site outside Las Vegas.

The idea of such a demonstration nuclear test blast is beyond reckless. In reality, the first U.S. nuclear test explosion in 28 years would do nothing to rein in Russian and Chinese nuclear arsenals or improve the environment for negotiations.

Rather, it would raise tensions and probably trigger an outbreak of nuclear testing by other nuclear actors, leading to an all-out global arms race in which everyone would come out a loser.

Other nuclear-armed countries, such as Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea would have far more to gain from nuclear testing than would the United States. Over the course of the past 25 years, the U.S. nuclear weapons labs have spent billions to maintain the U.S. arsenal without nuclear explosive testing.

Other nuclear powers would undoubtedly seize the opportunity provided by a U.S. nuclear blast to engage in multiple explosive tests of their own, which could help them perfect new and more dangerous types of warheads.

Moves by the United States to prepare for or to resume nuclear testing would shred its already tattered reputation as a leader on nonproliferation and make a mockery of the State Department’s initiative for a multilateral dialogue to create a better environment for progress on nuclear disarmament. The United States would join North Korea, which is the only country to have conducted nuclear tests in this century, as a nuclear rogue state.

As Dr. Lassina Zerbo, executive secretary of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, said on May 28, “[A]ctions or activities by any country that violate the international norm against nuclear testing, as underpinned by the CTBT, would constitute a grave challenge to the nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament regime, as well as to global peace and security more broadly.”

Talk of renewing U.S. nuclear testing would dishonor the victims of the nuclear age. These include the millions of people who have died and suffered from illnesses directly related to the radioactive fallout from tests conducted in the United States, the islands of the Pacific, Australia, China, North Africa, Russia, and Kazakhstan, where the Soviet Union conducted 468 of its 715 nuclear tests.

Tragically, the downwinders affected by the first U.S. nuclear test, code-named “Trinity,” are still not even included in the U.S. Radiation Effects Compensation Act program, which is due to expire in 2022.

Congress must step in and slam the door shut on the idea of resuming nuclear testing, especially if its purpose is to threaten other countries. As Congress finalizes the annual defense authorization and energy appropriations bills, it can and must enact a prohibition on the use of funds for nuclear testing and enact safeguards that require affirmative House and Senate votes on any proposal for testing in the future.

Eventually, the Senate can and must also reconsider and ratify the CTBT itself. As a signatory, the United States is legally bound to comply with CTBT’s prohibition on testing, but has denied itself the benefits that will come with ratification and entry into force of the treaty.

Nuclear weapons test explosions are a dangerous vestige of a bygone era. We must not go back.

The post Nuclear Testing, Never Again appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Daryl G. Kimball is Executive Director of the Arms Control Association (ACA) and publisher of the organization’s monthly journal, Arms Control Today

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Categories: Africa

Cover-up at the UN: You Scratch My Back & I’ll Scratch Yours

Wed, 07/01/2020 - 06:56

UN Security Council in session. Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 1 2020 (IPS)

The ongoing battle between China and the United States is threatening to paralyze the most powerful body at the United Nations – the 15-member Security Council (UNSC)—which has virtually gone MIA (missing in action) on some of the key politically-sensitive issues of the day.

The Council has scrupulously avoided any resolutions on the devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed the lives of over 500,000 people worldwide, while it has remained silent on Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ call for a global cease-fire in war-ravaged countries, including Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

Summing up the dysfunctional state of the UNSC, UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said: “We have not seen a statement (from the Security Council) on COVID 19. (And) we have not seen a statement on the Secretary-General’s call on global ceasefire”.

The warring parties in current conflicts are backed, directly or indirectly, by the five permanent members (P5) of the UNSC: the US, UK, France, Russia and China who are providing either political or military support– or both.

The big powers have a longstanding tradition of protecting their allies and their own national interests while covering up each other’s military sins — mostly on a reciprocal basis.

As the old saying goes, one Asian diplomat remarked, “the underlying principle is: You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”.

The Security Council, Dujarric rightly pointed out, has primacy in the UN over issues of peace and security. “A strong statement from that body… a strong unified statement from that body supporting the Secretary General’s call for a global ceasefire, I think, would go a long way in, hopefully, making a call for a ceasefire a reality”, he added.

Ian Williams, a veteran journalist who has covered the UN since the 1980s and currently president of the New York Foreign Press Association, told IPS it is past time for the grown-ups in the UN to get together to call out the UN P5, especially the recidivist veto-brandishers like the US, China and Russia.

Even the Trump administration is not impervious to rebuffs, he added.

“I seem to remember when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was going to veto a peacekeeping mission in Haiti over its recognition of Taiwan, until Ambassador Juan Somavia (of Chile) spoke to them on behalf of the LATAM members and warned of the consequences to their reputations. The consequences do not have to be critical – they can be cumulative since even the P5 need support.”

This Secretary General exceeds the quota on diplomacy, said Williams, author of “UNtold: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War.”

“Perhaps he should abandon any ambitions for a second term and, while he still has it, use his moral authority as custodian of the Charter to name and shame those who hold up crucial decision for national ego”.

“He has the pulpit: he should try preaching and rallying other members. Better to be a memorable one termer than a footnote two-termer!”, said Williams, a former President of the UN Correspondents’ Association (UNCA).

The Trump administration broke ranks and blocked consideration of a proposed resolution on COVID19– because it did not specifically single out China by name. If such a resolution came up before the Council, the Chinese would obviously have vetoed it.

At the same time, no Security Council member would dare introduce a resolution supporting pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, criticize the brutal suppression of Uighurs Muslims in China or condemn Israel for threatening to annex Palestinian territory.

As Guterres said during his press conference last week: “The problem is not that multilateralism is not up to the challenges the world faces. The problem is that today’s multilateralism lacks scale, ambition and teeth.”

And some of the instruments that do have teeth, he explained, “show little or no appetite to bite, as has recently been the case with the difficulties faced by the Security Council.”

Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco and coordinator of the program in Middle Eastern Studies, told IPS since the founding of the United Nations, one or more of the five permanent members have periodically abused their veto power or threat thereof to block action on important matters.

“Calls for reforming the Security Council, such as requiring a super-majority of some kind rather than a consensus of the P5 have been proposed, but largely ignored, for almost as long,” he said.

Zunes pointed out that the current U.S. administration is particularly extreme in its efforts to thwart the will of international community, however.

For example, he argued, the strongly pro-Israel administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon did not oppose a series of UNSC resolutions against Israel’s annexation of greater East Jerusalem.

And the strongly pro-Israel Reagan administration supported the unanimous resolution opposing Syria’s annexation of the Golan Heights, yet the Trump administration is blocking any action in opposition to Israel’s plans of annexing large swathes of the occupied West Bank, declared Zunes

“When the United States is willing to block action on fighting a global pandemic, establishing a global cease fire, or opposing the flagrantly illegal annexation of territories seized by military force, we really are entering a new era of political extremism which is not only weakening the Security Council, but threatening the viability of the of the entire UN system and post-World War II international order,” said Zunes, who also serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Zunes also referred to United Nations Security Council Resolution 252 (1968), 267 (1969), and 298 (1971) on Jerusalem and resolution 497 (1981) on the Golan Heights.

In a statement released June 30, US Ambassador Kelly Craft lambasted China’s gross human rights abuses but stopped short of taking any action in the Security Council.

In a hard-hitting statement she said the world has known about the Chinese Communist Party’s gross and systematic abuses of human rights for decades, but too often turned a blind eye.

“I salute the United Nations special rapporteurs and human rights experts for courageously breaking this silence and standing up for the Chinese people.”

She said the June 26 statement issued by UN rapporteurs and experts reveals the true state of human rights in the People’s Republic of China. It outlines the CCP’s systematic repression of religious and ethnic minorities; the disappearance and detention of lawyers and human rights defenders; and the regime’s use of forced labor.

While the UNSC has taken no action on the proposed annexation of occupied territory by Israel, the outspoken UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet added her voice to the growing international and national calls on the Government of Israel not to proceed with its plans to illegally annex a swathe of occupied Palestinian territory, saying it would have a disastrous impact on human rights of Palestinians and across the region.

“Annexation is illegal. Period,” she said. “Any annexation. Whether it is 30 percent of the West Bank, or 5 percent. I urge Israel to listen to its own former senior officials and generals, as well as to the multitude of voices around the world, warning it not to proceed along this dangerous path.”

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

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Categories: Africa

Sustainable Tourism and Fisheries Key to Growth in Post-COVID Pacific

Tue, 06/30/2020 - 21:18

A boat rests on the shores of Fiji. Credit: Unsplash / Nicolas Weldingh

By Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana
BANGKOK, Thailand, Jun 30 2020 (IPS)

Developing countries of Asia and the Pacific are experiencing unbalanced tolls of the COVID-19 pandemic. Grim milestones in infections and deaths have left countless devastated. Yet, we must look at the economic and social impacts in small island developing States (SIDS), where setbacks are likely to undo years of development gains and push many people back into poverty.

Compared to other developing countries, SIDS in the Asia-Pacific region have done well in containing the spread of the virus. So far, available data indicates relatively few cases of infections, with 15 deaths in total in Maldives, Guam and Northern Mariana Islands. Yet while rapid border closures have contained the human cost of the virus, the economic and social impacts of the pandemic on SIDS will place the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) even farther out of their reach. This is worrying as SIDS in Asia and the Pacific were only on track to reach SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure and SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production and as they had in fact regressed in SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, a crucial driver of inclusive development and key to reaching all SDGs.

One reason SIDS’ economies are severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic is their dependence on tourism. Tourism earnings exceed 50 per cent of GDP in Maldives and Palau and comprised 30 per cent of GDP in Samoa and Vanuatu in 2018. Measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, including restricting entrance to countries and halting international travel, will have a profound impact on the development of these economies in 2020 and beyond, with estimates of international tourist arrivals declining globally by 60-80 per cent in 2020. The pandemic has particularly affected the cruise ship industry, which plays an important role in many SIDS.

The severe impact of COVID-19 on these economies is also a result of heavy reliance on fisheries, which represent a main source of SIDS’ marine wealth and bring much-needed public revenues. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis will jeopardize these income streams as a result of a slowdown in fisheries activity. However, it is important to note that the COVID-19 pandemic may also create a small window for stocks to recover if it leads to a global slowdown of the commercial fishing industry.

Despite the tourism and fisheries sectors’ susceptibility to shocks, ESCAP’s latest report, the Asia-Pacific Countries with Special Needs Development Report: Leveraging Ocean Resources for the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States, emphasizes fisheries and tourism will remain drivers of sustainable development in small island developing States of Asia and the Pacific. They are among the most important sectors in their contribution to output and their importance for livelihoods. In the short term, addressing the consequences of the COVID 19 pandemic must take priority, but the long-term global context will usher in an era supportive of tourism development in Asia-Pacific SIDS. This is due to an increasing demand from the emerging middle class of developing Asia and the ageing society in the developed countries on the Pacific Rim.

As part of post COVID-19 recovery, new foundations for sustainable tourism and fisheries in Asia-Pacific SIDS must be built. These sectors must not only have extensive links to local communities and economies, but also be resilient to external shocks. Enhancing economic resilience must focus on building both the necessary physical infrastructure and creating institutional response mechanisms. For example, a ‘green tax’ for tourists can generate revenues for environmental protection. Such fees serve as an additional benefit for local populations and regulate the impact of tourism on SIDS’ fragile natural environment. SIDS may consider innovative financing instruments like blue bonds and and debt for conservation swaps to expand their fiscal space. Open data sharing, and the collection, harmonization and use of fisheries data can be strengthened for integrated and nuanced analysis on the state of fish stocks.

Given the limited capacity of the health-care systems of many Asia-Pacific SIDS, shutting down access to many of these economies was a wise and necessary short-term policy choice. Opening ‘travel bubbles’ with countries where the virus has been brought under control is now important. In the longer term, the effective implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development must take priority. This entails ensuring sustainable use of existing ocean resources and developing sectors that provide productive employment, including specific types of tourism and fisheries. SIDS can do more to embrace the blue economy to foster sustainable development and greater regional cooperation is an important element for creating an enabling framework. Regional cooperation is especially important given the nature of fisheries as a common property resource and the remote locations of most Asia-Pacific SIDS.

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a stark reminder of the price of weaknesses in health systems, social protection and public services. It also provides a historic opportunity to advocate for policy decisions that are pro-environment, pro-climate and pro-poor. Progress in our region’s SIDS through sustainable tourism and fisheries are vital components of a global roadmap for an inclusive and sustainable future.

The post Sustainable Tourism and Fisheries Key to Growth in Post-COVID Pacific appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana is United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific

The post Sustainable Tourism and Fisheries Key to Growth in Post-COVID Pacific appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

The Goan Village Women Helping Mitigate Plastic Pollution by Making Eco-friendly Sanitary Pads

Tue, 06/30/2020 - 12:08

The Sakhi sanitary pad is completely natural, comprising pinewood fibre, non-woven cloth, and butter paper. lt composts in eight days. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
PILGAON/GOA, India, Jun 30 2020 (IPS)

Jayashree Parwar has not traveled much outside of her village of Bicholim in the western coastal Indian state of Goa. But the homemaker-turned-social-entrepreneur has been reaching women in dozens of cities across the country with a hygiene product she makes at home along with women from her community.

Called Sakhi (friend in Hindi), the plastic-free sanitary pad is Goa’s first menstrual hygiene product made with organic materials.

Plastic challenge of sanitary pads

According to a 2018 joint report by Water Aid India and the Menstrual Hygiene Alliance of India, women and girls here use a whopping 12 billion sanitary pads annually. Depending on the materials used in the making of the sanitary pads, they could take up to 800 years to decompose, the report says.

Currently, most sanitary pads have over 90 percent composition plastics — the equivalent of four plastic bags.

Goa may be one of the smallest states in India but it produces 7,300 tons of plastic waste annually. According to the state-owned Goa Pollution Board, plastic waste management remains a mammoth challenge for the state, which aims to go plastic-free by 2022.
The huge plastic consumption is largely attributed to the flourishing tourism industry of the state, which has a population of less than two million but receives four times as many tourists each year.
According to the state-based National Institute of Oceanography — India’s premier ocean research institute that regularly organises beach clean-up drives — most of the plastic garbage on the beaches are dumped locally.

Parwar doesn’t know these statistics very well but is aware of the growing plastic nuisance in her state.

“Wherever you go, there is plastic. You can go to any beach and there are heaps of plastic. A lot of it like cups, bottles, spoons etc are used by tourists and hotels, but we locals also use a lot of plastic, especially the carry bags for shopping,” she tells IPS, before adding that the eco-friendly Sakhi sanitary pads are her own way of mitigating the plastic challenge.

Goa may be one of the smallest states in India but it produces 7,300 tons of plastic waste annually. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

“A small step to reduce a big burden”

Parwar’s journey of a thousand pads started in the summer of 2015 in the narrow, tin-roofed hut adjoining her living room that she calls her ‘workshop’.

Three other women from her community joined her. They all share a similar background: none of them have studied beyond high school; they are from a low income group; and they all have dreams of a better life for their family and children.

Their resources were few: a few hundred rupees as their capital and a compressing machine donated by local doctor Subbu Nayak. Nayak also trained them in pad making and connected them with a raw material supplier in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.

The process is fairly simple and making a single sanitary pad takes around five minutes, explains Nasreen Sheikh, one of Parwar’s colleagues.

“First we grind the pinewood fibre, then put it into a mould, press it and wrap it in (non-woven) cloth, sticking butter paper on one side and finally we sterilise it,” Sheikh tells IPS.

However, although they had a machine and the skills, a crucial component was still missing. They had no customers.

Fortunately for them, support came from different quarters, including the government’s Urban Development Department. Sumit Singh, an official from the department who leads the Clean India Mission, taught Parwar and her partners how to market themselves online with retailers like Amazon.

Parwar and her colleagues had no prior business experience and limited resources. They naturally saw online marketing as an exciting opportunity.

“We chose to sell on Amazon because none of us have the time or means to go out and market (the sanitary pads) in stores or malls. Besides, online we can have clients even outside of Goa,” Parwar says.

After four years of struggling to build the business and develop a steady customer base, along with numerous failed attempts to secure bank loans to grow their business, the women finally managed to expand beyond the narrow tin shed to a bigger room (their factory) where they now make a thousand pads every month.

“We are only making a 1,000 pads in a month, so it’s a very small step, but I believe every small step counts,” Parwar says.

Jayashree Parwar and her partners have been making plastic-free sanitary pads in Goa, and have sold them to clients in the India’s cities like Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad and New Delhi. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Growing demand for plastic-free

They have received orders from bigger cities like Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad and New Delhi. Unlike known brands and corporate manufacturers, Parwar’s group doesn’t have the ability to advertise, but word of mouth, social media and a growing environmental consciousness have helped them, she says.

“We use materials that are completely natural: pinewood fibre, non-woven cloth, butter paper. There is nothing there to cause itching or skin rashes and once you dispose it, this pad will compost in eight days. We have given demonstration in many schools and other organisations. People have tried it and seen how the composting really works,” Alita Pilgaonkar, another member of the group, tells IPS.

The sanitary pads also decompose in about two weeks.

Eight sanitary pads cost 40 rupees and bulk pack containing 96 pads costs 700 rupees. They are cheaper than most popular brands but the women say that they manage to make a small profit.

Reusable vs compostable

Could a total shift to plastic-free sanitary pads be a possibility and could it curb the ever-increasing plastic burden?

Ideally, it is possible, but the willpower seems to be currently missing, Kathy Walkling, co-founder of Ecofemme, tells IPS. Ecofemme is another women-led initiative that makes eco-friendly menstrual hygiene products. Based in Puducherry (formerly Pondicherry) on the country’s southern coast, Ecofemme produces and advocates for reusable sanitary pads that are both plastic-free and affordable.

“If government would back these initiatives, this could have a powerful effect to make a mainstream shift,” Walkling tells IPS.

But Eline Bakker Kruijne, an environmental engineer and formerly a programme officer at Netherlands-based international think-tank IRC WASH, tells IPS that no significant changes are possible without changing the current disposal system.

Pointing at the practice of treating discarded menstrual products, whether organic or plastic, as hazardous and burning them, Bakker Kruijne says that single-use pads are of no help as incineration only adds to pollution levels.

“It is all about how these single-use materials break down in the environment and if it requires an industrial process (like incineration), does it really help us?” Bakker Kruijne asks.

Walkling also says that single-use menstrual products, even if compostable, add to the daily waste volume. But public preference is currently tilted heavily towards these single-use pads as people see them as more hygienic than reusables.

However, both the experts feel that moving away from plastic is a positive step.

“With each person who shifts to a reusable and non polluting product, approx 125 kg of sanitary waste per person over a lifetime of use will be prevented. There are currently approx 355 million menstruating girls and women in India and if each uses 10 pads/month this would generate 42.6 billion pads every year (355million*10pads*12 months).

“Obviously given these numbers, more women switching to re-usable products makes a significant difference,” Walking tells IPS.

Meanwhile, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and the lockdown that has severely affected India’s economic sector has not left the producers of the Sakhi sanitary pads unaffected. Their main supplier in Coimbatore, in south India, stopped operations, almost forcing the women out of business. However, they have recently managed to find another supplier in Mumbai.

Sales have also decreased, but Parwar is confident of recovering quickly once the crisis is over. Because, as she says, women’s “periods will not stop”.

The post The Goan Village Women Helping Mitigate Plastic Pollution by Making Eco-friendly Sanitary Pads appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

”Murder Most Foul” – the Death of Olof Palme

Tue, 06/30/2020 - 08:22

The Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd´s Non-Violence sculpture outside the UN headquarters in New York.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Jun 30 2020 (IPS)

Just as the U.S. is haunted by the 1963 murder of John F. Kennedy, Sweden is troubled by the 1986 murder of its Prime Minister Olof Palme. The American feelings were aired on Bob Dylan´s latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, containing a 16 minutes long song with lines like:

It happened so quickly, so quick, by surprise
right there in front of everyone’s eyes.
Greatest magic trick ever under the sun,
perfectly executed, skillfully done.I said the soul of a nation been torn away
and it’s beginning to go into a slow decay.

On the evening of the 10th of June this year, a significant part of the Swedish population sat eagerly waiting in front of their TV sets. The Palme Commission was going to reveal the definite results of 34 years of official investigations into the murder of Olof Palme.

He had, in a street corner at the very centre of Stockholm, at short range, been shot dead in front of his wife. He was killed with a single bullet in the back. The Prime Minister had in the afternoon told his body guards they could take the evening off, something he often did when he was not on duty. Olof Palme’s evening had been quite typical for a Swede at the time, even for a high level, controversial politician, with an international fame rivalled only by the music group ABBA. Swedes had grown accustomed to a low level of violent crimes. After a regular day at work, Palme arrived home at 18:30. He ate dinner prepared and served by his wife. At 20:42 the couple caught the subway, three stations later they descended just in time to meet their son Mårten and his fiancé and for Palme to buy tickets for the four of them to watch the Swedish film The Brothers Mozart, which I saw a few years later, thinking it was a pity that Palme had to watch such a bad Fellini-wannabe movie just before he died.

After the movie, Palme and his wife were quietly walking back home when a taxi driver at 23:21 from his car witnessed how Palme’s wife fell to the ground slightly wounded by a bullet, while her husband lay bleeding on the ground. The murderer was running from the crime scene. The driver immediately called the switchboard of his taxi rank, which alerted the police. Within a minute a police patrol car had arrived. An ambulance happened to pass by and stopped while a police ran after the murderer, though he lost him.

When all this happened my wife and I were in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. The evening was going to be the highpoint of the carnival season and we were getting ready for the festivities. The TV was on, but we were not paying it much attention. As I was putting on the fangs which completed my vampire outfit, I glanced at the TV screen, glimpsing a portrait of Olof Palme.

”Something must have happened in Sweden – they have just shown a picture of Palme” I said, and turned up the sound only to find that other news were coming in. ”I don´t suppose it was anything serious”, my wife said. During the evening, I could not stop wondering about the picture of Palme and imagined I had heard the word asesinato. We came back to our flat at three in the morning and I called my father.

”What time is it in Sweden?”
”9 o´clock in the morning. Why? Has anything happened?”
”I saw something about Palme on TV, but didn’t hear anything. It was more than 12 hours ago.”
In faraway Hässleholm my father put the radio on. With a sense of shock I heard him say:
”They’re playing some sort of funeral music. Wait a moment … Olof Palme has been murdered! He is dead. He was shot in a street in Stockholm.”

I was still dressed up as vampire. Everything was absurd. I put on the TV and saw people weeping in the street outside Café Opera, Stockholm’s fanciest restaurant. What had happened?

After I had come back to my teaching job in Sweden five subjects had been set up for that year’s final exams, one of them being ”What Olof Palme and his death mean for me”. Every Swedish teacher at the school had to comment on his/her colleagues´essays and thus I came to read more than 150 student essays. To my suprise I found that every single pupil had chosen to write about Palme’s death. Most surprising was that the thoughts expressed in all essays were more or less the same: ”Sweden is now like every other country in the world. We have lost our innocence. We are not unique any more. Politicians are murdered even here. Swedish society and politics are just as corrupt as in the rest of the world. Palme’s death was the end of our secure welfare state. We live in a changed country.” It was like waking up in an unfamiliar landscape after a good night´s sleep. A vacuum had arisen in the Swedish self-awareness.

A Dutch friend of mine told me: ”When the President of a neat little democracy like Sweden is murdered you will soon witness how all kind of maggots will be creeping out of the corpse.” He was right. During the search for the killer different ”tracks” constantly opened up, each indicating an ”affair”, pointing to strange covert actions, all of them ultimately leading to a dead end.

After the assassination, Hans Holmér, Chief Constable of the Stockholm County Police, took charge of the investigations. He assumed the murder was of a political nature, but not related to the domestic political scene. Under his command, suspicions almost exclusively centred on his personal convictions. Crime scene investigations and witness interviews were fatally flawed. Resources were directed towards investigating radical immigrant groups, notably the Kurdish Liberation Movement PKK. After a raid when numerous Kurdish immigrants with presumed PKK connections were arrested, only to be released due to lack of evidence, Holmér had to resign.

Holmér shared a flat with Ebbe Carlsson, a publisher close to the inner circles of the governing Social Democratic Party. After Holmér had been removed from the Palme investigation, Carlsson was caught smuggling surveillance equipment into Sweden on behalf of Holmér. It turned out that Carlsson had acted with the consent of the Minister of Justice, who was forced to resign and the scandal thickened. Holmér had recruited infamously violent police officers with right-wing leanings, who furthermore had been suspiciously involved with narcotics- and arms dealers in Stockholm’s underworld, some of them had just before Palme’s death been spotted with walkie-talkies close to the murder scene. The Swedish secret police, SÄPO, had been marginalized from the investigations. Accordingly, several international affairs and connections with foreign Secret Service Agencies had not been fully investigated.

Among them was the so-called Bofors Scandal. The Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors had paid USD 9 Million in kickbacks to top Indian politicians. Furthermore, the company had apparently illegally exported sophisticated weaponry to Iran, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates. A year after Palme’s death, a State appointed Weapons Inspector ”fell” bakwards in front of a subway train and killed a few hours after a meeting with the head of the Nobel Industries, one of the co-owners of Bofors. Some illegal weapon deals had allegedly been brokered with the help of the East German secret police, STASI. Two Swedish journalists who had followed this trail had, two years before the inspector’s death, been found drowned in a car just outside Stockholm. None of these deaths was explained, even if the Foreign Minister just over a year after Palme’s death declared that: ”The dirty linen of the arms deals will be washed in the open.”

Speculations spread like wildfire after it was alleged that Bofors had been involved in arms sales to Iran during the infamous Iran-Contra Scandal. A former CIA agent, Dois Gene ”Chip” Tatum, who 1986 – 1992 had been active in several of CIA’s covert actions, was in an interview asked if he knew anything about the murder of Olof Palme. He answered: ”I was informed that the OSG [Operations Sub-Group] was behind and used the ”assets” [professional killers] in South Africa.” According to Tatum the reason for the murder was that agents in charge of the Iran-Contra deal had approached Olof Palme and become alarmed when learning that the Swedish Prime Minister was unaware of Bofors’s illegal activities and declared that he was going to take up the issue within the UN.

The Swedish Social Democrat Government was a known supporter of anti-Apartheid forces and by the end of September 1996 Eugene de Kock, a former South African police officer, gave evidence to the Supreme Court in Pretoria stating that Palme had been killed as part of an operation headed by a Secret Service agent, Craig Williamson, who had been in contact with Swedish mercenaries who had served under the South African Apartheid Regime.

None of the above cases have been validated by the Swedish authorities and represent just a few of several ”affairs” that surfaced in connection with Palme’s death. My Dutch friend’s prophecy proved to be correct – an unresolved, political murder would reveal what goes on under the surface of an affluent and ”just” society. My pupils were also right – with the murder of Olof Palme Sweden lost its innocence and its citizens have not recuperated from the shock. After approximately 600 million SEK spent on investigations, a reward of 5 million USD to anyone who can present convincing evidence of whom the killer was, and 130 confessed killers, the Palme murder continues to gnaw on the mind of many Swedes.

What did the Palme Commission reveal on TV? It had been been globally announced that definite facts about the murder were going to be exposed and explained. However, 34 years after Palme’s murder the Commission came up with yet another alleged killer, a loner like so many other earlier suspects. The Commission declared that the alibi of a certain Stig Engström had not been throuroughly investigated and that he was the probable killer. Twenty years after his death, Sweden now got its own Lee Harvey Oswald, though he had not even been arrested during his lifetime, even less officially accused of any crime. The Commission proclaimed the case closed. Not many were content with that conclusion.

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.

The post ”Murder Most Foul” – the Death of Olof Palme appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

India’s Test along the Line of Actual Control

Tue, 06/30/2020 - 07:52

Indian Army Chief, General M.M. Naravane recently admitted that there is a threat of possible collusion between China and Pakistan against India which could lead to a two-front war. Credit: Indian Defence News

By Simi Mehta
NEW DELHI, Jun 30 2020 (IPS)

Being the sole candidate from the Asia Pacific region for the non-permanent seat of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), India was elected by 184 votes in the 193-member United Nations’ General Assembly. on June 17, 2020.

For its membership during its two-year term- 2021-22, the priorities for India had been announced much in advance. India has called for a “New Orientation for A Reformed Multilateral System’ (NORMS)”- based United Nations.

The major characteristics for achieving norms include: new opportunities for progress; an effective response to international terrorism; reforming the multilateral system; a comprehensive approach to international peace and security, and; promoting technology with a human touch as a driver of solutions.

Chinese Incursions into the Indian Territory

With India’s non-permanent membership bid confirmed, its tenure begins with major skirmish in its border with the permanent member of the UNSC- People’s Republic of China (PRC), in the Ladakh side at the Galwan valley.

There has been a total of 20 confirmed casualties of the Army from the Indian side, and with indications of several personnel (jawans) held hostage by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Physical confrontation using nailed-rods have been inflicted as a means to torture the Indian jawans.

It needs to be mentioned here that this conflict draws resemblance to the 1962 war with China at the site of the Galwan river in the Ladakh region near the Line of Actual Control between India and China, began when China attacked India’s posts along the Indian border.

Suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Chinese, this war was described as a blatant Chinese communist aggression against India. It must be noted that after 1975, no Indian soldier was killed at the hands of the Chinese troops. This 45-year record of mutual trust witnessed a bloody jolt where 20 Indian soldiers were martyred on June 15-16, 2020.

As India seeks to place NORMS at the UNSC table, any complacency in its approach towards China would only embolden the latter. As it clearly is, India is surrounded by expansionist and terror-harbouring states who are also nuclear powers.

According to the Yearbook 2020 of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), India (150) has lesser nuclear warheads than Pakistan (160) and Pakistan and China (320) combined.

With nationalist sentiments raging high in India, the Prime Minister of India has sent a stern message that while India wants peace, it would respond appropriately to any provocation.

With complete resolve, it would do to protect its sovereignty and integrity and would not compromise it in anyway. Certainly, the stakes are high because when Pakistan intruded into India and challenged India’s sovereignty, India launched a ‘surgical strike’ against it as a befitting reply to such attack against it.

Amid the ongoing combat, a virtual meeting between India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and Foreign Minister of India Wang Yi, was held. India warned China that the unprecedented development and killing of Indian soldiers would have a ‘serious’ impact on the bilateral relations.

While India and PRC have border management agreements, India must realize that such arrangements have not stopped China into making aggressive overtures towards it. The sooner its thuggishness around international rules of law is exposed, the faster it would ensure safety for the heroes in the armed forces.

Non-Permanent Membership of the UNSC: India’s Test to Hold PRC Accountable

As India assumes its Non-Permanent Membership of the UNSC from January 1, 2021, India must seek to avenge the wrongs of China keeping all its options of tour de force open. It would also hold the UNSC presidency for a month in August 2021.

India’s objective to establish a NORMS-based architecture must stand the test of time and prove its mettle to the world that it is fully capable of wielding a veto-powered permanent membership to the UNSC.

While this is the eighth time that India would sit as a non-permanent member in the most powerful agency of the UN, this election has been regarded as being the result of Indian PM’s “vision, and his inspiring global leadership, particularly in the time of COVID-19”, and that the international community would be a testament to the Indian ethos of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family).

Into its 75th year, the UNSC does not represent the changed geopolitical realities. In 1945 when the UN was established, the UN General Assembly had 51 members, and in 2020 the it stands at 193.

However, the permanent membership to the UNSC remains unchanged- it was 5 then, it is 5 now. In other words, it remains unreformed and underrepresented.

India has been a vocal advocate of reforming the composition of the UNSC for over three decades, and being the largest democracy of the world, with formidable economic and military might as well as a responsible nuclear power, following a comprehensive approach to peace and security guided by dialogue and negotiations, mutual respect and commitment to international law, it has continued to demand a non-discriminatory permanent seat in the UNSC.

The UNSC is the pivot of the mechanism of international collective security and international peace. Therefore, it is high time that it should be reformed and expanded in order to enable it to perform its duties enshrined in the UN Charter more proactively.

For this it is imperative that the representation of emerging economies, most prominently India, be the top of the list, which would give the developing and lesser developed countries greater say in the decision-making process of the UNSC.

India’s objectives, mission and vision to promote responsible and inclusive solutions to international peace and security must put the need to reform multilateralism on top of the agenda.

With the commitment towards multilateralism, rule of law and a fair and equitable international system, India would adopt a ‘Five S’ approach to the world from the UNSC seat — samman (respect), samvad (dialogue), sahayog (cooperation), shanti (peace) and samriddhi (prosperity).

Basing all its arguments under these principles, India must call an urgent meeting of the UNSC comprising of all permanent and non-permanent members and collectively hold China accountable for its misadventures (including intrusions into its territory and threatening its sovereignty by induction of Chinese troops, artillery and defence equipment into the areas along the Line of Actual Control around Pangong Lake and the Galwan valley), and also for its attempts to unilaterally change the status quo on the border.

Having the international community of nations support India’s stand would be the first test as it sets to establish the NORMS architecture in the Council.

The post India’s Test along the Line of Actual Control appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr Simi Mehta is CEO and Editorial Director, Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi. She can be reached at simi@impriindia.org.

The post India’s Test along the Line of Actual Control appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Categories: Africa

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