Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Evidence shows that when women are empowered, farms are more productive, natural resources are better managed, nutrition is improved, and livelihoods are more secure. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 30 2018 (IPS)

Despite women being key figures in agriculture and food security, gender inequality is holding back progress towards ending hunger, poverty, and creating sustainable food systems. 

During a high-level event on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, the African Union (AU) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. (FAO) reviewed the persistent gender gaps in agri-food systems in Africa and highlighted the need for urgent action. “It is therefore economically rewarding to invest in women’s education and economic empowerment since women often use a large portion of their income on children and family welfare.” -- AU commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture Josefa Leonel Correa Sacko.

“There is a strong momentum to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment in agri-food systems because women constitute the majority of agricultural labour,” said AU commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture Josefa Leonel Correa Sacko.

However, despite women’s crucial role in such systems, there are persistent gender gaps.

“We need to better recognise and harness the fundamental contribution of women to food security and nutrition. For that, we must close persisting gender gaps in agriculture in Africa,” said FAO’s Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva.

“Evidence shows that when women are empowered, farms are more productive, natural resources are better managed, nutrition is improved, and livelihoods are more secure,” he added.

While women account for up to 60 percent of agricultural labour, approximately 32 percent of women own agricultural lands across 27 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa through either joint, sole ownership, or both.

Only 13 percent of women, compared to 40 percent of men, have sole ownership on all or part of the land they own, according to the Regional Outlook on Gender and Agrifood Systems, a joint report by the FAO and AU that was presented during the event.

In 2016, thousands of rural women across Africa gathered at Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro to protest and demand the right to land and natural resources.

Some even climbed to the peak of Africa’s highest mountain, showcasing their determination for change.

Even when women are able to own their own land, many still lack access to productive resources and technologies such as fertiliser, agricultural input, mechanical equipment, and finance.

This poses numerous challenges along the food value chain, including food loss.

Globally, approximately one-third of all food produced is lost or wasted. Food loss and waste is a major contributor to climate change and in Sub-Saharan Africa, the economic cost of such losses amount up to USD4 billion every year, FAO found.

Closing productivity gaps could increase food production and consumption by up to 10 percent and reduce poverty by up to 13 percent.

While women account for up to 60 percent of agricultural labour, approximately 32 percent of women own agricultural lands across 27 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa through either joint, sole ownership, or both. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

The FAO-AU assessment also estimated that agricultural output could more than triple if farmers had access to the finance needed to expand quality and quantity of their produce.

Panellists noted that addressing the agricultural gender gaps in Africa could additionally boost food security and nutrition in the region.

Globally, hunger is on the rise and it is worsening in most parts of Africa. Out of 821 million hungry people in the world in 2017, over 250 million are in Africa.

Many African nations are also seeing a rapid rise in obesity, which could soon become the continent’s biggest public health crisis.

“It is therefore economically rewarding to invest in women’s education and economic empowerment since women often use a large portion of their income on children and family welfare,” Sacko said.

Graziano da Silva noted that among the key issues is the lack of women in governance systems and decision-making processes. 

Between five and 30 percent of field officers from ministries and rural institutions are women while only 12 to 20 percent of staff in ministries of agriculture are female.

This coincides with the lack of gender targeting and analysis mechanisms, resulting in services that target male-dominated sectors.

If such trends continue, Africa will not be close to achieving many of the ambitious development goals including the Malabo Declaration, which aims to achieve inclusive growth, sustainable agriculture, and improved livelihoods.

There has been some positive trends as many African countries have started to recognise the importance of putting women at the heart of the transformation of rural food systems.

Botswana’s Women’s Economic Empowerment Programme provides grants to women, enabling them to start their own enterprises and advance their economic well-being.

First Lady of Botswana Neo Jane Massi attended the high-level event and stressed the “importance of inclusive growth in our national development agendas in order to ensure that no one is left behind.”

Similarly, the Joint Programme on Accelerating Progress towards the Economic Empowerment of Women, implemented by various U.N. agencies including FAO and U.N. Women, has provided more than 40,000 women with training on improved agricultural technologies and increased access to financial services and markets.

While women’s participation in decision making has increased from 17 to 30 percent, Graziano da Silva stressed the need for better and more balanced representation of women at all levels.

Presenting the recommendations from the AU-FAO outlook report, Sacko called for an “enabling environment,” reinforcement of accountability mechanisms for gender equality and women’s empowerment, and a “gender data revolution” to better inform gender-sensitive policies and programs.

“Let us be ambitious, and let us all put our wings together,” Massi concluded.

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The Bangui Wind Farm located in the northern Philippines hosts 20 wind turbines with a capacity of 33 megawatts. GGGI works mainly with governments that express an interest in sustainable growth and is supporting the Philippines in mainstreaming green growth into the country’s development planning. Credit: Kara Santos/IPS

By Carmen Arroyo
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 30 2018 (IPS)

When the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) was founded eight years ago, the general public thought that renewable energies would never replace oil and coal. Today, the tables have turned.

Dr. Frank Rijsberman has been the director general of the institute since 2016, and for him, green growth is no longer a matter of morality, but of economics. Renewable energies are now cheaper than fossil fuels. They create employment, do not pollute and provide countries with the amount of energy they need. Last week he joined several side events at the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

GGGI is an intergovernmental organisation that works with over 60 countries. It seeks commitments among governments and private companies to switch to green growth—economic growth that takes into account environmental sustainability.

The organisation, based in Seoul, South Korea, works mainly with governments that express an interest in sustainable growth. Its work does not directly depend on changes in administrations.

Under Rijsberman, GGGI has consulted with Colombia on their protection of the Amazon rainforest, the United Arab Emirates on how to diversify its economy, and more recently with New Zealand. Rijsberman is especially proud of the organisation’s work in Ethiopia and Rwanda, with its president Paul Kagame, who he considers a “champion of green growth”.

Rijsberman is not only very knowledgeable, he also calls his job “his passion”. When he describes GGGI’s presence worldwide, he jumps from Australia to Ethiopia, from South Korea to Mexico, and from Norway to the Philippines.

He talks slowly, like a teacher giving his first class, or a father trying to get his point through. And when he talks about GGGI’s achievements, he smiles in the affable way most Dutch people do. His excitement is justified: renewable energies are the present. And public opinion cares. Excerpts of the interview follow:

Director general of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) Dr. Frank Rijsberman outside the Office of the Natural Resources and Environmental Policy and Planning in Thailand Photo Credit: Sinsiri Tiwutanond/IPS

Inter Press Service (IPS): Why has green growth become relevant?

Frank Rijsberman (FR): A variety of countries are already convinced green growth is their only option for pollution and climate reasons. For example in Asia, air pollution is a strong driver of investors in green growth. In Seoul, everybody checks the air condition in the morning, because it is a real issue. We have to decide whether we are going to wear air masks or not. In the West, last summer we saw fires and heat waves. And in Africa, the average farmer is convinced the climate has changed."In the end there are gonna be more jobs with renewables than with coal." -- Director general of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) Dr. Frank Rijsberman.

I’ve been involved in climate change for a long time, and it used to be something we talked about that would happen in a 100 years. Then for our grandchildren. Then our children and then… it’s today.

Before, ministers of finance used to say they wanted first to develop and then they would care about the climate. Now, they also care about the quality of growth.

IPS: Has that international public opinion changed since United States president Donald Trump’s election?

FR: The truth is that the U.S. government was very influential in making the Paris Agreement exist in the first place. We have to thank them for that. They brought China to the table.

And after Trump was elected, the Chinese government did not back out, because solar and wind has become cheaper than coal. Wind energy prices have dropped by 66 percent and solar by 86 percent. In the last three years, the atmosphere has changed. There is a stronger belief that renewable energies are making a breakthrough.

Apart from the prices, the second big deal is batteries.Generally, you need a grid or a diesel generator to back solar and wind up. But instead of using diesel generators, now we can use batteries that store energy. Battery prices have also gone down by 80 precent. And over the next five years, batteries will be cheaper than the diesel backups. The investment recommendation we make is to buy batteries now, not diesel generators.

IPS: Where have renewable energies impacted the most?

FR: For example, in electricity production, we’ve seen a huge disruption. Most of the investments go to renewable energies. However, electricity is only 20 percent of energy use.

The other 80 percent is transportation and buildings. But I am confident that in some years, electric vehicles will be cheaper than normal fuel cars. These autonomous vehicles could reduce the number of vehicles in cities by three, which would reduce pollution, traffic, and costs.

IPS: The institute must also face challenges when promoting green growth. Is shifting investment patterns its biggest challenge?

FR: Yes. The hardest has been convincing Southeast Asian countries with fast-growing economies. They still invest in coal. Convincing those governments that solar and wind are cheaper remains the biggest challenge.

Sometimes we also find resistance in the utilities, companies that work with fossil fuels. We’ve had one government for which we did a plan for renewable energies, and then they told us they had already signed with fossil fuels. There are also countries where hotels want to put solars on their rooftops, but utilities say: “we will cut you off the grid.”

However, once the government agrees, it can take a short amount of time for them to transition to sustainable energies. In India it took two years. India had coal fired power plants. But as soon as the price of renewables decreased, the coal fired plants went down.

The example of Canberra (Australia) is also enlightening. They decided they wanted to be renewable by 2020. So, they put solars in schools, and they made it accessible so people could also put it on their homes. People got used to it and then they moved to utility-scale renewables.

IPS: Does this resistance in transitioning have to do with the loss of jobs?

FR: In the end there are gonna be more jobs with renewables than with coal. Trump talks about the job losses in coal, but he doesn’t talk about the new jobs with renewables. It’s true they may not be the same people, so you need some formal training. But that is normal. One industry dies and another is born.

IPS: You have been director general for two years, what have you achieved so far?

FR: GGGI has been strong in policy for a number of years. My predecessor saw there was a gap in developing bankable projects, and he started green investment finance services.

In 2017, we mobilised half a billion dollars in green and climate finance for the first time. I increased our goals to mobilise a couple billion dollars in our strategic planning. We raise it by investor commitments. Although our clients are governments, sometimes they can’t find investment themselves for renewable plans. We help find projects, we bring investors to the table, they sign a letter of intent, we hand it to the government and they decide over it.

IPS: And what do you want to accomplish in the next two years?

FR: We want to demonstrate that we can do it. Our goal for 2020 is to raise more than two and a half billion dollars in green and climate finance. And then convince more governments that this is crucial. Not only renewable energy, also waste management, pollution, and green jobs. We want to get more evidence that this works, and scale it to more countries. Our goal is to transform countries’ economies to green growth.

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By WAM
DUBAI, Sep 30 2018 (WAM)

The Ministry of Climate Change and Environment (MOCCAE) has conducted an overall assessment of climate adaptation in the health context in the UAE. Through surveys and a stakeholders’ workshop, MOCCAE outlined the direct and indirect climate-related health risks and the existing and possible actionable solutions for public health adaptation.

Officials from the Ministry of Health and Prevention (MOHAP), Department of Health – Abu Dhabi, Dubai Health Authority, as well as representatives from the private sector and academia attended the workshop and contributed their insights on the topic.

Fahed Al Hammadi, Acting Assistant Undersecretary of the Green Development and Climate Change Sector at MOCCAE, said, “We are already feeling the impacts of climate change in all aspects of our lives. Given the current projections, such impacts will continue to grow in intensity and frequency, and adaptation is the only viable response strategy.

“This assessment of climate-related health risks is the first brick in the wall to identify the current impacts of climate change on various sectors and come up with ways to adapt to these impacts. Such assessments will help us understand the bigger picture and act accordingly.”

For his part, Dr Hussein Abdul Rahman Al Rand, Assistant Undersecretary for Centers and Health Clinics, MOHAP, said, “We are pleased to join forces with the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment to confirm that the National Climate Adaptation Program is delivered as planned. It is crucial to take concrete action to mitigate and adapt to climate change impacts and build national capacities that can effectively tackle these impacts. In order to ensure a comprehensive overview, we need to capitalize on the research and experiments carried out by other nations as well as the data generated across the UAE.

“In this context, MOHAP has long worked on raising public awareness of the climate-related health risks and enhancing the health system across the country to ensure the UAE is well-poised to adapt to climate change. The recent assessment reveals the burden of climate-related diseases, which should be monitored and addressed. These include diseases associated with carbon pollution, such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, climate-related infectious diseases, malnutrition, and heat stress, which leads to reduced labor productivity and spiraling health costs.”

Health experts concluded that the direct and indirect impacts of climate change on human health in the UAE are primarily seen in the form of heat stress. This results in reduced labor productivity, particularly for outdoor laborers, and mortality or morbidity due to heat stroke.

They also noted that the multiple initiatives that have been carried out as part of environmental health and occupational safety policies are relevant – either directly or indirectly – to climate adaptation in the health sector. They highlighted the Ministerial Order No. 401 of 2015 that determines the afternoon working hours of laborers employed outdoors to reduce heat exhaustion and heat stress.

Another finding is that despite the existence of adaptation-related initiatives for climate risks, there is still a lot of room for more climate-focused adaptation policies and programs. Health experts proposed multiple actions to help address high and medium risks. Proposed actions include enhancing early warning systems and developing heat alert plans, especially for outdoor laborers during extreme heat events, and developing the capacity of clinics and health stations to recognize and respond to labor concerns on reduced productivity due to climate-related factors.

Furthermore, they recommended that more research needs to be undertaken on the effects of climate change on labor productivity, in addition to strengthening enforcement of existing initiatives such as the Safety in Heat and midday break programs. They also suggested enhancing monitoring and evaluation to objectively assess results, and mainstream climate change adaptation through reorienting existing programs on environmental health and occupational safety to better highlight their adaptation components.

To reduce climate change impacts and pave the way for green economic diversification, the UAE has adopted various policies at the federal and emirate levels to facilitate the transition from a hydrocarbon-dependent economy to a sustainable knowledge-based economy in line with the UAE Vision 2021.

The assessment findings correlate to those of the Leaders’ Roundtable: Climate Change and Public Health held on the sidelines of the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA 73). The roundtable touched on the non-communicable disease (NCD) dimension of the climate-health nexus, given that many greenhouse gas emission sources are key drivers of NCDs.

Dr. Thani bin Ahmed Al-Zeyoudi, Minister of Climate Change and Environment cohosted a roundtable, alongside Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Nikolai Astrup, Norwegian Minister of International Development, and Gina McCarthy, Professor of the Practice of Public Health in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE).

At the roundtable discussions, Dr Al Zeyoudi said: “It’s evident that our health and the infrastructure underpinning the health industry will be at increasing risk as climate change intensifies. That is why, the health sector is one of the first sectors we are addressing under the National Climate Adaptation Program launched in September 2017, along with energy, infrastructure and environment sectors. We are systematically assessing risks and identifying mitigation options.”

WAM/Hatem Mohamed

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SOURCE: TWITTER

By Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
Sep 29 2018 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

America has had a fairly inscrutable history. Haven to the oppressed in the European continent, its early settlers, while relishing the fruits of freedom, pretty much exterminated its indigenous inhabitants. At the same time, as a reaction to absolutist monarchies elsewhere in the world it created pluralist institutions. In this “New World” the Lord did not supposedly anoint Kings investing them divine rights, but imparted them directly to the people through the Constitution. While their leaders penned and pronounced praises to liberty (in the “Federalist Papers” written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, for instance), notions of equality were not extended to their black African slaves. While they were explicit in expressions of their new world coming to the aid of the old, their entry into the Great Wars of the twentieth century was actually effected only when their interests were directly threatened. They initiated the use of nuclear weapons of mass destruction in warfare, only to champion their elimination when others, particularly not of their ilk, sought to acquire them. While their intelligence agents relentlessly worked towards regime-changes in other countries, they themselves reacted adversely when others allegedly sought to do the same in theirs. So, how was it that America, such a bundle of contradictions, able to project itself as a beacon of morality on the international scene over such a sustained period of time?

The answer perhaps lies in what Americans have always excelled in: effective marketing. About 1775-76, Thomas Paine had published the “Common Sense”. The historian Gordon Wood saw it as “the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era”. It marshalled the arguments for the fight for liberty of the 13 American colonies against the British. The fact that the American Revolution almost coincided with the French counterpart helped. Indeed the French political scientist Viscount de Tocqueville in his two works, Democracy in America (in the 1830s) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) extolled American values. He viewed them as a healthy relationship between the market and the State. Soon America was being projected as the “City on the Shining Hill”, with a “manifest destiny” to expand territorially and ideologically. Eventually a political culture evolved that stressed America’s “exceptionalism”.

Doubtless American support to allies helped defeat German Nazism and Japanese imperial might. The establishment of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions on American soil aided the perception of America as the leader of the “free-world”. It saw itself charged with the responsibility of “containment”, a term coined by the diplomat George Kennan, of Soviet expansionism and Communism. When Karl Marx’s theories were turned on its head and instead of “capitalism” it was “communism” that collapsed due to its inner contradictions, America emerged as the unchallenged superpower. With it came a sense of hubris. Its ultimate evidence was the 2003 invasion of Iraq under President George Bush. President Bush understandably made no claims to higher enlightenment. However, his administration was moved by some who did. They were the Neo-conservatives or the “neo-cons”, people like Paul Wolfowitz, Charles Krauthammer, and Doughlas Feith. They were disciples of Professor Leo Strauss, the German-American thinker who was deeply influenced by the Classical Greek philosopher, Plato.

Plato believed that it is only a handful of individuals, who truly understood the essence of what is great and good. He called them “Philosopher Kings”. He lauded “empiricism” over “abstraction” and “shadow-learning”. This was characterised perhaps the world’s most famous apologue in philosophy, in his “allegory of the cave”. It is not just that new ideas have ancient roots. All “true history” is really “contemporary” as Benedetto Croce observed. Alas, ancient sources are also often distorted to justify current unsavoury acts. Even if the neo-cons were pushing their interpretation of Platonism, they were in contrast to the founding fathers who derived inspiration from the study of Constitutions by Plato’s student, Aristotle. And for the record, Aristotle had famously said “Amicus Plato sedmagisamicaveritas” “dear is Plato but dearer still is the truth”!

Fast forward to the present. The supposed leadership role of America came with a heavy price. America was made to play the very role that traditionally the founding fathers had been chary of: searching for monsters to destroy abroad. While they won the Cold War because of the implosion within the adversary camp, they either drew or lost many fights like Korea or Vietnam, or became mired in an unending conflict like Afghanistan. They were the strongest power in the world. But situation that meant little because their power derived from weapons that they could never use. Sometimes unfairly to the Americans, others fuelled their ego of leadership of the free world, in the words of the current President Donald Trump, ripped them off in trade and commerce! Newer powers were emerging. Some had acquired the dreaded nuclear-weapon retaliatory capacity. China was rising. Not just militarily, but also economically. In the contemporary digital world, it was catching up with America in Artificial Intelligence. It had the capacity to feed the machine more mass-data, and algorithms to improve products and services and invent new ones. A “Thucydides Syndrome” was in the making. The sage of that name had observed that when Athens grew strong there was great fear in Sparta. History is replete with rising powers challenging established ones.

Trump is the product of exhausted America. He represents the viewpoint that the so-called leadership role with its high-price tag is not worthwhile. To him, the United States should be like any other nation that should act only in pursuance of its narrow self-interest. Recently at the United Nations, he rejected globalism and embraced patriotism. Many, like the Europeans, may think patriotism delinked from multilateralism could lead to nationalism. In Europe in the past it has in turn resulted in war. But Trump thinks differently. And right now he is the President. This thinking may be in many ways germane to contemporary American ethos. Some may argue that the idea of an intellectual restraint to the proliferation of such predilections might be in order. So has the time come for the “containment” of America by others in an ironical reversal of history? Opinion will be divided .The Emperor, in this case represented by the power of America, may not be wearing the clothes as the pretentious monarch in the fairy tale, which the clever and deceitful tailor had claimed were too fine for the human eye to see, but it is only because now he has chosen not to.

Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury is a former foreign adviser to a caretaker government of Bangladesh and is currently Principal Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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By GGGI
Sep 28 2018 (GGGI)

Being a greenpreneur goes beyond being part of an international competition, being a greenpreneur goes beyond getting mentorships from the best experts in sustainability issues, entrepreneurship, finance, clean technologies; being a greenpreneur is a matter of attitude, of innovating, of generating a true change to local problems with global solutions, it is not a question of competing with the other teams, but of collaborating for the same purpose that is to generate green growth for a sustainable development and collaborate in the fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Greenpreneurs competition has allowed to connect 10 teams from different countries with international expertise, which has demonstrated the ability of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGI), Student Energy and the Youth Climate Lab to achieve a 10-week online program that allows that we can improve from the approach and identification of the problem to the business model and its final presentation. This is a great contribution, since startups and ideas from all over the world in different stages of consolidation have been able to grow thanks to the mentoring of experts in the field, at the same time breaking down the barriers of language and distance, as is the case with the team that I am part of which is GREENfluidics®, which represents Mexico in this competition.

In addition, the networking we have been able to achieve through the Greenpreneurs program has been valuable in our performance, as part of the personalized mentoring of our Greenpreneurs’ mentor Chuy Cepeda, which despite having a different area of ​​application but linked to the solution energetic that we propose, has collaborated with high value advice related to the presentation of a disruptive technology, since the challenge of communication is vital to demonstrate the value we add with our solution.

We also had the fortune to coincide with the representative of our country of the GGGI, Pablo Martínez, with whom we were able to discuss the action plans in which he is focused at this moment, related to the green growth of the nation, which gave us a general view of where we are going within our region, but also the opportunities that we have with the global GGGI connection. This type of meetings has allowed us to develop both communication and sales skills, as well as having another point of view outside of our comfort zone, showing the areas of opportunity that will strengthen us in the local market, thus having a closeness of support in the GGGI Mexico.

In this way we can mention that the experience of the Greenpreneurs is unique in the world, for all the value that it adds through its panel of mentors, experts in the subject and exercises for the development of the teams, for which it is an honor to be able to demonstrate in this competition what GREENfluidics is capable of achieving in the energy transition, not only of Mexico but of the world towards the use of new energies, where we want to go beyond the competition and impact on the lives of people.

Energy is everywhere, GREENfluidics #wemakeitflow

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By GGGI
Sep 28 2018 (GGGI)

The knowledge of some of the microorganisms with which we share the planet Earth has allowed us to have another perspective of the life, we have known how to take advantage of its characteristics to advance science and use them in technology.

Personally, I have fallen in love with some fascinating microorganisms called microalgae that seem to have superpowers, take advantage of solar radiation to feed themselves and adapt to any situation that life presents them as the Chloromonas reticulata that lives between low temperatures (8 ° to 14 ° C), high solar radiation and few nutrients or Isochrysis galbana that lives in high temperatures and is rich in lipid production, in other words they are so adaptable and flexible that they can be domesticated but careful, they have their physiological challenges, get control requires a 4.0 strategy, make them feel in optimal conditions with the minimum requirements to take full advantage, the amount of products that can be obtained from microalgae ranging from biofuels to food supplements, are rich in proteins and essential oils such as omega 9 and chlorophyll .

They generate components that the industry demands. Their ability to fix carbon dioxide makes them a powerful solution for the mitigation of greenhouse gases.All these skills make them worthy of being part of the future, I firmly believe that nature has the best designs that adapt evolutionarily to solve the most complex problems. What stops us from learning from nature? For this reason I want to continue learning from the microalgae, explore them, thoroughly know their strengths and weaknesses, their applications can be incomparable. I have studied Scenedesmus sp, I have seen them grow and change shape by the different ways of cultivation to which I submit them and they never stop surprising me.

The industry is recognizing the power of microalgae and demand is increasing, for example Buggy Power, a European company that recognizes that the future of nutrition lies in the oceans and bodies of water, they are interested in the nutritional and pharmaceutical value of microalgae, even in the energy industry are becoming popular. There is the case of BIQ algae house is “building with Bio-Intelligent Quotient” (BIQ) is the first algae powered building in the world, located in Hamburg, Germany; xtrae all the energy needed to generate electricity and heat from renewable sources. In addition to generating energy using the biomass of algae collected from its own facade.

GREENfluidics knows the potential of microalgae and trusts that the energy future lies in the combination of high-end technology with the adaptive abilities of microalgae, that’s why we have designed a bioenergetic system inspired by nature that mitigates the environmental impact of dioxide. carbon at the same time that electric power is decentralized. In a few words, it can not be denied that microalgae will be part of future bioenergetic 4.0

Being on trend is part of the new energies.

In the XXI century the use of fossil fuels still remains constant in many of the most developed countries. Only by the end of 2017 was it estimated that the global production of energy by fossil fuels increased by two percent!, according to the International Energy Agency. This is incredible, since at the critical point for climate change in which we find ourselves, it seems that carbon dioxide emissions are in the background, which is not cool.

However, despite continuing to use natural gas, oil, diesel, among others, I do not see myself proudly placing a hashtag in TW that says -My new #petrol car or my house is lit with #naturalgas-. It is well known that we are in the age of social networks, and that everything that is a trend we want to feel part of and in doing so, it produces well-being. But unconsciously we know that we do wrong by continuing to pollute and affect our planet, but we continue doing it because that is what our parents, grandparents and previous generations have done and it has worked.

It is time to make a change and get trendy, today’s are the new energies. As such, the term new energy refers to that which is generated from sources other than fossil fuels, which can create confusion with clean energies, however, they are associated, combining more than one type of clean energy will help to the generation of new energies.

Using new energy impacts beyond generating energy free of fossil fuels, the efficiency with which it is generated is sought to be greater, also that it can generate by-products for its use, such as biomass, oxygen, biofuels, among others. Not only will using new energy make you look like a person committed to the planet and reduce your expenses substantially, but also give a stylized touch where you apply, from houses or skyscrapers, to greenhouses or hotels. This type of energy is expected to reach even the most remote areas, where energy will allow human and economic development.

Some companies immersed in energy production have already joined this movement of new energies, including some multinational like Shell with its division of New Energies. Therefore, in GREENfluidics we have joined the change, and we want to contribute to the energy transition of the new energies, through bio-inspired technologies in nature that generate decentralized energy in a sustainable way.

We have witnessed how in communities of high poverty are marginalized by geographical areas of difficult access in which they are. So, the fashion to generate a change is not only in the cell phone, or in the construction of technological buildings, but promote change from the most affected areas such as poor communities to industries that generate a large amount of environmental pollution by dioxide of carbon. Let’s be promoters of green growth, where different social strata seek the same common good.

Let the new energies become a trend to create a real change in the population, in the economy and on the planet.

Energy is everywhere, GREENfluidics #wemakeitflow

Designing the future.

Even among the originality of man during his development and evolution there are designs inspired by the most natural for example the daggers were inspired by the shape of the claws of the big hunting cats. The human being has learned to observe and design from observation even to modify the errors that nature itself seems to forget.

Today is not different and tomorrow will be more noticeable than today. I mean that the past, the future and the present have a Constructional design, what does that mean? That adapt and evolve. This change is faithful to the Constructional Law generated in 1996 that states that for a finite system to be constant, it is necessary that its design be predictive.

Are there predictive designs? There are, because they have learned from the circumstances, for example, the branches and roots of the mangroves are designed to face the most aggressive wet seasons, capable of filtering and with very high leaves far from water reach or the prepared anatomy of the migratory birds, not all the time they are in the crossing of the migration even though they realize it for the first time these animals are prepared because lines of birds previous to theirs experienced it, adapted and evolved.

So must and can be the technology made by man. Ideally, systems in complex processes capable of learning from their current production states, to be finite systems need a fluidity of efficiency to be optimal.

Millennials: The generation that uses technology to combat climate change

In recent years, the concern due to the remarkable climatic changes that have occurred at a global level, the increasing impact due to natural disasters and the great impact that this has had on the economic and cultural development of societies, has prompted governments to work in global agendas to mitigate this problem (as is the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development), but above all to motivate new generations to take action to solve these major problems.

Millennials this generation that is criticized by many and respected by a few stands out for its impetus to get involved and have control in all processes that have an impact on their economy and lifestyle, almost nomadic lifestyle, that thanks to new technologies allows us to have control and communication of their activities anywhere in the world

Blockchain the chains that generate energy confidence

In the 90´s, this technology called blockchain arose, a development that would impact the world a short time later, changing the way in which transactions had been carried out so far, popularizing peer-to-peer transactions due to accessibility and feasibility. what they offer to users. Impact that energy transactions have reached.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading represents direct energy trading between peers, where energy from small-scalen Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) in dwellings, offices, factories, etc, is traded among local energy prosumers (regular consumar that are able generate and distribuite its own energy) and consumers.

Recently studies shown that P2P energy trading is able to improve the local balance of energy generation and consumption. Moreover, the increased diversity of generation and load profiles of peers is able to further facilitate the balance and bring control to people to create new energy networks. Providing millennials with the control they now seek to have over the generation of energy.

Technological control over new energies

Existing electrical energy systems were designed and built to accommodate large- scale generating plants, with demand traditionally considered as uncontrollable and inflexible, and with centrally controlled operation and management. Recently, there has been a revival of interest in connecting Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) to distribution networks, and microgeneration and flexible loads at the premises of end users. DERs suffer from the issues of uncertain availability due to varying weather conditions. Power networks are undergoing a fundamental transition, with traditionally passive consumers becoming ‘prosumers’.

A key question that remains unresolved is: how can we incentivize coordination between vast numbers of distributed energy resources, each with different owners and characteristics? Virtual power plants and peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading offer different sources of value to prosumers and the power network, and have been proposed as different potential structures for future prosumer electricity markets.

This addresses social, institutional and economic issues faced by top-down strategies for coordinating virtual power plants, while unlocking additional value for P2P energy trading.

The post The future is green and … microscopic! appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By GGGI
Sep 28 2018 (GGGI)

Back in December 2017, Jonathan was staying for a two-month community service in Sidomulyo, a village under the administration of Batu, a famous tourist city in East Java, Indonesia. Despite its status, Sidomulyo did not fit the description of typical third-world village. They had wide roads, the streets were clean, and also, numerous, well-maintained attraction parks. In fact, one could find hotels and villas, many of which were styled to the taste of affluent population of Surabaya, a metropolitan within two-hour drive range.  

Although tourism drove a significant part of the economy, most villagers grew flowers for a living. With such relatively developed economy, it was not surprising to see that the farms were beautifully arranged and well-maintained, with colorful chrysanthemums and roses here and there. Everything seemed great until Jonathan saw local farmers were used to do unthinkable things in their farms, one of which was burning empty pesticide bottles, along with other municipal waste.

At first, he thought it was accidental and directly covered his mouth and nose with his right hand, but then they flipped the bottles to complete the burning. Out of curiosity, he asked a farmer nearby, whether it was a custom in the whole village. The farmer nodded. Later in that week, he was less surprised to find two farmers were hanging out in the sun while smoking cigarettes on one hand, and diluting pesticides with the other.

As an emerging economy, Indonesia has a lot of problems, many of which seems urgent enough that lack of safety awareness is easily overlooked. For a foreigner just arriving in the country, this problem is observable on so many occasions. From the first time landing at Soekarno-Hatta, its main airport, one could witness the chaotic Jakarta traffic, where cars move around like motorcycles in developed economy and motorcycles like no other. In the streets, it is also not uncommon to find motorcycle riders going at 50 mph while not wearing a helmet. When visiting local middle-class houses, fire alarm is hardly ever found although the people use portable liquefied gas tank to cook daily.

As an agricultural economy, the number of farmers, although decreasing, is still quite high, yet sparsely distributed in remote areas, even separated by seas, considering its archipelagic nature. This makes local government initiative to promote occupational safety, even if there is one, would be ineffective. In the case of farmers in Sidomulyo, local government’s department of agriculture actually had had many socialization on this matter, yet farmers’ adoption was proven uncertain.

BUMDest, consisting of Albertus, Jonathan, Natali, and Yohanes, were privileged to access a world-class education at Department of Chemical Engineering, Universitas Gadjah Mada. The undergraduate program, accredited by Institution of Chemical Engineers in UK, included significant portion of occupational safety in its curricula. We are passionate to translate our knowledge in chemical process and safety for our community, specifically farmers. Our initiative was supported by long-standing tradition of our university to prioritize applied over theoretical research, aiming to empower underprivileged communities.

Mentored by Dr. Wiratni, who was recently featured in Business Insider as one of ‘The Most Powerful Female Engineers of 2018’, BUMDest developed an organic pesticide to tackle the forementioned safety issues. We acknowledge that changing farmers’ habits and tradition is still a long way to go, therefore we aim to first find a substitute for the toxic chemicals they handle. Our product, CountrySide is mainly composed of clove leaf oil and lemongrass oil. Per our market survey, the most wanted feature in a pesticide is rainfastness, or the ability to withstand being washed away by rain. This feature is more urgent in areas with high precipitation like Indonesia.

We named our pesticide, CountrySide, to revive the imagery of old-fashioned farming, the good old days when the land was green and toxic chemicals were nowhere to be found. After a prototype had been made, we had it tested for viscosity and effectivity. Two commercial pesticides, one for organic and one for synthetic, were used as benchmark. Laboratory test result showed that CountrySide was twice as viscous as the other two. We conducted the effectivity test independently, against Tenebrio molitor, a common pest in Indonesia, and showed that qualitatively, there was no significant difference between the performances of CountrySide against of the synthetic benchmark. The viscosity test was to prove that CountrySide would be more rain-resistant and the effectivity was an attempt to debunk the common myth that organic pesticide could never beat its synthetic counterpart.

Thanks to Greenpreneurs, we dared to approach our target customers to test whether our products would suit the market. According to local farmers, if farmers in an area consisting of farms with same crops were to use different pesticides, the discrepancy of effectivity between each pesticide would make pests more likely to congregate in a farm whose pesticide is the least deadly. Therefore, we need more detailed tests for CountrySide against multiple types of pests to conclude its feasibility for widespread commercial use. We have our fingers crossed to snatch this opportunity to create a positive impact in our beloved homeland through Greepreneurs. Wish us luck!

The post BUMDEST: Providing Your Better Pesticide appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By GGGI
Sep 28 2018 (GGGI)

Like many African countries (Benin, Cameroon, Togo, Nigeria …), Morroco has had a rapid increase in its urban population (over 65%), with high demand for garden produce, such as fruits and vegetables. Large quantities of chemical fertilizer and inputs are used by the horticulture sector each year. The distribution system remains very traditional and lacking in modern agricultural technology. Also, there are huge post-harvest losses and food waste (up to 40% for fruits and vegetables according to the FAO) despite the productivity declines, the high vulnerability of small producers and family farms to climate change.

This causes significant water and soil pollution, biodiversity, high GHG emissions, price spikes and high poverty. Huge total losses of good quality soils for agricultural production are recorded each year with the scarcity of water resources.

Food insecurity affects a large part of the population and the various health consequences of thousands of urban households are worrying.

Innovation in greentech and agroecology

To solve this challenge, we reconcile ICTs, the circular and solidarity economy, and the applied management.

Awarded Best World “Innovations for Agroecology” by FAO, Winner of the ICAF AWARD (Climate Initiatives) 2017 at COP23, and distinguished as one of the top 10 most advanced Agritech startups in Africa at the Presidential Summit in AGRF 2018, PREMIUM HORTUS is the African greentech for scaling agroecology to achieve the SDGs, specializing in the e-commerce of agroecological products, organic production and farmers support.

Available as a Web, Mobile platform, Big data, blockchains and Payment solutions, ” Premium Hortus ” allows you to subscribe, order, pay online, so as to get home-delivered fruits, vegetables, and organic products safely. In this way, users can control their consumption, reduce waste, donate or transfer food, and receive a food insurance credit. Waste is limited and recycled for organic composting, biogas, and for the cosmetics industry.

With our organic farms, farmers benefit from adequate technologies that facilitate their responsible production and adaptations to climate change. They have easy access to natural seeds, technical support (informations, pest management, control of rainfall, seeds, water control techniques, planning, biological processing, recycling, diversification, marketing, and green management.), knowledge and sharing of experiences. They can easily monitor the evolution of stocks remotely by phone or PC.

In line with the SDGs (1,2,4,5,6,8,12,13,14,15), PREMIUM HORTUS has real socio-economic, cultural and ecological impacts verified by several international experts with reports.

PREMIUM HORTUS strengthens the resilience of family farmers, increasing access for all to healthy foods, in a healthy environment. Many young and women family farmers can access technical support, optimize their agricultural productivity and reduce postharvest losses of up to 50 percent. They benefit from a short circuit, and market their small quantities of products more easily. Thus, the population can enjoy low-cost organic food, at steady prices, and improve their nutritional security.

PREMIUM HORTUS enhances professionalization, facilitates climate change adaptation, and empowers farmers from all backgrounds. Through responsible production and consumption, PREMIUM HORTUS reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and preserves the soil, water, biodiversity and health of thousands of African households.

PREMIUM HORTUS has been initiated in Benin since January 2016 and is in the internationalization phase. It has, according to the Bilan Carbone, a reduction of 46.67% GREENHOUSE GAS over a total of 1681 Kg / ha / year emitted. It promotes the Saving 31.12% of direct energy out of a total of 3088 Kwh / ha / year used for transportation, tractors, irrigation, and self-propelled in-line farming. Our innovation therefore has a direct energy reduction of 6727 KWh / year, reduction of crop losses and reduction of at least 40% of GHG emissions generated.

Our team of co-founders have complementary expertise in management, corporate communication, computer engineering, agronomy and nutrition sciences. We all know each other, we respect each other, accept our differences to innovate and impact together. We share the same values ​​of innovation, professionalism, responsibility, leadership, excellence and eco-citizenship.

GREENPENEURS Program, a real implementation support of PREMIUM HORTUS in MOROCCO

The GREENPRENEURS Program organized by GGGI, Youth Climate Lab and Student Energy, is very important for the implementation of PREMIUM HORTUS in Morocco. Laureate of the 1st GREENPRENEURS Program, ou team have benefited from various expertise and mentors that have allowed us to deepen the study of needs and market, to increase accessibility to our green innovation, to improve our financial strategy and fundraising. The various modules and experience sharing are very edifying for better team performance.

The perpetuation of GREENPRENEURS will certainly allow the development of the green economy in Africa and in the world.

Let’s work together for green growth !

Local agroecological practices and innovations can be scaled up to achieve the SDGs. PREMIUM HORTUS is a profitable, replicable Green Technology based on the principles of agroecology, Which can be supported by organizations, state and nonstate actors, and investors

We are available for a lasting partnership with you and do not hesitate to contact us.

Agriculture has developed with imperfections, but thanks to GGGI, Youth Climate Lab, Study Energy and You, it is possible to scale up acgroecology to achieve SDGs.

The post Use ICTs for Scaling up agroecology to achieve the SDGs: PREMIUM HORTUS, the African greentech for Agroecology in implementation in Morocco appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By GGGI
Sep 28 2018 (GGGI)

Many Ugandans are not familiar with the SDGs, and those that have heard of them picture a complex, international project meant only for those in the United Nations or government to implement. This was the case too for the youth we work with before they became engaged in our Waste to Energy Youth Project. It is our aim to change this lack of knowledge and to deliver action at the community level.

WEYE stands for Waste to Energy Youth Enterprise because the company produces carbonized fuel briquettes from agricultural waste materials, and municipal organic waste from households and food markets. This company is not the first to make briquettes, but what is unique is that we produce our briquettes from organic waste materials and we supply our products to institutions.

Institutions use 80% of firewood harvested in Uganda, and with our new institutional briquette stove technology using our quality briquettes, these institutions can now use briquettes, thus reducing demand for firewood and consequently reducing deforestation in Uganda. I feel it is my duty to do anything in my ability to promote affordable and clean energy access for all (SDG 7) and these institutions make up the majority share of Uganda that had no access to clean energy.

These institutions, including schools, universities, vocational institutions, hospitals and many more, lacked the appropriate stove technology to enable them to use clean cooking briquettes as an alternative to firewood.

Despite the presence of solar, hydro power and gas as alternative sources of cooking energy, fuel briquettes are the most affordable and efficient alternatives for these institutions at this point in time. The new stove and our briquettes enable institutions to transition from firewood to clean smokeless briquettes, reducing deforestation for firewood and the respiratory complications faced by cooks from burning firewood.

Our solution guarantees our clients a 35% reduction in cost of cooking fuel,  50% reduction in cooking time and most importantly a smoke free cooking environment for the cooking staff.

During the pilot study, the results from St. Kizito High School – the first school to adopt our technology – were amazing. The school registered an annual financial saving of over US$2500, a 50% reduction in cooking time and increased job satisfaction among the cooking staff due to the healthy, clean and smokeless cooking conditions.

Our project uses organic waste from farmers and food markets such as maize combs, banana peelings and many others, which were considered useless. We offer the farmers and waste collectors monetary value for this organic waste and give them a new avenue to generate income, boosting the agricultural and waste management sectors.

If this business is expanded, it has a potential to open up new entrepreneurial opportunities in organic waste collection and sorting for briquette production. Apart from the profit to the owner, with a minimum of five customers, this business has the potential of directly and indirectly employing over 40 individuals in waste collection, sorting, production, marketing, distribution and finance.

With a potential market of over 30,000 institutions, the company runs a training program to train youth and women with the skills in briquette making to take advantage of the government youth fund to start up their own briquette companies, because the market is too big for one company to satisfy. This 30,000 institution potential market has the potential to create over 100,000 new jobs for youth and women. Apart from the income generation and employment benefits, we also have the environment (forests and shrubs) preservation aspect.

In the greenprenuers program, we have been able to get expert advice and mentorship on how to this green business can be taken to the next level. Our highlights so far have been;  the connection to the GGGI team in Uganda to discuss more in local context, how to improve our product. The new raw material sourcing approaches from Sanyal Palash, a subject matter expert in the program.

Our Mentor Zeleke Nahom has been very instrumental in the development of our business plan and new strategies to approach institutions owned by government bodies and NGOs. Overall, I can gladly say that this program has provided our team with the required knowledge and expertise to take our solution to a new level,  the kind of knowledge that would have taken us 3 years of challenges to gain.

The project is mainly aimed to contribute to achieving SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), but also greatly contributes to SDG 8 (Decent work and Economic growth) by providing an alternative economic activity and source of income for youth. SDG 5 (Gender Equality) is a key focus because our training programs have women as a key target market, as well as youth. SDG 15 (Life on Land) and SDG 13 (Climate Action) are also addressed, by providing an alternative to wood fuel, thus saving forests and their inhabitants.

We all can affect SDG implementation on not just one but multiple goals if we start with what we have. By focusing on our communities and the solutions that lie within, we can achieve the SDGs.

The post Climate Action through commercialization of grass root waste to energy solutions appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A student walks by a board displaying names of freedom fighters. The New Digital Security Act 2018 makes speaking against any freedom fighter leader a punishable offence. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
HYDERBAD, Sep 28 2018 (IPS)

It has been six and half years since the killing of Bangladeshi journalists Meherun Runi and Sagar Sarwar in Dhaka. Runi, a senior reporter from the private TV channel ATN Bangla, and her husband Sarwar, news editor from Maasranga TV, were hacked to death at their home on Feb. 11, 2012.

Years later, with no official updates on the progress of the investigation, their families wait for justice as the fear of impunity looms large.

The atmosphere in Bangladesh’s journalism today is one of trepidation and caution.

It has witnessed a series of attacks against students and journalists in the capital city of Dhaka, followed by the passing of a cyber law that has come under scathing criticism.

The Digital Security Bill 2018, passed on Sept. 19 has been strongly criticised by journalists, who have called it a tool designed to gag the press and freedom of speech.

The draft bill had been actually introduced last year, and there had been strong demands for amending several provisions of the law. The government had publicly promised to consider the demands. However, on the advice of the law makers, the government decided to go ahead without any changes and passed it last week. IPS Journalists worldwide stand in solidarity for press freedom and join the Nobel Laureates and 17 eminent global citizens, and British MP Tulip Siddiq as they call for the immediate release of Shahidul Alam. IPS also calls for the release of journalists who have been detained in the course of duty across the globe, including those in the Congo, Turkey, and Myanmar.

IPS has noted with concern the increasingly repressive environment that our reporters are working in and call on governments to review their media laws and support press freedom. It is incredibly important for IPS that our reporters are safe as they do their work in holding governments and institutions to account.

One of the most worrying provisions of the law (section 43) is that it allows the police to arrest or search individuals without a warrant.

Other provisions of the law includes 14 years of imprisonment for anyone who commits any crime or assists anyone in committing crimes using a computer, digital device, computer network, digital network or any other electronic medium.

As expected, the new law has come under scathing criticism of the media.

“The act goes against the spirit of the Liberation War. Independent journalism will be under threat in the coming days. We thought the government would accept our [Sampadak Parishad’s] suggestions for the sake of independent journalism, freedom of expression and free thinking, but it did not,” said Naem Nizam, editor of Bengali news daily Bangladesh Pratidin, in a strongly-worded public statement.

The Editor’s Council, known as Shampadak Parishad, also was unanimous in labelling the law as a threat to press freedom and independent media in the country.

To protest against the law, the council has called all journalists and media bodies to join a human chain on Sept. 29 in Dhaka.

The legislation “would violate constitutional guarantees of freedom of the press, and would create extensive legal dangers for journalists in the normal course of carrying out their professional activities,” Steven Butler, the Asia programme coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said in a statement.

Interestingly, the new law was originally developed in response to the media’s demand for scrapping Section 57 of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act, 2006—a broad law against electronic communication.

Under Section 57, intentionally posting false, provocative, indecent or sensitive information on websites or any electronic platforms that was defamatory, and can disrupt the country’s law and order situation, or hurt religious sentiments, is a punishable offence, with a maximum penalty of 14 years imprisonment and a fine of USD120,000.

It was under this section 57 that Shahidul Alam, an award-winning independent photographer, was arrested.

Alam was arrested on Aug. 5 from his home in Dhaka and has been charged with inciting violence by making provocative statements in the media. He has been held without bail since the arrest, despite repeated appeals by the media, human rights groups and the international community for his release.

IPS contacted several local journalists and academics but everyone declined to comment on the issue of Alam’s arrest. However, last month, British MP Tulip Siddiq, and the niece of Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina, called on her aunt to release Alam saying the situation was “deeply distressing and should end immediately”.

Protestors demanded the unconditional release of Shahidul Alam, and for charges against him, and others held in similar circumstances, to be dropped. Courtesy: Salim Hasbini

Alam’s family organised a protest in New York on Sept. 27 to coincide with prime minister Hasina’s address to the United Nations General Assembly.

The protest was endorsed by human rights groups and journalist associations, rights activist Kerry Kennedy, actress/activist Sharon Stone, and attended by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others.

At the demonstration, Columbia University professor Gayatri Spivak pointed out, “What is really important for the state is that if one silences the creative artists and intellectuals, then the conscience of the state is killed because its the role of the creatives artists and intellectuals to make constructive criticism so that the state can be a real democracy.”

According to Meenakshi Ganguly, Asia director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Bangladesh government wants to show that no one who dares criticise or challenge its actions will be spared.

“Newspaper editors face being charged with criminal defamation and sedition. Journalists and broadcasters are routinely under pressure from the authorities to restrain criticism of the government,” Ganguly said.

“As a photographer, Alam documents the truth; his work and his voice matter now more than ever,” she said. 

In Bangladesh, the media has been demanding the scrapping of Section 57, explains Afroja Shoma, an assistant professor of Media and Mass Communication at American International University of Bangladesh.

“However, the Digital Security Act left this untouched and so this new law is nothing but ‘old wine in a new bottle,’” Shoma told IPS.

“Section 57, in the past, has been misused several times. The media wanted the government to scrap this. The government then brought this whole new law [the Digital Security Bill 2018]. But it has retained the same old provisions of the section 57. As a result, the law has created an atmosphere of fear among the journalists of the country,” said Shoma.

Digital security breeding insecurity

However, digital laws are not just threatening press freedom in Bangladesh. Several countries in south Asia have had similar punitive laws passed.

India had its own “Section 57” known as the Section 66A of the Information Technology Act 2000.

Section 66A in the act made provisions for “punishment for sending offensive messages through communication service” and included information shared via a “computer resource or a communication device” known to be “false, but for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will.”

In March 2015, the Supreme Court of India struck it down, calling it “open ended, undefined, and vague.”

However, of late, India has also seen a spate of vicious attacks on journalists. These include the murder of journalists Gauri Lankesh and Shujat Bukhari as well as online attacks on investigative journalist Rana Ayyub who authored the book Gujarat Files. No arrests have been made in any of these cases so far.

Nepal, a country not known for attacks on the press, has just passed a new law  that makes sharing confidential information an offence resulting in a prison sentence. The code criminalises recording and listening to conversations between two or more people without the consent of the persons involved, as well as disclosing private information without permission, including private information on public figures.

Under the law, a journalist could face fines of up to 30,000 rupees (USD270) and imprisonment of up to three years, according to the CPJ. The CPJ has released a statement asking the government to repeal or amend the law.

Badri Sigdel, Nepal’s National Press Union president, said in a recent press statement: “The NPU condemns the Act with provisions that restrict journalists to report, write and take photographs. Such restrictions are against the democratic norms and values; and indicate towards authoritarianism. The NPU demands immediate amendment in the unacceptable provisions of the law.”

Pakistan, which ranks 139 in the Press Freedom Index (India ranks 138, while Bangladesh and Nepal rank 146 and 106 respectively), has witnessed the killings of five journalists while working between May 1, 2017 to Apr. 1, 2018.

Also, according to a study by local media watchdog the Freedom Network there have been:

• 11 cases of attempted kidnapping or abduction,

• 39 illegal detention and arrest,

• 58 physical assault and vandalism,

• and 23 occurrences of verbal and written threats.

The country has just, however, drafted the Journalists Welfare and Protection Bill, 2017, which aims to ensure safety and protection of journalists. The draft, once adopted, will be the first in the region to provide physical protection, justice and financial assistance for all working journalists—both permanent and contractual.

• The Shrinking Space for Media Freedom in Uganda
• When Being ‘Offensive’ or ‘Morally Improper’ Online Carries an Indeterminate Jail Sentence in East Africa
• Social Media – the New Testing Ground for Sri Lanka’s Freedom

The post Impunity, Harsh Laws Trouble Journalists in South Asia as Protesters March on the U.N. For Release of Bangladeshi Journalist appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb took credit for bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Algiers in December 2007, an act that claimed the lives of 17 U.N. personnel. Credit: UN Photo / Evan Schneider

By Abe Radkin
NEW YORK, Sep 28 2018 (IPS)

With the rise of violent extremism worldwide has come the stereotyping of an entire religion. In many countries and across many borders, Muslims have been vilified for events they are just as outraged at.

Yet instead of working together to foster a common understanding and mutual respect, we have seen otherwise liberal countries shut their borders and suppress culture. At a time of extreme intolerance, it is increasingly important that we recognize the importance of working together toward shared global interests of peace and prosperity.

As an increasing number of Muslim-majority nations take a stand against extremism practiced in the name of their faith, people around the world are working across borders to promote cross-cultural understanding and tolerance.

At a time when so much of what we hear is about the ill in the world, we have a duty to celebrate the critical work that happens every day to ensure the “battle of ideas” in the global fight against extremism is not lost to those who preach violence rather than peace.

This is the work of the Global Hope Coalition, which shines a light on both the governments and the everyday heroes standing up to violence and intolerance in their countries and around the world—and those who are joining with them in the fight. At this year’s annual dinner they recognize those who have taken a stand against extremists invoking religion for the purposes of perpetrating terror.

Take for example Niger, a majority Muslim country, which is increasingly at the center of a vast struggle for power in Africa’s Sahel region. After the retreat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Niger has seen a massive uptick in extremist threats as the Sahel region has become an active theater for ISIS and jihadi terrorists.

Niger’s government under the leadership of President Mahamadou Issoufou has been an outspoken critic of violent extremism in the name of Islam and has advocated a tolerant and peaceful vision of the religion. The country has worked hard to build regional alliances against terrorist groups in the Sahel region.

At a time of great challenge, when many would retrench, Niger has worked to strengthen the rule of law and the country’s constitutional institutions, while respecting the separation of powers. Perhaps most heartening was the more than $23 billion from donor countries pledged to Niger at a two-day “Niger Renaissance Conference” in Paris in December 2017.

Niger is not alone.

Muslim-majority countries are standing up to extremists and proving the actions of a select few do not define an entire religion. But the global community’s response has been inadequate. Largely fueled by stereotypes created and driven by ISIS and al-Qaeda, Muslims have been demonized, attacked, and shut out of a number of otherwise tolerant nations.

Many global efforts to lift up anti-extremism efforts have been nebulously structured at best and ineffectual at worst. And crucially, some wealthier western countries have failed to be shining beacons of tolerance and prosperity whose principles they were founded upon and have instead hid behind thinly veiled xenophobia. All that while continuing to expect fealty from Muslim allies.

This cowardice is not the answer – in any part of the world. Instead of turning a blind eye to good faith efforts to stand up to common enemies, the global community must rally around them like they did for Niger in 2017.

That’s why governments and heads of state are only one piece of the equation. Equally important, but far less public, are the thousands upon thousands of individuals in towns and cities throughout the world working every day to stand up to extremism, fight intolerance, and work towards peace in their communities.

Just as the international community must rally around natural allies in this fight, so too must it uplift and encourage the everyday heroes and on-the-ground change makers – like, for instance, this year’s Global Hope Heroes Sherin Khankan and Omer Al-Turabi. Khankan, a female imam and daughter of a Syrian refugee, has led the creation of a women-led mosque in Copenhagen to promote a tolerant, peaceful Islam true to its original precepts.

Al-Turabi is a prominent Sudanese author and academic who has become a leading voice among younger generations in the Arab world seeking peace and a liberal future for their countries.

Both Khankan and Al-Turabi have faced tremendous obstacles to their efforts – yet both have been unwavering in their efforts to win the battle for hearts and minds. There are countless more like them, and that is why Global Hope’s work is so important. By providing resources and valuable organization and networking opportunities to heroes just like these, progress can – and will – take shape.

The UN General Assembly gives us an annual opportunity to reflect on what can be accomplished by thoughtful and meaningful multilateral action. This year, under existential threats to our way of life and a global order built on cooperation, the takeaway couldn’t be clearer: We must choose peace, and we must stand with those who fight for it.

The post Muslim Allies In the Fight Against Extremism appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Abe Radkin is International Coordinator of the Global Hope Coalition.

The post Muslim Allies In the Fight Against Extremism appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Bobby John is a New Delhi based physician and global health advocate.

By Bobby John, MD
NEW DELHI, Sep 28 2018 (IPS)

In the early months of 1993, there was frenetic activity within the Geneva headquartered WHO’s Communicable Diseases program, to get Tuberculosis designated as a Global Emergency.

While countries like India had instituted TB Control programs as early as 1962, and Tanzania in the late 1970’s had shown field level evidence of programmatic innovations like directly observed treatment would reduce TB related mortality, the global reality was things were not going too well as far as reducing incidence and mortality for this age-old disease.

Frighteningly, for the western world at least, the disease had made a dramatic comeback, showing up in a drug resistant avatar in New York between 1991-92.

Fast forward 25 years – it is 2018: Tagged the world largest TB burden country, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has committed to India eliminating TB by 2025; and at last, TB had a special UN High Level Meeting on September 27th.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Delhi End TB Summit, March 13, 2018

The intervening 25 years since the declaration of the “Global TB Emergency” has seen robust growth of national TB control programs. The WHO expanded the list of 22 high burden countries of the late 1990s to include many more countries and three different categories of burden.

India, Indonesia, and Nigeria remain hosts to a large proportion of the global TB burden and represent the best opportunities for making the largest impact to it. Though Brazil, South Africa, and China also have sizeable TB burdens, they have remarkably responsive TB control programs in place already.

The toolkit to combat TB has changed somewhat too. There is a growing awareness that old diagnostic tools will not help. Newer technologies, available but still not entirely affordable by lower income countries at scale, need to be deployed extensively.

Advances in information technologies are also reshaping the use of old tools like chest X Rays, digitizing and transmitting them to cloud based servers where they are analyzed and reported back in minutes, without waiting on radiologists.

There is growing understanding that in the battle against bacilli, there will be the need to prevent the emergence of resistance, and where already present, manage with appropriate drug regimens. This is expensive, but no longer optional, and will require the same collective bargaining power that institutions like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria brought to the fore to bring down anti-malarial drug prices in the mid 2000’s.

While the bio-medical toolkit to combat TB will change, and it will – with enough urgent support and resources directed towards research and development, the greatest change needs to be in focusing political capital to the elimination of this age-old disease.

Tuberculosis in the community, like the mycobacterium bacilli inside the human lung, is to be found where there is little chance of it being discovered and dislodged easily. In real terms, communities and individuals who are on the margins of society, geographically or socially, are most likely to be where the disease continues to find its long-term incubatory refuge.

Without adequate political capital to reach, diagnose and treat those at the social and geographical margins, even the best new toolkit and operational innovation to fight TB will fail. Which is why Prime Minister Modi’s public statement on March 13th this year at the Delhi EndTB Summit is both welcome, and necessary to be replicated at sub-national and local levels, and in every other country where TB currently takes a toll.

When a disease elimination program is politically led, resources are eventually found. The Global Polio Elimination Initiative over the past 20 years showed us that. Tuberculosis has that moment in 2018.

The technical and TB program community, ably marshalled by the Stop TB Partnership, needs to provide the required assurances to those whose careers are electorally determined, that TB is a winning proposition, both from a public health perspective and from the good that it does to restoring individual productivity.

It is estimated that a dollar invested on TB control in today’s terms returns over $43 in cumulative productivity gains. It is the technical and program implementers community, from the WHO at global, regional and national levels, national health programs, partners like the World Bank and the Global Fund, and the myriad civil society organizations and voluntary groups who need to provide robust encouragement to, and backstop, the commitments political leaders make to their communities.

Mycobacterium Tuberculosis bacilli are notoriously insidious growers, taking their own time to make dramatic, debilitating appearances. One hopes that the growth features of the bacilli is a metaphor for the global movement against TB –long in the making, but truly dramatic in the way things change to eliminate the epidemic.

The post A UN High-Level Meeting May See Hopes to End Tuberculosis appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Bobby John is a New Delhi based physician and global health advocate.

The post A UN High-Level Meeting May See Hopes to End Tuberculosis appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Uganda Police Force manhandle a journalist covering a demonstration in Kampala, Uganda. Courtesy: Wambi Michael

By Wambi Michael
KAMPALA, Sep 27 2018 (IPS)

Last month, a horrifying video circulated on social media in Uganda. It shows Reuters photographer, James Akena, surrounded by Uganda Peoples Defence Force soldiers who beat him as he raised his hands in the air in surrender. He was unarmed and held only his camera. 

Akena suffered deep cuts to his head and injuries on his hands, neck and fingers for which he had to be hospitalised. He is yet to resume work.

But a month after Akena’s torture, there is no evidence that the soldiers who assaulted him have been punished, despite the Ugandan army issuing a statement against the soldiers’ unprofessional conduct, saying orders had been issued for their arrest and punishment.

Uganda’s Chief of Defence Forces General David Muhoozi insisted in an interview with IPS that action was being taken against his soldiers.

“We don’t need anyone to remind us that we need to [hold] those who commit torture to account. Those ones who assaulted the journalist, we are going to take action. They have been apprehended. So it is within in our DNA to fight mischief,” Muhoozi told IPS.

Akena was photographing protests against the arrest and torture of popular musician turned politician Robert Kyangulanyi, popularly known as Bobi Wine. He had been in the process of taking photographs that would expose the brutal conduct of the army and the police while they dispersed demonstrating crowds.

President Yoweri Museveni a week later told members of parliament from his ruling National Resistance Movement party that his security had told him that Akena had been mistaken for a petty thief taking advantage of the demonstration.

Human Rights Network For Journalists – Uganda (HRNJ) executive director Robert Sempala told IPS that that the abuse of journalists has continued despite assurances from the army and Uganda Police Force. He said about 30 journalists have been beaten by the army between Aug. 20 and Sept. 22, 2018.

“They insist that they arrested those soldiers but the army has not disclosed their identities. So we are still waiting to see that they are punished or else we shall seek other remedies, including legal action,” Sempala said.

Maria Burnett, an associate director at Human Rights Watch in charge of East Africa, expressed doubt whether the arrest of those who tortured Akena would mean that journalists would not be beaten in the future. 

“Security forces have beaten journalists with limited repercussions for years in Uganda. Other government bodies then censor coverage of army-orchestrated violence. 

“Beating journalists serves two purposes: It scares some journalists from covering politically-sensitive events, and, at times, it prevents evidence of soldiers beating or even killing civilians from reaching the public,” Burnett said in a statement.

She said threatening and intimidating journalists curtailed the public’s access to information – information they could use to question the government’s policies.

“With more and more cameras readily available, beating or censoring the messenger isn’t feasible in the long term. It will only lead to more fodder for citizen journalists and more questions about why the government resorts to violence in the face of criticism,” observed Burnett.

Dr. Peter Mwesige, a media scholar and head of the African Centre For Media Excellence, said: “This is unacceptable. We call upon the government to rein in members of the armed forces who are now presiding over this frightening erosion of press freedom and free expression in Uganda. As we have said before, press freedom and freedom of expression are not just about the rights of journalists and the media to receive and disseminate information.”

He said stopping journalists from covering political protests and violence denied citizens access to information about what was going on in their country.

“No degree of imperfections in our media ranks can justify the wanton abuse that security forces have visited on journalists,” said Mwesige.

Sarah Bireete, the deputy executive director at the Centre for Constitutional Governance, told IPS that the violence against journalists was part of the shrinking civic space in Uganda. 

She said there were efforts to silence civil society groups who worked in the areas of governance and accountability.

“Such abuses also continue to extend to other groups such as journalists and activists that play a key role in holding governments and their bodies to account,” said Bireete.

The Ugandan government uses its national laws to bring charges against journalists, revoke broadcasting licenses without due process of law, and practice other forms of repression.

The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) has used ill-defined and unchecked powers to regulate the media. 

The UCC, for instance, issued on Sept. 19 a directive to radio and TV stations in Uganda restricting them from carrying live coverage of the return of Kyangulanyi to the country. The legislator was returning from the United States where he had gone for treatment after he had been tortured by the army. Most of the media outlets heeded to the directive.

The government has moved further to restrict press freedom by restricting the number of foreign correspondents in Uganda.

The Foreign Correspondent’s Association in Uganda (FCAU) on Sept. 12 issued a statement calling on the Uganda government to stop blocking journalists from accessing accreditation. 

It said at least 10 journalists wishing to report in Uganda had not been given government accreditation even after they had fulfilled all the requirements.

“Preventing international journalist from working in Uganda adds to a troubling recent pattern of intimidation and violence against journalists. Stopping a number of international media houses from reporting legally inside Uganda is another attempt to gag journalists,” read the statement. 

Section 29(1) of the Press and Journalists Act requires all foreign journalists who wish to report from Uganda to get accreditation from the Media Council of Uganda through the Uganda Media Centre. The journalists are required to pay non-refundable accreditation fees depending on their duration of stay in the country. 

IPS has learnt that a number of journalists have since returned home after failing to secure accreditation.

Uganda Media Centre director Ofwono Opondo told IPS that the government has not stopped the accreditation of foreign journalists but was reviewing the guidelines.

Magelah Peter Gwayaka, a human rights lawyer with Chapter Four, a non-profit dedicated to the protection of civil liberties and promotion of human rights, told IPS: “Not long ago we had a BBC reporter, Will Ross, who was deported. The implication is to force journalists to cow down, to stop demanding for accountability, to stop demanding for all those things that democracy brings about.”

“So if the army is going to stop demonstrators and it beats up journalists like we saw the other day, no civil society [can stand] up to say please can we account? Can we have these army men arrested?” Gwayaka said.

• When Being ‘Offensive’ or ‘Morally Improper’ Online Carries an Indeterminate Jail Sentence in East Africa
• Social Media – the New Testing Ground for Sri Lanka’s Freedom
• Confusion over U.S. Travel Ban Grounds Foreign Correspondents

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Houseboats line the Nile bank in Cairo. Some 85 million Egyptians depend on the Nile for water. According to the United Nations, Egypt is currently below the U.N.’s threshold of water poverty. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS.

By Maged Srour
ROME, Sep 27 2018 (IPS)

Local residents in Cairo are becoming concerned and discontent as water scarcity is reaching a critical point in the capital and the rest of the country.

Although not all areas of the country are affected in the same way, many Cairo residents say they don’t have water for large portions of the day. And some areas are affected more than most.

“Where my grandmother lives, in a central area and near a hospital, water is almost never missing, but where I live with my family in a more peripheral area, water is missing several times during the week if not during the day,” one local resident from Cairo, who did not want to be named, tells IPS.

According to the United Nations, Egypt is facing an annual water deficit of around seven billion cubic metres and the country could run out of water by 2025, when it is estimated that 1.8 billion people worldwide will live in absolute water scarcity.

The U.N. World Water Development report for 2018, warns that Egypt is currently below the U.N.’s threshold of water poverty, it is currently facing water scarcity (1,000 m3 per capita) and dramatically heading towards absolute water scarcity (500 m3 per capita).

“The water goes away all the time, we don’t know how to handle this issue. The other day I even opened the tap and the water that came out was stinking of sewer,” the Cairo resident adds.

As highlighted in the ‘Egyptian Journal of Aquatic Research’, problems affecting the Nile River’s flow are many and range from inefficient irrigation to water pollution. In addition, the uncontrolled dumping of anthropogenic waste from different drains located along the Nile River’s banks has significantly increased water contamination to a critical level, warns the research. 

The pollution of the river—considered the longest river in the world—is an issue that has been underestimated over the past few decades. “Most of the industries in Egypt have made little effort to meet Egyptian environmental laws for Nile protection, where, the Nile supplies about 65 percent of the industrial water needs and receives more than 57 percent of its effluents,” the study says. 

As so many people rely on the Nile for drinking, agricultural and municipal use, the water quality is of concern. 

The reality is that the Nile is being polluted by municipal and industrial waste, with many recorded incidents of leakage of wastewater and the release of chemical waste into the river. 

But Dr. Helmy Abouleish, president of SEKEM, an organisation that invests in biodynamic agriculture, says there is increasing awareness in the country about its water challenges.

“I can see the awareness towards the water insecurity challenge is now spreading in society more than before,” Abouleish tells IPS. “We all should be quite aware of the fact that whatever we are doing today, our children will pay for it in the future. None of the current resources will be available forever,” he adds.

SEKEM has converted 70 hectares of desert into a green and cultivated oasis north east of Cairo, which is now inhabited by a local community.  

These futuristic innovations is what Egypt needs more of, considering that water availability is progressively worsening in the country.

“In Egypt rainfall is limited to the coastal strip running parallel to the Mediterranean Sea and occurs mainly in the winter season,” Tommaso Abrate, a scientific officer in the Climate and Water Department at the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), tells IPS. 

“The amounts are low (80 to 280 mm per year), erratic and variable in space and time hence rainfall cannot be considered a reliable source of water.”  

“Climate models indicate that Egypt, especially the coastal region, will experience significant warming and consequent substantial drought by the end of the century, while rainfall is expected to show just a small decrease in annual means,” Abrate says. 

He warns that other factors like abstraction (removal of water from a source) and pollution, have major effects on water quality. 

Another concern is the fact that the country uses 85 percent of its water resources for agricultural activities—with 90 percent of this being used for conventional agriculture. 

But agricultural wastewater, which carries the residual of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, is drained back into the Nile River.

It is a vicious cycle that is worsening the quality and the sustainability of Egypt’s farmlands.

However, this year the Egyptian government and partners announced the allocation of about USD4 billion in investment to address the water shortage.

“Major efforts are being invested in the desalination of water from the Red Sea and the Mediterranean (for example the mega scale project in Ain Sokhna, which will purify 164,000 cubic litres per day). A regional centre unit will be established to follow water movement using the latest remote sensing techniques to combat this problem,” Abouleish adds.

SEKEM says that it is working to develop a “sustainable and self-sustaining water management system in all of Egypt.” 

“We foster several research projects that are developed by the students and the research team at Heliopolis University to realise this mission. For instance, researching water desalination models from salt water, recovery systems for water from the air as well as waste water recycling systems is now considered in our core focus,” says Abouleish. 

The U.N. agrees that in the next few years Egypt will face a water crisis of considerable size, which will require a more effective management of the available, scarce resources. This should involve a modernisation of the irrigation systems to avoid the current waste. 

If water scarcity is not addressed by those accountable, there is a risk that in the coming decades, a country of nearly 80 million people could run out of water. It could result in a humanitarian crisis that would probably destabilise the entire Mediterranean region with unpredictable consequences.  

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The post Water Scarcity and Poor Water Management Makes Life Difficult for Egyptians appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Anita Käppeli is European Outreach Director at the Center for Global Development (CGD) & Lee Robinson is a researcher at the Center for Global Development.

By Anita Käppeli and Lee Robinson
WASHINGTON DC, Sep 27 2018 (IPS)

We just published the Commitment to Development Index (CDI) 2018, which ranks 27 of the world’s richest countries on how well their policies help the more than five billion people living in poorer countries.

European countries dominate this year’s CDI, occupying the top 12 positions in the Index and with Sweden claiming the #1 spot. Here, we look at what these countries are doing particularly well in the past year to support the world’s poor, and where European leaders can still learn from others.

Each year, we look at policies beyond aid (only one of seven policy areas included in our analysis). We also measure policy efforts of rich countries in the areas of finance, technology, environment, trade, security and migration.

Within each of these seven components, countries are measured on how their domestic policies and actions support poor countries in their efforts to build prosperity, good governance, and security. We encourage you to explore the detailed results with our interactive tool below.

RELATED EXPERTS

Anita Käppeli
Director of Policy Outreach, Europe

Sweden shows biggest commitment to development
Sweden makes it to the top this year, a first since 2011, relegating its neighbors Denmark and Finland to second and joint-third (with Germany) respectively. Sweden’s top performance was driven by excellent scores on foreign aid quantity and quality, environment, and trade.

It also led the migration ranking, with a high share of refugees and strong policies to help integrate migrants. By accepting a relatively large share of migrants from poorer countries, Sweden contributes to poverty reduction and income redistribution as working abroad enables migrants to earn higher incomes and gain valuable skills, while at the same time filling gaps in the local labor market.

Migrants contribute to Sweden’s booming economy, which has the highest share of employment among EU-countries (Eurostat data, 2004-2017). However, as the recent election demonstrates, while Sweden’s integration policies are among the best of all the countries evaluated by the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), challenges remain and the country’s openness to migrants has resulted in a political backlash. It remains to be seen how this will affect the country’s migration policies moving forward.

Denmark comes second in this year’s CDI, performing very well on aid and leading on the security component. It demonstrates that even small countries can support peace and international security beyond their borders.

Denmark punches above its weight on the international stage by contributing disproportionately to international peacekeeping and sea lanes protection. Further, it fully supports the international security regime through ratification of all treaties assessed in the CDI and acts coherently by having very low arms exports to poor and undemocratic countries.

However, it could learn from its neighbor Sweden by putting in place a more open and welcoming migration policy. This also applies to Finland, which comes joint-third with performances above average on all components except migration.

Germany proves economic powers can also be development drivers
For the first time since the Center for Global Development started producing the CDI in 2003, a G7-country has made it to the top three. Germany comes joint third with Finland, demonstrating that even the largest economies in the world can put domestic policies in place that also benefit poorer countries.

The country’s top score was driven by its development-friendly policies on trade and migration. Germany ranked second in migration due to the acceptance of an exceptional number of migrants from poorer countries. It also came second on trade, with the most efficient trade logistics of all CDI countries and by being a leader on openness to services trade.

Still, it is penalized for its relatively large EU agricultural subsidies, and has room to learn from its G7-peers Canada (ranking 17th overall) and the United States (ranking 23rd overall) which each provide significantly smaller agricultural subsidies. Germany was held back from the top overall position by its moderate scores on aid and security policies.

European development policies are among the best
European countries take up the first 12 positions on the CDI, highlighting European leadership on development issues. France comes in seventh this year, being one of the few countries to increase its aid spending (by 0.05 percent to 0.43 percent of gross national income [GNI]).

This development conforms with President Macron’s pledge to increase ODA-spending to 0.55 percent/GNI by 2022, which he renewed this past August. While France still has room for improvement on aid quality, it does particularly well on security and finance. Ranking third on the finance component, France demonstrates that a successful and powerful economy can at the same time be a transparent financial jurisdiction.

The United Kingdom, coming in eighth place, is the third G7 country in the top 10, scoring especially well on trade and security. The UK is one of the few countries meeting the international commitment of 0.7 percent of GNI spent on aid, but still ranks in the lower end of the table on migration and technology.

On the latter, it could learn from Portugal, ranking ninth overall and third on technology, with its heavy investments in Research and Development (R&D). The “Benelux” trio—Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg—complete the top 10.

The Netherlands and Luxembourg share position five and Belgium ranks 10th. All three countries have smart policy designs in place: Luxembourg tops the aid component; the Netherlands the trade component; and Belgium the finance component.

Australia and Japan: two countries on the rise
Australia and Japan are among the countries which have improved notably since the 2017 publication. Australia ranks 14th in this year’s CDI, with good migration policies and a top-three position in the trade ranking. Australia is a CDI leader in providing equal access to goods from developing countries.

It has the second-lowest income weighted tariff rate and the second-lowest agricultural subsidies. Its improvement by four positions from last year was propelled by improvements in its foreign aid policy. However, Australia lags on environment, having the highest greenhouse gas emissions of all 27 CDI-countries. By increasing its gasoline taxes, which are currently the second lowest after the United States,

Australia could take a simple step to help fighting climate change—an issue with a disproportionately damaging effect on people in poorer countries.

While it comes in 24th this year, it is worth noting that Japan rose 10 slots in this year’s trade ranking to 15th place. Japan scored well on measures of customs speed and trading infrastructure. And while Japan’s tariffs are high relative to other advanced economies, they are reduced for many lower income trading partners. More on how this year’s trade component and Japan’s results can be found here.

The CDI demonstrates how we all benefit from good policies.
In times of fading commitment to multilateralism and the threat of increasing protectionism, this year’s CDI findings demonstrate that all countries can do more to put coherent, development-friendly domestic policies in place. They also serve as a reminder that advanced economies’ policies across a wide range of sectors have a lasting impact on people in poorer countries and that their well-being is in everyone’s best interest.

Many European countries have recognised the benefits of mutual development, but with billions left in poverty worldwide, high inequality levels and insufficient provision of global public goods, there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

More trade, innovation, and investment, but also a reduction in damaging spill-overs of instability in other parts of the world—triggered by violence, conflict, and climate change—will benefit us all directly.

The post Europe Leads the Way in Development Index 2018 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Anita Käppeli is European Outreach Director at the Center for Global Development (CGD) & Lee Robinson is a researcher at the Center for Global Development.

The post Europe Leads the Way in Development Index 2018 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By WAM
NEW YORK, Sep 27 2018 (WAM)

Dr. Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, Minister of Climate Change and Environment, today confirmed that the UAE is proceeding with grants totalling US$34.5 million (AED126.7 million) to fund renewable energy projects in the Caribbean that are built to withstand Category-5 hurricanes and located for enhanced resilience. This amount builds on $15 million of projects announced last year as part of the UAE-Caribbean Renewable Energy under Reem bint Ibrahim Al Hashemy, Minister of State for International Cooperation.

The announcement was made at the second annual Bloomberg Global Business Forum, held on the sidelines of the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, USA, where Minister Al Zeyoudi was invited to speak in the climate segment with President Bill Clinton and Kristalina Georgieva, CEO of the World Bank.

Addressing the forum, Minister Al Zeyoudi said, “The UAE is honoured to have partnered with over 30 island countries since 2013 to implement renewable energy projects that reduce energy costs and create jobs. Today’s announcement on our partnership in the Caribbean builds on this legacy, simultaneously expanding our cooperation into climate resilience.”

“Hurricanes Irma and Maria were a wake-up call for us,” Minister Al Zeyoudi added. “We realised that the kind of projects we pursue had to change. As a result, we have implemented a resilience standard for all of our Caribbean projects that reflects the reality of climate vulnerability in the region. Inspired by this precedent, we are now preparing for global roll-out of a resilience standard across over $5 billion of annual aid from the UAE.”

The Minister described plans for 7 new projects in Belize, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, St Kitts and Nevis, and St Lucia. He also announced that the UAE had increased its allocation by 50% to the rebuilding of the Barbuda power system, devastated by Hurricane Irma, in order to relocate and strengthen its main plant, where a solar and battery solution will be installed.

The Minister additionally announced that the UAE will allocate $12 million for the next cycle of the fund, to be launched in January 2019 at the Assembly of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

In tandem with the Bloomberg Global Business Forum, Minister Al Zeyoudi also participated in the One Planet Summit organized by President Emmanuel Macron of France. The UAE is a core member of a sovereign wealth fund working group on carbon accounting, announced under the summit.

UAE foreign aid for renewable energy has reached nearly $1 billion since 2013. In addition to the UAE-Caribbean Renewable Energy Fund, the UAE notably has launched the US$50 million UAE-Pacific Partnership Fund, which has implemented projects in 11 Pacific island countries, and runs a $350 million soft loan facility with IRENA.

WAM/Hazem Hussein/Hatem Mohamed

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Two mothers and their children look to shore after arriving by boat to Mingkaman, Awerial County, Lakes State, South Sudan. In 2014 in less than a month close to 84,000 fleeing the fighting in Bor crossed the river Nile. South Sudan has been mired in civil conflict since December 2013. Some 2.8 million people, a majority of whom depend on livestock for their livelihoods, are now facing acute food and nutrition insecurity, according to FAO. Credit: Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 27 2018 (IPS)

Reversing years of progress, global hunger is on the rise once again and one of the culprits is clear: conflict.

A high-level side event during the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly brought together, U.N. officials, governments, and civil society to assess and recommend solutions to the pressing issue of conflict-based food insecurity. “The use of hunger as a weapon of war is a war crime. Yet, in some conflict settings, parties to conflict use siege tactics, weaponise starvation of civilians, or impede life-saving humanitarian supplies to reach those desperately in need." -- Action Against Hunger’s CEO Veronique Andrieux

“Conflict-related hunger is one of the most visible manifestations to human suffering emerging from war…this suffering is preventable and thus all the more tragic,” said United States’ Agency for International Development’s (USAID) administrator Mark Green.

According to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018, the number of hungry people increased to over 820 million in 2017 from approximately 804 million in 2016, levels unseen for almost a decade.

The Global Report on Food Crises found that almost 124 million people across 51 countries faced crisis-level food insecurity in 2017, 11 million more than the year before.

Conflict was identified as the key driver in 60 percent of those cases.

The report predicts that conflict and insecurity will continue to drive food crises around the world, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

Panellists during the “Breaking the Cycle Between Conflict and Hunger” side-event noted food insecurity is often a tell-tale sign of future potential conflict and can lead to further insecurity.

“Building resilience…is indeed fundamental for strengthening social cohesion, preventing conflict, and avoiding forced migration. Without that, there is no peace,” said Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. (FAO) director-general Jose Graziano da Silva.

World Food Programme’s executive director David Beasley echoed similar sentiments, stating: “If you don’t have food security, you’re not going to have any other security. So we have to address the fundamentals.”

In an effort to address conflict-based hunger and the worrisome reversal in progress, the U.N. Security Council for the first time recognised that armed conflict is closely linked to food insecurity and the risk of famine earlier this year.

The group unanimously adopted resolution 2417 condemning the use of starvation as a weapon of war and urged all parties to conflict to comply with international law and grand unimpeded humanitarian access.

While participants lauded the historic resolution, they also highlighted that it alone is not enough.

“Humanitarian action and technical solutions can mitigate the effects of food crises but we desperately need political solutions and we need to implement [resolution] 2417 if we are to reverse the shameful, upwards trajectory of hunger primarily resulting from conflict,” said Action Against Hunger’s CEO Veronique Andrieux.

In order to prevent food crises and thus conflicts from escalating, the international community must take a holistic, preventative approach and strengthen the humanitarian-development nexus.

Before the long-running war began, Syria faced a drought which caused a spike in prices and led to food shortages. Many theorise that it was these very conditions that set off the civil war in 2011. This is a picture dated August 2014 of the then rebel-held Aleppo city, Syria. The government has since taken control of the city. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

Beasley pointed to the case of Syria where a seven-year long conflict has destroyed agricultural infrastructure, local economies, and supply chains and has left over six million food-insecure.

“The cost for us to feed a Syrian in Syria was about 50 cents a day which is almost double the normal cost because it is a war zone. If that same Syrian was in Berlin, it would be euros per day,” he told attendees.

“It is a better investment if we address the root cause as opposed to reacting after the fact,” Beasley added.

Before the long-running war began, Syria faced a drought which caused a spike in prices and led to food shortages. Many theorise that it was these very conditions that set off the civil war in 2011.

“Early action response to early warning is critical. We cannot wait for the conflict to start. We know that it will start,” said Graziano da Silva.

And it is data that can help establish early detection and prevent such crises, Graziano da Silva along with the other panelists stressed.

The Global Network against Food Crises (GNFC), which publish the Global Report on Food Crises, brings together regional and national data and analysis to provide a comprehensive picture of food insecurity globally.

It was the GNFC that enabled agencies to mitigate food crises and avert famine in northern Nigeria and South Sudan.

Just prior to the side event, FAO and the European Commission partnered to boost resilience and tackle hunger by contributing over USD70 million.

Panelists stressed the importance of such partnerships in addressing and responding to the complex issue of conflict-based food insecurity.

“At the ground, when we work together, it’s not only that we do better…we are much more efficient,” Graziano da Silva said.

Andrieux highlighted the need to uphold respect for international humanitarian law and that the U.N. and member states must hold all parties to the conflict to account.

“The use of hunger as a weapon of war is a war crime. Yet, in some conflict settings, parties to conflict use siege tactics, weaponise starvation of civilians, or impede life-saving humanitarian supplies to reach those desperately in need,” she said.

“We believe this is failing humanity,” Andrieux added.

Green pointed to the conflict in South Sudan where fighters have blocked desperately needed humanitarian assistance and attacked aid workers.

The African nation was recently ranked the most dangerous for aid workers for the third consecutive year.

“All the parties to the conflict are culpable, all the parties to the conflict are guilty, and they have all failed themselves, their people, and humanity,” Green told attendees.

Though the task of tackling conflict-based hunger is not easy, the solutions are there. What is now required is commitment and collective action, panelists said.

“All of us working together with effective solutions—we can truly end world hunger,” Beasley said.

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• Recognising the Debilitating Nature Conflict Has on Food Security

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A mother and a child in Melghat district, an area in India with high rates of malnourishment. The government’s new POSHAN campaign aims to curb malnutrition by a significant margin by also using smartphones to collect relevant data. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
MAYURBHANJ DISTRICT, India, Sep 26 2018 (IPS)

Kanaklata Raula from Kaptipada village in India’s Mayurbhanj District is on duty 24×7. The 52-year-old community health worker from Odisha state rides a bicycle for hours each day, visiting community members who need nutrition and reproductive healthcare.

Raula’s main job is to ensure that the women and young children in her community are using the integrated free basic healthcare and nutrition services at the government-run community health and nutrition centre, locally known as Anganwadi.“Technology alone is not enough, we need to also reach the unreached population like the migrants who are too poor to afford a nutritious meal.” -- Laila Garda, the director of the KEM Hospital Research Centre in Pune city.

Raula monitors the health of all children under the age of six, checks their weight and their growth, ensures they are immunised and advises their mothers and other pregnant and nursing women on basic healthcare and nutrition. She then encourages them to regularly visit the Anganwadi.

But most important of all her duties, Raula is the record keeper of the community and notes, through numbers and statistics, the health of her patients. She then submits regular reports on the health of the community to the government.

“I am in charge of five villages. There are 300 families and more than 80 percent of them are poor tribal people. Without Anganwadi they will not be able to get proper nutrition for their children or necessary health supplements for themselves,” Raula, who received the best Anganwadi worker award in July by Plan India, the Indian arm of Plan International, tells IPS.

Life has gotten a little easier for Raula as the ministry of women and child development has decided to provide Anganwadi workers with smartphones or tablets with software especially designed to make their record-keeping and reporting easier.

India currently has the fourth-highest number of stunted people in the workforce in the world. Of these, 66 percent of  stunting is a result of childhood malnutrition, says a new World Bank report.

The recent National Family Health Survey 2015-2016 shows that while there is a declining trend in child stunting, the levels remain high at 38.4 percent in 2015/2016.

The survey noted increased levels of child wasting (where one’s weight is too low for their height); from 19.8 percent in 2005/2006 to 21 percent in 2015/2016. The country also has high levels of anaemia among children–58.4 percent of children under the age of six are anaemic.

To curb the alarming rate of malnutrition and stunting, India launched a new nutrition drive last November called Partnerships and Opportunities to Strengthen and Harmonise Action for Nutrition (POSHAN). With a total budget of nine billion rupees (USD126 million), the campaign has an ambitious goal: to reduce stunting, under-nutrition, anaemia and low birth weights by about two to three percent per annum.

According to information shared in national parliament by India’s minister of women and child development Maneka Gandhi, POSHAN is using:

• a mobile application that is made available to the community healthcare workers and is pre-loaded on mobile phones and,
• a six-tier monitoring dashboard for desktops.

IT for ground data

But how will smartphones be used by the Anganwadi workers while in the field?

Pramila Rani Brahma, the social welfare minister for Assam state, in north eastern India, explains that the phones will be loaded with software called the Common Application System or CAS, which was specially built for the POSHAN campaign and developed in collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Anganwadi workers will use the software to enter the details of their patients, including the number of children they see, their health updates, weight etc., and will send this report to headquarters.

Data on service delivery and its impact on nutrition outcomes will also be collected.

The desktop monitoring system will be used to monitor the delivery of services to children, pregnant women and lactating mothers. It will analyse the ground data and map the weight efficiency, height and nutrition status of children under five years.

“There are a total 11 registers which I have to regularly maintain. It [usually] takes many hours. I think it will save me a lot of time, which I can spend on serving the community better. I think it will also help send the information much more quickly to the higher officials,” Raula tells IPS.

According to Brahma, the 61,000-strong Anganwadi workers in Assam state have been struggling to submit their daily reports and even demanded computers or laptops.

There are currently nearly 1.3 million Anganwadi workers across India – all of whom will receive a simple, android data-enabled smartphone, according to the government. The phones will be distributed by the respective state governments, while the federal government and its ministry of women and child development will provide the funds.

“I was informed that, there are provisions to provide smartphones to the Anganwadi workers and several other states have already taken this initiative. We will provide the smartphones to the Anganwadi workers within a short period of time,” Brahma said to a group of journalists – which included IPS – at a state-organised workshop on nutrition in Guwahati, Assam.

An early success story

The IT-enabled nutrition campaign has already reaped some results, when it was first rolled out in June.

“We have given over 50,000 cellphones to Anganwadi workers through which they give us daily reports on how many children were provided food, how many were weighed, etc,” Gandhi said at press conference in New Delhi. “Until now, we have identified 12,000 children (as severely underweight) and we are following up on their status with the district officials,” she said.

Besides collecting numbers, Anganwadi workers are also using the smartphones for  surveying houses in their neighbourhoods and even sending photos of children eating a hot cooked meal at the Anganwadi.

An uphill task ahead

However, despite the new campaign, the road ahead for India to become malnutrition-neutral remains a difficult one.

One of the main reasons for this is that the country still has a huge population that continues to face acute hunger. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nation’s report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, 2018, some 159 million of the country’s 1.3 billion people are undernourished.

The Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition’s Food Sustainability Index (FSI) 2017 ranks 34 countries across three pillars: sustainable agriculture; nutritional challenges; and food loss and waste. India ranks close to bottom on the index at 33. According to the index India ranks 32 in the world in food sustainability and human development. The centre will be hosting an international forum on food and nutrition this week as a side event to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. One of the topics it will be discussing is food and migration.

Kavita, a 22 year old domestic worker in Hyderabad’s Uppal neighbourhood, presents a perfect example of this.

She is a migrant labourer from Mahbubnagar—a rural district some 150 km away from Hyderabad—and despite labouring for nearly 12 hours each day, she is unable to afford a nutritious meal for her and her 18-month old daughter.

Every day Kavita cooks a simple meal of rice and tomato chutney for her and her child. Both the mother and daughter appear underweight and malnourished with a yellowish tinge to their hair and dark circles under their eyes. But the mother says that she has no time to visit an Anganwadi.

“I start working at 5 am and finish only at 4 pm. I have to work seven days a week. If I take one holiday, my employers will fire me. I heard that at the Anganwadi they give dhal, curry and even eggs to children. But I can’t afford to leave work and take my child there,” she tells IPS.

There are millions of poor migrants and floating workers like Kavita across urban India who are not aware of the government facilities or the POSHAN campaign and continue to be left out of these initiatives. According to the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, there were 326 million internal migrants in the country as of 2007/2008.

Unless this huge population is covered, it will be difficult to achieve the targets of the POSHAN campaign, says Laila Garda, the director of the KEM Hospital Research Centre in Pune city, Maharashtra.

“Technology alone is not enough, we need to also reach the unreached population like the migrants who are too poor to afford a nutritious meal,” Garda, who has been working in community health for nearly two decades, tells IPS.

Chuna Ram, a community reporter and nutrition activist in Barmer, Rajastahan—one of the states in the country with the highest rate of malnutrition—says that government action must go beyond the rhetoric.

In Rajasthan, he says, the government has talked of providing smartphones  to the Anganwadi workers, but it has not happened yet.

“The general election is going to take place in 2019, so the government is making a lot of promises to woo the voters. But how much of these promises will actually be kept will decide how far the situation will change,” he tells IPS.

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The post India Uses Tech to Power its New Battle Against Malnutrition appeared first on Inter Press Service.

In Cameroon, a nutritionist assesses the health of a child: red indicates severe malnutrition. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Matthew L. Norman
NEW YORK, United States, Sep 26 2018 (IPS)

Each year as hundreds of billions of dollars are invested and critical decisions are made in agriculture, there is often little evidence or research to back these choices. 

According to experts, this lack of data “leads to less than optimal decisions, causing losses in productivity, lost agricultural income, and ultimately more hunger and poverty.”

“The data gaps in agriculture are widespread, affecting 800 million, or 78 percent of the world’s poorest. The problem is especially dire in Sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly half of countries have incomplete information about the [agriculture] sector and farmers,” Emily Hogue, a senior advisor with Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), explains to IPS.

“Assessments have shown that those countries are able to meet half or less of their basic data needs, largely due to a lack of [agriculture] surveys.”

Citing the foundational role data plays in directing development efforts and monitoring progress towards the U.N’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Gates Foundation, World Bank, FAO and others have launched a partnership aimed at investing in the agricultural data capabilities of low and middle-income countries. 

Dubbed the 50 x 2030 Initiative, the plan aims to invest USD 500 million in data gathering and analysis across 50 developing nations by 2030.

On Monday, the governments of Ghana, Kenya and Sierra Leone joined the coalition in hosting an event at the U.N. General Assembly to announce the initiative. Panellists representing several of the initiative’s key partners shared the impetus behind their involvement.

Rodger Voorhies, executive director for Global Growth and Opportunity at the Gates Foundation, noted that “almost no country has come out of poverty in an inclusive way without agricultural transformation being at the centre of it.” 

However, the panellists noted, the data needed to design evidence-based agricultural policy and target agricultural investments is severely deficient in many developing nations. This data gap represents a “critical obstacle to agricultural development,” according to Beth Dunford of USAID.

“There is no efficient path to meeting SDG2 or other [agriculture] development goals without improved agricultural data. Improved data will promote more effective targeting of interventions, improved national [agriculture] policies, and increased resources for the sector. As FAO is the organisation that is at the forefront of the activities to promote [agriculture] development and reduce hunger and malnutrition, we see filling in the agricultural data gap as a prerequisite to achieving agricultural development goals,” Hogue says. SDG2 is the goal to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.

The 50 x 2030 Initiative’s announcement comes in the wake of the FAO’s recent revelation that world hunger has risen for a third straight year, with 821 million people worldwide facing chronic food deprivation. 

Panellists emphasised that the data gap limits the ability of many nations to direct resources towards populations most in need, including smallholders affected by gender inequality or climate change. 

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) president Gilbert Houngbo, formerly the prime minister of Togo, observed that granular data could reveal regional, ethnic or gender disparities that are obscured by aggregate data. He recalled that during his time as Togo’s leader, progress in achieving inclusive poverty reduction was made more challenging because the country “did not have the disaggregated data to better adjust the implementation of our policies.”

In addition to driving better policy design and implementation, improved agricultural data will make it possible to better monitor progress in achieving the SDGs. 

Claire Melamed, CEO of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, noted that many countries lack any data for several of the most critical SDG indicators, making it impossible to set a baseline and monitor progress towards the goals.

José Graziano da Silva, director general of FAO, explained that the initiative would initially focus on scaling up existing surveys of farming households. The FAO’s AGRISurvey is expected to expand to nineteen nations by 2021, and Graziano da Silva noted that this initiative would allow it to eventually expand to 50 or more. The initiative will also build upon the World Bank’s Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (ISA), part of the Bank’s Living Standards and Measurement Study (LSMS).

“The goal of this initiative is to have 50 low and lower-middle income countries (LMICs) with strong national data systems that produce and use high-quality and timely agricultural data for evidence-based decision-making. The survey programs are the vehicle through which we will build capacities and strengthen the institutions in those systems. We also aim to include the private sector, especially agribusinesses, as users and supports of these data,” Hogue adds.

Over time the initiative should allow more countries to take advantage of advances in data gathering and analytics. Laura Tuck, vice president of Sustainable Development at the World Bank, suggested that new tools for “real-time, high-definition data” would lead to smarter policies that increase sustainable food production. Tuck also noted that the structure of the 50 x 2030 initiative would allow countries the autonomy to drive their own use of data.

*Additional reporting by Carmen Arroyo in New York.

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