Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Secretary-General António Guterres (centre) poses for a photo with youth participants of the high-level event on Youth2030, to launch the United Nations Youth Strategy and the Generation Unlimited Partnership organized by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). UN Photo / Mark Garten 2018

By International Organization for Migration
Sep 26 2018 (IOM)

There are an estimated 1.8 billion people aged 10–24 around the world; nearly 90 per cent of these young people live in developing countries. This is the largest generation of young people in history, and in recognition of its significance, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres made youth a priority from the onset of his mandate.

This commitment was manifested on 24 September 2018 when the Secretary-General presented Youth 2030: The United Nations Youth Strategy.

“With Youth 2030, I want the UN to become a leader in working with young people: in understanding their needs, in helping to put their ideas into action, in ensuring their views inform our processes.”

 
– UN Secretary-General António Guterres

The Strategy is aimed at guiding the entire United Nations (UN) system to empower young people to realize their full potential and stand up for their rights. It also aims to ensure youth engagement and participation in the implementation, review, and follow-up of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well as other relevant global agendas and frameworks.

“I have come to love myself for who I am, for who I was, and for who I hope to become. Now I urge you to speak yourself.” A member of the band BTS, also known as the Bangtan Boys, from the Republic of Korea, speaks at the Youth 2030 event. UN Photo: Mark Garten / 2018

Globally, there were an estimated 258 million international migrants in 2017. Of these international migrants, 14 per cent were under 20 years of age; this means 36 million young people are international migrants.

Whether on their own or with family, adolescents and youth are increasingly migrating in search of security, improved standards of living, education, and protection from discrimination and abuse.

Young migrants have a lot to offer. They fulfill many roles in their communities and societies; they are agents of social progress and development; they are crucial to peace-building and security; they are important contributors to political change; and they are crafters of new solutions.

Youth participants in Jordan discussing how to film the closing scene of a video they created. Photo: IOM 2017

During the President of the General Assembly’s 2018 Youth Dialogue and International Youth Day 2018, many of the youth representatives present were migrants, bringing important migrant voices to the debate and highlighting the need to engage and work with young people and recognize the different experiences that they have.

It is also noteworthy that young migrants are a large constituency whose lives will be impacted by implementation of the Global Compact for Migration, which is the first, intergovernmentally negotiated agreement to cover all dimensions of international migration in a holistic and comprehensive manner, and which will be adopted in Marrakesh, Morocco this December.

More generally, one of the greatest opportunities we have today to eradicate poverty and promote prosperity is to take advantage of the shifting demographics in the world. To do this, we need to pay attention to the situation of young people around the world.

Young boys and girls at school in Pohnpei, Micronesia. Photo: Muse Mohammed/ IOM 2017

While young people are key players when it comes to the future and health of our planet, they currently experience many challenges. For example, 61 million adolescents of lower secondary school age (about 12 to 14 years old) and 139 million youth of upper secondary school age (about 15 to 17 years old) are out of school.

Today, nearly 64 million young people are unemployed, and they are three times more likely than adults to be unemployed. Furthermore, young people are not at the centre of political decision making even though more than half of the world’s population is under 30 years old.

Poverty, displacement, conflict, climate change and restricted access to accessible, youth-friendly health services can further compound existing challenges or threats. Young women in particular continue to face multiple barriers when trying to enter the labour force, including unequal pay for work of equal value, and widespread violence and harassment in different contexts.

Syrian youth in Turkey get ready for class. Muse Mohammed / IOM 2016

The UN has set five priorities for the next 12 years in order to operationalize the UN Youth Strategy. The priorities of the strategy include amplifying youth voices for the promotion of a peaceful, just and sustainable world; supporting young people’s greater access to quality education and health services; supporting young people’s greater access to decent work and productive employment; protecting and promoting the rights of young people and supporting their civic and political engagement; and supporting young people as catalysts for Peace and Security & Humanitarian Action.

2018 is a landmark year for shaping the ways in which the international community will approach working with young people for years to come. When given the opportunity, they can effect positive change in several fields.

By recognizing this key demographic as the future leaders of tomorrow, the UN Youth Strategy will empower youth to recognize their potential and become the positive agents of change that the world needs. 2018 is also a landmark year for the international governance of migration.

We know that well-managed migration provides a net benefit to countries of origin and destination, as well as to migrants themselves. Migrants give more back to the societies that they have moved to, and those they have come from, than what they take out.

Central African Republic. Photo: Amanda Nero / IOM 2018

As a significant demographic within the migrant population, and one which has so far arguably been largely underserved, young migrants stand to gain significantly from both the implementation of the UN Youth Strategy and the adoption and subsequent implementation of the Global Compact for Migration.

Multiple factors have compounded the challenges faced by young people, and young people on the move in particular; these two historic documents can work to realize their true potential — especially in the many areas where the two initiatives see real overlap.

In turn, the world stands to gain much from young people and young migrants in particular.

The article was prepared by Amira Nassim, Migration Policy Officer at IOM’s Office to the United Nations.

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Secretary-General António Guterres (2nd right) delivers his remarks at the high-level meeting on the Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. Credit: UN Photo-Evan Schneider

By Paula Donovan
NEW YORK, Sep 26 2018 (IPS)

The UN’s youngest entity, UN Women, announced last week that a senior official, Ravi Karkara, had been found guilty of sexual transgressions against an unspecified number of men after a 15-month internal investigation. Newsweek reported that “at least” eight made accusations against him. Karkara’s punishment? Dismissal.

Several of his accusers have gone public, describing how Karkara sexually assaulted and harassed them. One accuser, Steve Lee, alleged that Karkara grabbed his genitals in a Montreal hotel room—clearly, a crime. In announcing the firing, the executive director of UN Women said that Karkara “cannot be protected by diplomatic immunity” and UN Women “stands ready to cooperate with any national authority that decides to investigate this matter.”

So: UN Women conducted a lengthy administrative investigation before announcing it was ready to cooperate with law enforcement.

While the UN has rights as an employer, employers’ rights must never take precedence over criminal matters. Shouldn’t the UN, as a matter of policy, inform victims that potential crimes can be reported to and handled immediately by law enforcement?

Shockingly, it does not. The United Nations has no uniform standard when criminal allegations of sexual abuse are lodged against its personnel. Our Code Blue Campaign’s work with victims in recent cases involving accused UN perpetrators—including Luiz Loures of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and Diego Palacios of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)—reveals that different parts of the UN deploy different policies and procedures in a thoroughly ad hoc and inconsistent manner. The only consistent feature is a systemic protection of alleged perpetrators at the expense of victims.

The United Nations is, of course, a distinctive institution that must be permitted to operate on the world stage as a fearless arbiter of international norms. Since the world body’s founding, UN officials have enjoyed “immunity”—codified protections from the willful actions of vengeful localities and governments.

Upon learning of alleged sexual violence by one of its non-military personnel, the United Nations can and should quickly make two determinations.

First, could the allegation in any way be construed as an activity the UN official was conducting as part of his official UN duties? According to a 1946 convention on the “privileges and immunities” of the UN, most UN officials—including Ravi Karkara and Diego Palacios—have “functional immunity,” which means they are only immune from legal process for “words and deeds” committed in service of their UN functions. The UN has affirmed the truism that sexual crimes can never be part of UN functions.

Second, is it possible that the alleged crime could have occurred? The UN has a reasonable responsibility to ascertain not if the incident happened, but whether it could have happened. The UN should determine whether the alleged offender, for example, was in the vicinity of the alleged incident.

Once the UN has determined that the alleged act could have occurred and the alleged perpetrator is not protected by UN immunity, the UN must stand aside and let the national authorities of the country where the alleged crime took place do their job. Law enforcement and legal systems must be allowed to investigate and, if necessary, prosecute. Such are the necessary protocols of justice worldwide.

It must be emphasized: This does not currently happen. In sexual abuse cases, the UN routinely misapplies immunity to hinder police investigations of its accused personnel.

Take the case of UNFPA’s Palacios. After a woman named Prashanti Tiwari filed a criminal sexual assault complaint against Palacios in early 2018, the UN asserted immunity. The police investigation stalled while the UN conducted a months-long internal investigation. Because Ms. Tiwari persisted, the police investigation is now resuming, but only haltingly and with continued UN interference.

The UN takes advantage of widespread, and wrongheaded, assumptions about UN immunity, which is imbued with an almost mystical power in the public mind. The notion that a UN official cannot be arrested is so deeply embedded that the Indian government had to ask the UN for official “clarification.” (It received such clarification in writing—from the accused, Diego Palacios, the senior UNFPA official in India—who declared himself immune.)

The UN fosters the misapprehension by shrouding its immunity in mystery. It consistently prevents any external oversight of its actions. It refuses to disclose basic information about cases, asserting “confidentiality” over the public’s and victims’ rights to information.

Our thorough examinations of cases reveal that UN policies and procedures are so deficient—so rife with conflicts of interest—that the 193 governments that govern the bureaucracy must undertake a radical overhaul and pay no more heed to avowals of “zero tolerance” from the Secretary-General.

As a necessary first step, UN Member States must temporarily impanel impartial experts—not employees—to oversee the UN’s responses to claims of sexual exploitation and abuse across all parts of the UN.

It would monitor every step taken in real time, from receipt of each claim, through fact-finding and investigation, to the final outcome. We submit that a “Temporary Independent Oversight Panel,” reporting directly to Member States, could be well placed to gauge the level of the organization’s problems and make expert recommendations on the UN bureaucracy’s policies and procedures.

The UN should not be making headlines for impeding law enforcement investigations of accused sexual predators within its own ranks. It should leave criminal justice where it belongs, in the hands of national authorities, and make headlines instead for solving the grave crises that are rending the planet.

The post It’s Not Complicated: UN Must Clarify Immunity appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Paula Donovan is Co-Director of AIDS-Free World and its Code Blue Campign

The post It’s Not Complicated: UN Must Clarify Immunity appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The majority of Cambodia’s exports to the European Union (EU), are textiles such as garments and shoes. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury
KUALA LUMPUR and SYDNEY , Sep 26 2018 (IPS)

Trade liberalization, a key dimension of recent globalization, has failed to promote broad structural transformation in developing countries and has instead contributed to increased worldwide inequality, a new United Nations report shows.

The Trade and Development Report 2018: Power, Platforms and the Free Trade Delusion (TDR 2018) suggests that the profits surge and growing concentration of large transnational corporations, have depressed labour’s global income share, worsening income inequality.

The UN report also finds that policies that helped China to successfully develop, diversify and upgrade are now being discouraged, if not blocked, by developed countries influenced by transnational corporations threatened by such policies.

Despite long-standing concerns in developing countries about the international trading system, heightened recent anxiety in developed countries has strengthened scepticism about the supposedly shared benefits of trade liberalization.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

More positive attitudes to trade liberalization will require more than seductive, but also deceptive slogans such as ‘freer trade lifts all boats’. Instead, a new momentum based on a more inclusive and developmental trade agenda is needed, reflecting the raison d’etre of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the TDR’s author.

Trade-induced structural change?
While the growing role of developing countries in international trade has been important for recent globalization, the ‘rise of the Rest’ – mainly developing countries or the ‘South’ – is a mainly East Asian story.

TDR 2018 shows that rapid export growth mainly came from the first-tier East Asian newly industrialized economies, and then China. Meanwhile, developed countries’ share of world exports declined, from nearly three-quarters of gross merchandise exports in 1986, to just over half in 2016. Export shares in most other developing countries remained constant or declined, except when commodity prices rose.

China stands out among the BRICS, whose share of world income soared from 5.4 per cent to 22.2 per cent during this period. Without China, the share of Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa in global output only rose from 3.7 per cent in 1990 to 7.4 per cent in 2016.

Anis Chowdhury

In 2016, East Asia accounted for about 70 per cent of all developing countries’ manufactured exports. Only East Asian developing economies have headquarters of leading transnational corporations. Of the world’s top 2,000 transnational corporations, transnational corporations’ share of profits rose from 7 per cent in 1995 to over 26 per cent in 2015.

More exports, less diversity
As developing countries increasingly rely on global market access, their exports have generally become less diverse. TDR 2018 associates these trends with spreading global value chains and the challenges of ‘catching up’ without a strong ‘developmental state’.

In fact, such value chains have long characterized commodity trade. Since 1995, 18 of the 27 developing countries with the relevant data had increased shares of extractive industries in export value added.

But, except for China, spreading global value chains have seen declining shares of domestic value added in gross exports. Except in East Asia, there is little evidence of ‘upgrading’ in these chains. While growing demand from China has stimulated growth in many developing countries in recent decades, it has not enhanced or diversified their export profiles.

Unfair trade
Size matters for corporate behaviour, both at home and abroad. Trade has been dominated by big firms, especially since the mid-1990s. Among exporting firms, the top percentile accounted for 60 per cent of exports, while an average of ten firms accounted for 40 per cent of exports.

Unsurprisingly, new entrants and smaller exporters have low survival rates, with three quarters giving up exports after two years, with developing country firms faring worse than their developed country counterparts.

Besides ‘hollowing out’ due to ‘offshoring’ from advanced economies, the income shares of low and medium skilled production workers in most developing country value chains besides China have been declining due to fabrication’s falling share of value added.

Size also matters for profitability, with the rapid profit growth of the top 2,000 firms depressing global labour income share. Worsening inequality attributed to trade is due to more profits from ‘intangible assets’, higher headquarters’ incomes, and cutting production costs.

Many big international firms engage in trade resulting in greater income flows to low-tax or no-tax jurisdictions. Payments for intellectual property have risen sharply in the last two decades in countries such as Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Transnational corporate incomes in such locations have been rising far more than where their products are made or sold.

Policy space
TDR 2018 concludes that the problem is not with trade per se, but rather with its management and regulation. Rhetoric about ‘win-win’ solutions typically obscures how benefits can be more broadly shared.

UNCTAD argues that South-South trade agreements are less susceptible to such abuses of corporate power and influence. In contrast, policy space has been increasingly constrained by typical free trade agreements, reflecting powerful corporate influences via opaque negotiations.

Such agreements augment corporate profits, especially through ‘non-trade’ provisions. Inter alia, such clauses enhance intellectual property rights, cross-border capital flows, investor-state dispute settlement procedures, and harmonization of regulatory standards.

The post New Trade Realities Cause Concern appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A Rohingya woman and her child at a refugee camp in Bangladesh. Credit: Kamrul Hasan/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 26 2018 (IPS)

Over one year ago, Bangladesh opened its doors in response to what is now the world’s fastest growing refugee crisis. But questions still remain on how to rehabilitate the steadily growing population. 

After a military crackdown on suspected terrorists in August 2017, over 700,000 Rohingya fled from their homes in Rakhine State, Myanmar to Bangladesh, bringing with them stories of the horrors they have experienced.

The United Nations described the military offensive as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and a recent fact-finding mission called for the investigation and prosecution of top officials from Myanmar’s military for possible crimes of genocide.

However, recurring cycles of violence can be traced back to 1978 and now 1.3 million Rohingya reside in Bangladesh, leaving the small South Asian nation straining for resources to provide to grief-stricken refugees and overcrowded camps.

So far, only one third of the humanitarian appeal for refugees and local host communities have been met and still many challenges remain from environmental stress to trafficking to the lack of shelters.

Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was in Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential people of 2018, has been lauded for her humanitarian gesture and her government’s work in addressing the crisis.

Many international and national organizations are working to support the Rohingya refugees. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) in particular and its head William Lacy Swing have worked relentlessly to not only provide support to the refugees but also to find a lasting solution to the crisis. Swing has worked closely with the prime minister and her government and engaged with the many parties involved to bring about an end to the tragedy.

In recognition of his untiring efforts, Inter Press Service (IPS) is honouring Swing with the Person of the Year Award at an event to be held at the U.N. headquarters on Sept. 27. The prime minster will receive the IPS U.N. North America’s Humanitarian Award for her decision to give shelter to the over one million Rohingya refugees who were driven out of their homes, tortured, burnt, raped and left stateless and hopeless.

Ahead of the Hasina’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly, which is expected to focus on the Rohingya crisis and call for international action to resolve the crisis, IPS spoke to ambassador Masud Bin Momen, permanent representative of Bangladesh to the U.N.about the ongoing challenges, support, and future action plans.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Inter Press Service (IPS): Could you talk about the situation in Bangladesh—are refugees still arriving? What conditions are Rohingya refugees arriving in and what conditions are they seeing and living with in Bangladesh?

Masud Bin Momen (MBM): The situation in Cox’s Bazar is terrible. Having to shelter more than 700,000 Rohingyas from Myanmar’s Rakhine state, which is the fastest-growing crisis of its kind in the world, and provide them with humanitarian support is an onerous responsibility. It was the bold decision of our honourable prime minister to take up such a huge responsibility responding to humanity’s call. It takes a lot of courage and magnanimity of heart to make such a politically sensitive decision.

And the influx of Rohingyas has not stopped. It is continuing although in much smaller numbers. The freshly-arrived Rohingyas are still giving a grim picture of the ground situation in the Rakhine state. They are telling us about insecurity, threat, persecution, hunger, lack of livelihood opportunities, which is forcing them to leave Myanmar.

IPS: What has the government been doing as of late with regards to supporting Rohingya refugees there now? What have been some of the challenges to support these refugees?

MBM: The camp conditions in Cox’s Bazar may not be perfect and surely, one would understand how difficult it is for a developing country to cater to the humanitarian needs of such a huge population. But our government is trying its best to further improve the camp conditions to ensure basic necessities of the Rohingyas.

The challenges are manifold, I would mention only a few. Providing them with the basic amenities has been the biggest challenge.

For firewood, the Rohingyas have destroyed the forest and vegetation around the camps creating serious threat to the ecology of the area. The shelters that they have built on the slope of the hills are vulnerable to landslide during the monsoon.

For livelihood they are competing with the locals. This is reducing employment opportunities of the local population thus creating concern among the host communities. Their presence is affecting the local law and order situation. The possibility of radicalisation looms large. As their stay lingers, there is the possibility of mingling with the local population which could make their repatriation more difficult.

A Rohingya girl proudly holds up her drawing at a UNICEF school at Balukhali camp, Bangladesh. Credit: Farid Ahmed/IPS

IPS: Could you talk about the controversies surrounding repatriation? Why has it been stalled, and are conditions favourable or safe for Rohingya refugees to go back to Myanmar right now? 

MBM: Although Rohingyas want to return to their homes in Rakhine they would not return to Myanmar until and unless the ground condition in the Rakhine state is conducive for their return. This is the singular impediment to return. Improving ground conditions is entirely Myanmar’s responsibility. Since the ground condition is not yet conducive, the Rohingyas are not signing the declaration for voluntary return and hence repatriation is being delayed.

IPS: If refugees cannot return to Myanmar yet, what does Bangladesh plan to do with regards to support? Are there future actions planned to enhance camps and living conditions?

MBM: If they do not return in the foreseeable future we perhaps have no other option but to continue to give them refuge. We would not send them back against their will. As our prime minister said, we would share our meals with them (Rohingyas). There cannot be a more poignant message of our goodwill to the Rohingyas. Our government is relentlessly working to improve the camps and the living conditions therein. We are also developing an island for relocation of some of the Rohingyas.

IPS: What are your thoughts to the criticism that the island which you mentioned is not safe to live, particularly due to violent weather and high risk of floods? 

MBM: This is an entirely wrong perception. Keeping the entire Rohingya population in a geo-politically sensitive place like Cox’s Bazar is not feasible at all. Cox’s Bazar simply does not have the physical capacity or the infrastructure to sustain such a huge Rohingya population. So, they have to be relocated and the island you are talking about is one such place for possible relocation.

Initially about 100,000 Rohingyas are planned to be relocated. The criticism that you have referred to is baseless coming from ill-informed quarters. Our government is working hard to make the island livable with self-sustaining livelihood options. And until it is made entirely livable, Rohingyas are not going to be relocated there.

IPS: What are your thoughts on the International Criminal Court (ICC) launching a preliminary examination? 

MBM: We feel that this is a positive development in ensuring accountability of the perpetrators. If the ICC can come up with some concrete outcome, it might also serve as an important factor in building confidence among the Rohingyas which will facilitate their repatriation.

IPS: Do you have a response or message to Myanmar’s government regarding the crisis? And perhaps a message to the International community in addressing the situation? 

MBM: We would urge upon Myanmar to make ground conditions in the Rakhine state conducive for return and take back the Rohingyas as soon as possible. The comprehensive implementation of the Kofi Annan Commission’s recommendations would be able to address the root causes of the Rohingyarians.

We urge upon the international community is to take custodianship of the bilateral arrangements for return that Bangladesh and Myanmar have signed and impress upon Myanmar to take back the Rohingyas.

*Interview has been edited for length and clarity

Related Articles

• “We Should Not Wait” — Action Needed on Myanmar
• Damning U.N. Report Outlines Crimes Against Rohingya As Children Suffer from Trauma One Year Later
• Fate of Rohingya Refugees Discussed by IOM Chief and Bangladesh Prime Minister

The post Q&A: An Uncertain Future Ahead for Rohingya in Bangladesh appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

IPS Correspondent Tharanga Yakupitiyage talks to AMBASSADOR MASUD BIN MOMEN, permanent representative of Bangladesh to the U.N about the Rohingya' crisis.

The post Q&A: An Uncertain Future Ahead for Rohingya in Bangladesh appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By WAM
DUBAI, Sep 26 2018 (WAM)

Regional and international experts on sustainable built environments will come together at the 7th Annual Emirates Green Building Council, EmiratesGBC, Congress to discuss best practices and strategies to go beyond net zero carbon buildings, and explore the significance of net zero cities in ensuring the viability and liveability of our cities in the future.

Organised by EmiratesGBC, an independent forum aimed at conserving the environment by strengthening and promoting green building practices, the Congress will be held under the theme “Targeting Zero: A Vision for Future Cities”, on 9th October, 2018 at the Pullman Dubai Creek City Centre hotel.

The congress will commence with welcome addresses by Saeed Al Abbar, Chairman of EmiratesGBC; Eng. Aisha Al Abdooli, Director of Green Development, Ministry of Climate Change & Environment; and Ahmed Muhairbi, Secretary-General, Dubai Supreme Council of Energy. It will be moderated by Holley Chant, Executive Director of Corporate Sustainability, KEO International Consultants.

Saeed Al Abbar said, “The congress this year will drive the conversation forward and take a deep dive into the net zero building movement and explore how we can apply and rapidly expand the approach to our cities in the UAE, the region and around the world. The fast pace of urbanisation today is a fundamental challenge, and we are bringing both regional and international experts to the UAE to participate in this dialogue as the emphasis on sustainable buildings and cities becomes more crucial than ever. From the government to the public and private sectors, the UAE has shown its commitment and now we must boldly deliver on it as the global net zero emissions timeline approaches.”

The Annual EmiratesGBC Congress brings together international experts in diverse aspects of energy management and sustainable development to discuss strategies for promoting sustainable built environments for the cities of the future in line with UAE Vision 2021 and the objectives of the Paris COP21 Climate Agreement. The event aims to influence sustainable practices in the UAE’s built environment and to help identify key industry challenges and solutions as well as catalyse innovation in green building practices to create new models that support the country’s efforts to be more sustainable.

The discussions will focus on three sub-themes that are closely related to honouring and promoting the values associated with the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the Founding Father of the nation, as the UAE marks the Year of Zayed this year to commemorate his 100th birth anniversary. These are “Inspired Cities reflecting the Wisdom of Sheikh Zayed”, “Collaborative Cities focusing on the value of Respect” and “Holistic Cities mirroring the value of Sustainability” which cater to the needs of future generations.

WAM/Esraa Ismail/Nour Salman

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In Rwanda the banana disease BXW is detrimental to a crop and has far-reaching consequences not only for farmers but for the food and nutritional security of their families and those dependent on the crop as a source of food. Credit: Alejandro Arigón/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Sep 25 2018 (IPS)

When Telesphore Ruzigamanzi, a smallholder banana farmer from a remote village in Eastern Rwanda, discovered a peculiar yellowish hue on his crop before it started to dry up, he did not give it the due consideration it deserved.

“I was thinking that it was the unusually dry weather causing damage to my crop,” Ruzigamanzi, who lives in Rwimishinya, a remote village in Kayonza district in Eastern Rwanda, tells IPS.

But in fact, it was a bacterial disease.

Ruzigamanzi’s crop was infected with Banana Xanthomonas Wilt (BXW), a bacterial disease that affects all types of bananas and is known locally as Kirabiranya. "Our ongoing effort to develop, test, and deploy smart or normal mobile applications is a critical step towards cost-effective monitoring and control of the disease spread." -- Julius Adewopo, lead of the BXW project at IITA.

Here, in this East African nation, BXW is detrimental to a crop and has far-reaching consequences not only for farmers but for the food and nutritional security of their families and those dependent on the crop as a source of food.

Banana is an important crop in East and Central Africa, with a number of countries in the region being among the world’s top-10 producers, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database.

According to a household survey of districts in Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda, banana accounts for about 50 percent of the household diet in a third of Rwanda’s homes.

But the top factor affecting banana production in all three countries, according to the survey, was BXW.

Researchers have indicated that BXW can result in 100 percent loss of banana stands, if not properly controlled.

Complacency and lack of information contribute to spread of the disease

The BXW disease is not new to the country. It was first reported in 2002. Since then, there have been numerous, rigorous educational campaigns by agricultural authorities and other stakeholders, including non-governmental organisations.

Farmers in Ruzigamanzi’s region have been trained by a team of researchers from the Rwanda Agriculture Board and local agronomists about BXW. But Ruzigamanzi, a father of six, was one of the farmers missed by the awareness campaign and therefore lacked the knowledge to diagnose the disease.

Had he known what the disease was, and depending on its state of progress on the plant, Ruzigamanzi would have had to remove the symptomatic plants, cutting them at soil level immediately after first observation of the symptoms. If the infection is uncontrolled for a long time, he would have had to remove the entire plant from the root.

And it is what he ended up doing two weeks later when a visiting local agronomist came to look at the plant.

By then it was too late to save the banana stands and Ruzigamanzi had to uproot all the affected mats, including the rhizome and all its attached stems, the parent plant and its suckers.

Ruzigamanzi’s story is not unique. In fact, a great number of smallholder farmers in remote rural regions have been ignoring or are unaware of the symptoms of this bacterial banana infection. And it has increased the risk of spreading of the disease to new regions and of resurgence in areas where it had previously been under control. Several districts in eastern Rwanda have been affected by the disease in recent years.

An enumerator for the ICT4BXW project conducting a baseline assessment of Banana Xanthomonas Wilt (BXW), a bacterial disease, status in Muhanga district, Rwanda. Courtesy: Julius Adewopo/ International Institute of Tropical Agriculture

Using technology to strengthen rural farmers and control spread of BXW

Early 2018, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), in partnership with Bioversity International, the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies and the Rwanda Agriculture Board, commenced a collaborative effort to tackle the disease through the use of digital technology. IITA scientists are exploring alternative ways of engaging farmers in monitoring and collecting data about the disease. The institute is renowned for transforming African agriculture through science and innovations, and was recently announced as the Africa Food Prize winner for 2018.

The new three-year project (named ICT4BXW), which launched with a total investment of 1.2 million Euros from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, seeks to explore the use of mobile phones as tools to generate and exchange up-to-date knowledge and information about BXW.

The project builds on the increasing accessibility of mobile phones in Rwanda. According to data from the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority, this country’s mobile telephone penetration is currently estimated at 79 percent in a country of about 12 million people, with a large majority of the rural population currently owning mobile phones.

“Our ongoing effort to develop, test, and deploy smart or normal mobile applications is a critical step towards cost-effective monitoring and control of the disease spread,” says Julius Adewopo, who is leading the BXW project at IITA. He further explained that, “Banana farmers in Rwanda could be supported with innovations that leverages on the existing IT infrastructure and the rapidly increasing mobile phone penetration in the country.”

Central to the project is the citizen science approach, which means that local stakeholders, such as banana farmers and farmer extensionists (also called farmer promoters), play leading roles in collecting and submitting data on BXW presence, severity, and transmission. Moreover, stakeholders will participate in the development of the mobile application and platform, through which data and information will be exchanged.

About 70 farmer promoters from eight different districts in Northern, Western, Southern, and Eastern province will be trained to use the mobile phone application. They will participate in collecting and submitting data for the project—about incidence and severity of BXW in their village—via the platform. The project expects to reach up to 5,000 farmers through engagement with farmer promoters and mobile phones.

Further, data from the project will be translated into information for researchers, NGOs and policy makers to develop effective and efficient support systems. Similarly, data generated will feed into an early warning system that should inform farmers about disease outbreaks and the best management options available to them.

A real-time reporting system on the disease

While the existing National Banana Research Programme in Rwanda has long focused on five key areas of interventions with strategies used in the control or management of plant diseases, the proposed mobile-based solution is described as an innovative tool that it is easily scalable and flexible for application or integration with other information and communications technology (ICT) platforms or application interfaces.

“We observe limitations in the availability of reliable and up-to-date data and information about disease transmission patterns, severity of outbreaks, and effect of control measures,” Mariette McCampbell, a research fellow who studies ICT-enabled innovation and scaling on the ICT4BXW project, tells IPS. “We also have lack good socio-economic and socio-cultural data that could feed into farmer decision-making tools and an early warning system.”

The new reporting system intends to develop into an early warning system that will allow the Rwandan government to target efforts to mitigate the spread of BXW, it also aims to serve as a catalyst for partnerships among stakeholders to strengthen Banana production systems in the country.

“This [ICT] innovation could enable [near-]real-time assessment of the severity of the disease and support interventions for targeted control,” explains Adewopo.

The project team is currently working hard to co-develop the ICT platform, with farmer promoters and consultants. By the second quarter of 2019, tests with a pilot version of the platform will start in the eight districts where the project is active.

The project team have already identified a variety of scaling opportunities for a successful platform.“Problems with Banana Xanthomonas Wilt are not limited to Rwanda, neither is it the only crop disease that challenges farmers. Therefore, our long-term goal is to adapt the platform such that it can be scaled and used in other countries or for other diseases or other crops,” McCampbell explains.

According to Adewopo, “the vision of success is to co-develop and deploy a fully functional tool and platform, in alignment with the needs of target users and with keen focus on strengthening relevant institutions, such as the Rwanda Agricultural Board, to efficiently allocate resources for BXW control and prevention through democratised ICT-based extension targeting and delivery.”

There is increasing need for smarter and faster management of risks that have limited production in agricultural systems.

In recognition of BXW’s terminal threat to banana crops, there is no doubt that the use of ICT tools brings a new hope for banana farmers, and can equitably  empower them through improved extension/advisory access, irrespective of gender, age, or social status – as long as they have access to a mobile phone.

*Additional reporting by Nalisha Adams in Johannesburg

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IOM has deployed a fleet of 10 new, fully equipped ambulances to support emergency health services for Rohingya refugees and local residents in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Photo: IOM 2018

By International Organization for Migration
COX'S BAZAR, Bangladesh, Sep 25 2018 (IOM)

The UN Migration Agency (IOM) has deployed a fleet of ten new ambulances fitted with critical medical equipment to support emergency health services for Rohingya refugees and local host community residents in the Cox’s Bazar district of Bangladesh.

The vehicles, funded by the United Kingdom, Sweden, the United States and the European Union, contain specialist equipment to deliver high dependency first aid during complex emergency situations. This includes equipment to cope with head injuries, heart problems, pregnancy complications and cases requiring admission to intensive care.

“These ambulances are going to be at the front line of saving lives and providing better health care for local people and refugees in Cox’s Bazar,” said IOM Emergency Coordinator Manuel Pereira. “They not only increase our ability to move people swiftly and safely to wherever they can receive the best health care. The specialist medical equipment inside the vehicles also means that we can help prevent tragedies while on the move.”

IOM is the lead agency for medical referrals in the area and runs a 24-hour hotline to ensure patients from across the district can receive urgent transfer by ambulance to the most appropriate health facility.

The new ambulances began operating as an IOM community clinic in Kutapalong, Cox’s Bazar, serving refugee and local mothers, was ranked by Bangladesh’s Ministry of Health among the top five in the country for maternal and child health services. The clinic was named number one for such services out of more than 2,200 clinics in Bangladesh’s Chittagong division, which includes Cox’s Bazar.

There are now almost a million refugees living in Cox’s Bazar after violence in Myanmar forced over 700,000 people to flee to Bangladesh over the past year. The dramatic increase in population has resulted in a spike in demand for medical services.

Since the refugee crisis in Cox’s Bazar began in late August 2017, IOM medics have carried out over 600,000 consultations with patients from the refugee and local communities. Over that period IOM health staff have also supported over 9,000 referrals to secondary and tertiary medical facilities in the area.

IOM in Cox’s Bazar currently oversees the referral of over 200 patients each week from medical facilities run by different organisations in the refugee camps and surrounding towns and villages to facilities across the area, including the Cox’s Bazar Sadar District Hospital and Chittagong Medical College.

The launch of the new ambulances was welcomed by Commissioner of the Office of Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commission (RRRC) Mohamed Abul Kalam, who officiated at the inaugural event, which was also attended by representatives of Ministry of Health & Family Welfare.

As part of IOM’s commitment to continuing to improve access to health care in Cox’s Bazar for all those affected by the crisis, health experts are also working to support emergency response capacity for ambulance staff. This week they are being trained by UN Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS) specialists on first responder use of the Emergency Trauma Bag.

“This training will help us to further improve services and benefit the local community, the refugees and UN agencies working here in the Cox’s Bazar,” said IOM Emergency Health Programme Coordinator Dr. Andrew Mbala.

For more information please contact Fiona MacGregor at IOM Cox’s Bazar. Tel. +88 0 1733 335221, Email: fmacgregor@iom.int

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Members of the Caribbean Youth Environment Network (CEYN) clean debris from a river in Trinidad. GGGI has developed a new platform for young entrepreneurs with a flair for business development that is environmentally and socially sound, i.e. green growth business. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe , Sep 25 2018 (IPS)

Young people – a growing population segment in developing countries – are intrepid innovators and entrepreneurs who can help solve pressing climate and development challenges today.

Believing in the potential of the youth, the Seoul-based Global Green Growth Initiative (GGGI), in partnership with Student Energy and Youth Climate Lab, has developed a new platform for young entrepreneurs with a flair for business development that is environmentally and socially sound.

Greenpreneurs is designed to provide opportunities for young entrepreneurs to transform innovative ideas into green businesses in sustainable energy, water and sanitation, sustainable landscapes and green cities.

GGGI’s manager leading the Greenpreneurs Programme, Juhern Kim, says the institute has been working with developing countries for the last six years as an inter-governmental organisation and realised the need to work with young people in those countries as a new engine of green growth. Many young people have innovative ideas on green growth but do not have a proper ecosystem to convert them into business opportunities that create jobs.

“Based on my experience, I learned firsthand about the limitation of an aid-based development approach, and recognised the need of partnering with business as a solution provider of traditional development issues that we want to tackle through a green growth intervention,” Kim tells IPS. “There might be a role of us – solely dedicated to promoting green growth – as a facilitator or platform creator to serve the needs in developing countries, working with various stakeholders including investors.”

Excerpts of the interview follow:

GGGI’s manager leading the Greenpreneurs Programme, Juhern Kim, says the idea behind the programme was to ultimately develop locally-driven, locally-originated green businesses. Courtesy: Juhern Kim

Inter Press Service (IPS):What was the motivation behind the Greenpreneurs Programme?

Juhern Kim (JK):To promote young entrepreneurs developing green business and contributing to green growth. Young entrepreneurs in developing countries have a lack of access to the right technical training, network, mentorship, (strategy to access to) investment capital. They require coaching to convert their ideas into solid business plans.

But incubating young entrepreneurs is not a simple task, since the demand is varied depending on diverse stages of business development, e.g. idea stage–prototyping–testing–commercialisation. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy to help entrepreneurs, particularly for those who are committed to green growth. And we are not talking about Silicon Valley here, with abundant capital, intellectual and physical infrastructure, and advanced ecosystem. These types of platforms are not always installed in every country in the developing world. For young entrepreneurs in the developing world, [we have to] level the playing field.

IPS: Why the youth for greenpreneurship?

JK: I was working in Cambodia from 2011 to 2013 and realised that young people in rural areas were leaving their towns looking for new jobs. I wondered if rural areas are losing their young people who could look after the future of those villages, from economic, social, and environmental perspectives.

The idea behind promoting Greenpreneurs was to ultimately develop locally-driven, locally-originated green businesses. Ideas created by local people are authentic and ultimately sustainable if the business is taken care of with local ownership, since they know what they need, in terms of culture and practice. We thought, if that worked, that would provide green jobs for the youth.

IPS:Are green jobs possible in achieving the SDGs?

JK: Yes. Depending on the country situation and our intervention, we are focused mainly on goals #6, #7, #11, #13, #15 and #17 on climate change, energy, water and sanitation, land, agriculture, forestry and green cities. We want to grow the green economy sector and this can be associated with green finance and education and support social goals…the idea is to support and boost innovation in terms of green growth and provide some support. We believe ultimately these early stage investments will create jobs and, if successful, will ensure the hiring of local people and these kinds of businesses can be expanded.

IPS: Talk me through the business plan competition behind this initiative?

JK: Through our pilot programme this year, we have received 349 applications globally from youth startups. From these applicants we shortlisted 10 finalists and they have been working with us since early August through the 10-week web modules. We thought the online modules were ideal instead of developing a physical incubator, since we targeted youth entrepreneurs who do have enough support on the ground.

We started off with a webinar with GGGI’s director general Frank Rijsberman’s message to young entrepreneurs while providing content-based modules dealing with customer segmentation and problem-solving techniques to financial/impact modelling. We are now on Week 7 and up to Week 10 we will be help them organise their ideas to customise them for a final business pitch.

This will be a five-minute video pitch in which they will quantify social and environmental returns and show a robustness of the financial model to evaluate the proposal. We will then select three finalists who will come to Seoul in late October to be awarded the prize, during the side event of GGGI council.

IPS: Green growth is quite a fancy concept especially in the African context and in your experience do you see a lot of interest in this low carbon based development given that developing countries have technically argued they pollute less than developed countries but bear the brunt of the impact of climate change? 

JK: I would dare to say this is an old argument. The kind of radical confrontation is over. The situation is different now. The facts are there. Simply put, in 2016 solar power became cheaper in terms of clean energy – there is no reason to not pursue an economically beneficial and social sound renewable business. It is not just about limiting development for the sake of the environment, but more about thinking of ways of using the natural capital wisely in the growing economy.

One of the examples is bio-economy, which could be considered a subset of green growth based on biological resources. Agriculture and food production are part of the bio-economy as one of the easiest entry points for the development of innovative bio-economy opportunities – agriculture is the largest driver of global environmental change, and is most affected by these changes. Therefore, a transformation to a sustainable agriculture and food system is a must.

IPS: What next?

JK: We have tried to make this programme as flexible as possible, focusing on actual impacts on the ground nurturing promising entrepreneurs. We do not want to re-invent the wheel, as there are many players in entrepreneurship such as incubators and accelerators.

We will partner with them leveraging our comparative advantage of working directly with our partner governments. After this year’s competition – equipped with the seed capital for entrepreneurs hopefully from our new private sector partners – we hope to make a better global and national programme giving more opportunities to young people in developing countries dedicated to green growth with an aim of actual job creation.

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The post Q&A: Why Young and Smart Greenpreneurs are the Future of Sustainable Development appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

IPS correspondent Busani Bafana speaks to Global Green Growth Institute's Greenpreneurs programme manager Juhern Kim.

The post Q&A: Why Young and Smart Greenpreneurs are the Future of Sustainable Development appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Staff members assist in setting up flags at the North Delegates Lounge. Credit: UN Photo/Ariana Lindquist

By International Organization for Migration
Sep 25 2018 (IOM)

The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA)’s 73rd session will run from September 2018 to September 2019. Its high-level segment, which started on 24 September 2018, will be a key defining moment for the UN’s 193 Member States to engage in debates towards cooperative responses to many urgent and complex global issues of today, such as peace, gender equality and sustainable development.

Most importantly, this year we are closer than ever to a joint response for one of the greatest political challenges of our era: migration.

This session will see the adoption of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), the first intergovernmental agreement to cover all dimensions of international migration in a holistic and comprehensive manner.

With its universal membership the General Assembly, established in 1945, is the most representative international body and the pre-eminent deliberative, policy-making and representative organ of the UN. The Assembly’s decisions carry the weight of world’s opinions on the full spectrum of international political issues as expressed in resolutions, and largely affect the year-round work of the UN in its six main committees. In early October, the work of the 73rd UNGA’s main committees will kick off.

The General Assembly elected María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés as President of its seventy-third session. Ms. Garcés is congratulated by colleagues following her election. UN Photo/Loey Felipe

The opening of the 73rd UNGA is noteworthy for several reasons.

First, having a female President of the General Assembly (PGA) for only the fourth time and the first time in more than a decade.

In June 2018 María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility from Ecuador was elected as only the fourth woman in history to hold the PGA position of PGA. Garcés hopes she can contribute to the progress towards gender parity and be a positive influence for “all the women in the world who participate in politics today and who face political and media attacks marked by machismo and discrimination.” She is also the first woman from Latin America and the Caribbean to preside over the Assembly.

Garcés put ensuring the success of the intergovernmental conference to adopt the GCM at the top of her agenda. “We must keep our commitment with migrants all over the world. We are building an agreement and it is our responsibility to finalize our work,” she noted in her visionary statement for the election and as one of the seven key priorities listed in her speech at the opening of the 73rd UNGA.

In addition to the GCM, she will have the task of continuing the important work of the General Assembly on other issues, namely, supporting the UN reform process, implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), combatting climate change, furthering financing for development, as well as empowering women and girls, among others.

A delegate captures a photo of the General Assembly Hall during the statement by United States President Barack Obama at the general debate of the Assembly’s 67th session. UN Photo/Jennifer S Altman

Second, a continued theme of the 73rd General Debate to ensure the work of the UN remains focused on the people it was intended to serve.

The 73rd General Debate begins on 25 September 2018 for approximately nine days. 196 participants will take to the lectern, among them 95 Heads of State and 42 Heads of Government.

The President of the General Assembly has chosen the theme of General Debate as follows: “Making the United Nations relevant to all people: Global leadership and shared responsibilities for peaceful, equitable and sustainable societies”. This also represents continuity for the General Assembly itself, as “focusing on people” was the 72nd President Miroslav Lajčák’s theme. Lajčák expects the successor will continue with a number of things he launched, and stated that “ [as] with many good things accomplished, it is still a work in progress.”

IOM community health worker Sirichai Rathkhetbanpoot examines Wirasat Kirnapa, who has cancer and tuberculosis. IOM/Joe Lowry 2013

Third, global health is to take central stage, opening up the potential for IOM to further progress in advancing the migration health agenda.

Global health has received significant attention as governments have advanced preparations for three high-level meetings; two of them will take place during the 73rd session. The themes of the three meeting pointed to the accelerated progress of SDG 3, ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all.

The General Assembly’s first-ever high-level meeting on tuberculosis (TB) aims to accelerate efforts to end TB and reach all affected people with prevention and care, and will be convened on 26 September. During an interactive hearing in early June, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres highlighted that social drivers of the disease include poverty, inequality and increasing rates of migration. A draft political declaration was placed, mentioning the prioritization of high-risk groups as well as other people in vulnerable situations such as migrants, refugees and internally displaced people.

The following day, on 27 September, the General Assembly will convene the first comprehensive review of the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) since the adoption of the SDGs in 2015.

This session will also feature preparation of the high-level meeting on Universal Health Coverage (UHC) scheduled for 26 September 2019. Reaching UHC means that people and communities will receive health services without undergoing financial hardship. The inclusion of UHC as SDG target 3.8, including financial risk protection and access to quality healthcare, medicines and vaccines, cemented its position as a global health policy priority. UHC also reaffirmed the 2030 Agenda’s commitment to “leave no one behind”, which would only be possible through the inclusion of migrants.

As the 73rd session of the General Assembly gets underway, it is IOM’s hope that these discussions and Member State negotiations can highlight the many benefits that migrants bring to their new communities; can tackle the drivers or irregular and forced migration; and can move towards tangible results that bring change to society and to people’s lives.

The article was prepared by Xin Guo, Migration Policy Officer at IOM’s Office to the United Nations.

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By WAM
NEW YORK, Sep 25 2018 (WAM)

The United Arab Emirates has set nine priorities to it will seek to highlight during its participation in the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA 73), an event held amidst a high-profile presence of world heads of state, government leaders, and foreign ministers of UN member states.

The nine priorities are designed to ensure the country’s participation as a modern and developed state that boasts a privileged stature in the Middle East region and seeks to promote values of tolerance, inclusion, and sustainable development.

The nine priorities are designed to ensure the country's participation as a modern and developed state that boasts a privileged stature in the Middle East region and seeks to promote values of tolerance, inclusion, and sustainable development.

The country spares no efforts to establish peace and security in the Middle East in collaboration with other nations in the region that share its same moderate views and tolerant approach with the ultimate goal of standing up to the threats posed by terror groups and their sponsors. Empowering governments and state institutions to adopt modern policies based on pluralism, cultural diversity and respect for others’ religious beliefs feature high on the list of priorities adopted by the country.

The UAE regards UNGA 73 meetings as a significant platform to address key issues with close relevance to international cooperation and peace and sustainable and humanitarian development, where it will collaborate with international partners to achieve the following nine objectives: -First: Supporting and restoring regional peace in the Middle East through its partnership with the United Nations. In this respect, tolerance represents a fundamental value that the country deems as an important factor to ensure stability in the region, with the country’s leadership setting a model to be copied for building up peaceful societies capable of confronting subversive ideologies. The UAE seeks to share this fundamental value with the countries of the region and the entire world.

Second: Confronting terrorism and extremism. The UAE believes that regional stability would not be possible without uprooting terrorism and extremism, which the country regards as one of the most critical threats to international security. The UAE will continue to work with UN member states and various UN organisations to exchange best practices to counter terrorism and establish new partnerships in this regard.

Third: Promoting peace and diplomatic efforts in the Middle East, as the country exhibits full readiness to support all constructive efforts to reach peaceful settlement to all armed conflicts in the region, including those flaring in Libya, Palestine, Syria and Yemen, by adopting measures based on peaceful dialogue and confidence-building.

Fourth: Alleviating humanitarian suffering by providing developmental and humanitarian aid as the UAE believes that settlement of disputes is inseparably associated with ensuring sustainable development. Within this context., the OECD named the UAE as the world’s largest Official Development Aid donor relative to national income.

Fifth: Gender-Equality and women’s empowerment. The UAE continues to underline the importance of gender equality and promote women’s empowerment as an integral part of its policies- an approach which manifests itself in the country’s partnership with the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, known as UN Women. In this respect The UAE will continue to support the UN Secretary-Genera’ strategy on gender equality.

Sixth: Supporting youth’s integration into society, as the UAE strongly believes that addressing challenges is not possible without adopting a future-oriented approach based on delivering genuine partnerships with youth.

Seventh: Reforming the UN to empower it to fulfill its obligations, as the UAE believes that the world organisation is entrusted with a major role in confronting cross-border challenges, including the current unprecedented waves of displacement, chronic conflicts, urgent humanitarian needs during crises and the escalating role of non-state parties. The UAE will remain committed to supporting the UN; however it will in the same time endeavour to sustain reform efforts made to enhance the world organisation’s ability to address the current geopolitical status quo.

Eighth: Leading efforts to harness technologies with the ultimate goal of addressing major global challenges. This includes fostering cooperation in areas of digital space, future of corporate governance and dedicating science and innovation to realise SDGs.

Ninth: Addressing climate change and mitigating its impact. The UAE is diligently working to propel international efforts aimed at confronting climate change threats by supporting renewable energy investments and cultivating robust partnerships with other international parties concerned.

Finally, the UAE reaffirms its full support for the UN Secretary General in person and for the UN as an organisation to overcome current global challenges on the basis of preventing armed disputes, promoting political mediation efforts to current crises, and enforcing and respecting international law, specially with regards to complying to Security Council resolutions. In this respect, the UAE affirms that collective compliance to UN Charter and multilateral diplomacy is the basis of our joint destiny and stability.

Hatem Mohamed

WAM/Hassan Bashir

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Investments in technology solutions to social challenges in emerging urban centers have the potential to improve the lives of 2 billion people and generate up to $2 trillion in revenue by 2022 according to research released by Arm and UNICEF.

By Henrietta Fore and Simon Segars
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 25 2018 (IPS)

Rose lives in Nairobi. Getting safe, reliable drinking water for her six daughters in the slum where they live used to involve risking disease from an illegally tapped water supply.

But a year ago, a metered water pump was installed that provided clean and affordable water using an electronic key loaded with credit.

Moving East; Ica lives in Jakarta. With no degree, she was trapped in an entry-level corporate communications job. Her prospects were poor.

That was until she began an e-learning degree programme with a European university. The chance to access a world-class education in another continent has changed her life and her ability to improve her career opportunities.

On the other side of the world, Anna lives in Mexico City where she holds down two jobs at a store near her home and at a packaging facility. But even with a double income, the rapidly increasing living costs in Mexico City meant her weekly wage still wasn’t enough to make ends meet.

Again, technology offered a solution and she now finds extra cleaning work with an online home and business cleaning service that digitally connects her to clients.

Three real people, three very different stories but with a single thread that connects them all. That thread is in how technology has changed their lives for the better.

100 billion reasons to engage

The companies that provide these technological innovations have to sustain themselves and cannot take action solely to improve lives. There has to be commercial viability.

For companies looking beyond established markets, tapping into the commercial potential of emerging markets and their new customers represents real, often uncontested, commercial opportunity.

This is the message that we want to send on behalf of our organizations – UNICEF and Arm. You don’t have to only think about the world’s poorer regions as places for corporate philanthropy.

They are also commercially viable markets representing new consumer groups that are predicted to become some of the largest and most important over the next few decades.

By 2030, up to two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities – approximately 1.8 billion of them under the age of 24, and the majority in Africa and Asia.

Instinctively, these rapidly growing urban centres feel like huge opportunity zones for business. But until now, the value of that opportunity has not been fully quantified.

Now, new research co-commissioned by UNICEF and Arm reveals the scale of what is possible. It sets out to chart the scale of unrealized potential in cities through a ground-breaking piece of research: Tech Bets for an Urban World.

In the research we see that businesses investing in emergent technology solutions across emerging world markets can not only potentially improve the lives of four billion people but they could also generate up to $100 billion in profits by 2022.

The Tech Bets

UNICEF and Arm have long shared the view that although the technology sector has the potential to change lives profoundly, it is currently not serving the people with the greatest need.

To catalyse change, we needed to explore the potential financial and social opportunity available to companies who choose to invest in unrealised markets.

As a result, we jointly commissioned Dalberg to produce the new Tech Bets market research. This focused on three urban cities: Nairobi, Jakarta and Mexico City and identified six ‘tech bets’: Digital Learning, Multi-Modal Skilling, Smart Recruitment, Water Metering, Emergency Response and Commuter Ride-Sharing.

The first three tech bets highlight the growing market for job sector preparation for some of the 1.8 billion future students, interns, mentees and job applicants. With Digital Learning, teachers can use online lessons to engage and inspire 500-600 million young people.

Multi-Modal Skilling, combining online education with in-person mentoring, could equip 120 million young people with important skills. And to assist people looking for work, Smart Recruitment quickly connects individuals and employers in the informal economy. All these strategies start with companies selling their technology services.

Our research indicates technological innovations for infrastructure investments could also pay significant dividends. Smart Water Solutions – like IoT networks of sensors and meters – are a great example.

As well as generating revenues for hardware and services operators, there are huge economic benefits to giving at-risk individuals, such as Rose, access to affordable and clean water.

Looking beyond health, Ride Sharing platforms could offer a safer, more efficient way to travel for the 350 million people living in cities, whose commuting time can often take up to three hours each way.

This would help take the pressure off traditional transport services and put more flexible transport options at the centre of reinvigorated city economies.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Real progress in dramatically improving lives means looking beyond philanthropy and working with businesses to identify and meet market needs.

The Arm and UNICEF partnership was founded on the desire to do just that, innovating and accelerating the development of new technology to overcome the barriers that prevent millions of people across the world from accessing basic health, education and support services.

Changing minds is about big partnerships and so we are also beginning to work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and partners to identify and support new technology that can improve lives. Our first initiative is a smart water challenge that will start to turn the Tech Bets for an Urban World research into action.

We want to go further too. The 2030Vision initiative launched by Arm in partnership with the UN system, NGOs and others in the tech industry is all about collaborating to drive the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The aim is to improve a billion people’s lives by 2030.

Together, UNICEF and Arm are calling on the tech sector to develop new partnerships that can unleash the potential of technology and answer the needs of these new urban markets.

With a chance to invest in six tech bets, create up to $100 billion in profit, and improve the lives of billions of people like Rose, Ica and Anna, it’s clear that it’s possible to both do good and do good business. You just need to place your tech bet. We’re placing ours now.

The post How Technology Has Changed Lives for the Better appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Henrietta Fore is Executive Director, UNICEF and Simon Segars is CEO, Arm

The post How Technology Has Changed Lives for the Better appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Illustration: Amiya Halder

By Editor, The Daily Star, Bangladesh
Sep 25 2018 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

The Right to Information Forum (RTI Forum) has expressed deep concerns over the passage of the Digital Security Act 2018 by the Parliament as some of its provisions have been given undue precedence over those of the Right to Information Act 2009.

The forum believes that The Digital Security Act, in its present form, will grossly restrict the scope of people’s access to information under the RTI Act which has been widely held as one of the best opportunities created by the government in empowering people to promote transparency and accountability.

In a statement yesterday, the RTI Forum observed that some provisions of the Official Secrets Act 1921 have been included in the Digital Security Act 2018 which directly undermines Section 3 of the RTI Act. Section 3 stipulates that the RTI Act will prevail over any Act that may create obstacles in providing information or is conflicting with provisions of the RTI law.

The Digital Security Act not only contradicts parts of the RTI Act, but also raises questions about the government’s capacity to be consistent in law-making, the forum observed.

It also lamented that the Digital Security Act creates wide opportunities to restrict the space for raising informed public opinions and ensuring transparency and accountability of public institutions, reducing corruption, and establishing good governance as outlined in the preamble of the RTI Act 2009.

The forum further observed that the Digital Security Act is clearly inconsistent with the fundamental constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression as per Article 39 of the Constitution and, therefore, undermines democracy and human rights, which are among the fundamental principles of state policy.

Bangladesh’s commitment under Sustainable Development Goal 16.10, that obliges the government to promote free flow of information, will also become nationally and internationally questionable, the forum further added.

The RTI Forum, a coalition of more than 45 organisations, played a pivotal role in the enactment of the right to information law in 2009 and has been supporting the government its implementation and promotion since then.

Meanwhile, journalist’s organisation Dhaka Reporters Unity (DRU) yesterday expressed grave concerns over the Digital Security Act 2018 as well, saying that some harsh and objectionable provisions in the law would create obstructions in the way of independent journalism.

They also criticised the government for passing the law, while ignoring the concerns and recommendations of journalists.

The organisation urged the government to review the law with the light of the journalists’ recommendations and revoke the objectionable provisions from the law.

In a statement, DRU president Saiful Islam and its joint secretary Moin Uddin Khan said that journalists had been expressing concerns over some provisions ever since the draft was approved in the cabinet meeting.

Journalist leaders demanded to scrap the much-debated provisions from the law after meeting with the ministers concerned and also sent their recommendations to parliamentary standing committee.

“The government also assured the journalists that there would be no such harsh provisions. But the bill was passed in the parliament ignoring the concerns and recommendations of journalists,” the statement added.

The DRU observed that the existence of the RTI Act beside Official Secrets Act is conflicting and enabling the police to exercise unfettered power — to search, seize and arrest anyone without a warrant – may create the risk of harassment for journalists.

“Such provisions are against basic human rights and democracy,” the statement added.

In the meantime, rights body Human Rights Support Society (HRSS) expressed solidarity with the human chain programme called by the Sampadak Parishad (Editors’ Council) that will be formed in front of Jatiya Press Club on September 29.

The organisation requested President Abdul Hamid not to approve the law and urged him to return it for a review.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

The post Alarm raised over Digital Security Act appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Graça Machel, member of The Elders and widow of Nelson Mandela, makes remarks during the Nelson Mandela Peace Summit. Credit: United Nations Photo/Cia Pak

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 25 2018 (IPS)

In honour of Nobel Peace Laureate Nelson Mandela’s legacy, nations from around the world convened to adopt a declaration recommitting to goals of building a just, peaceful, and fair world.

At the Nelson Mandela Peace Summit, aptly held in the year of the former South African leader’s 100th birthday, world leaders reflected on global peace and acknowledged that the international community is off-track as human rights continues to be under attack globally.Guterres highlighted the need to “face the forces that threaten us with the wisdom, courage and fortitude that Nelson Mandela embodied” so that people everywhere can enjoy peace and prosperity.

“The United Nations finds itself at a time where it would be well-served to revisit and reconnect to the vision of its founders, as well as to take direction from Madiba’s “servant leadership” and courage,” said Mandela’s widow, and co-founder of the Elders, Graça Machel. The Elders, a grouping of independent global leaders workers for world peace and human rights, was founded by Machel and Mandela in 2007.

Secretary-general Antonio Guterres echoed similar sentiments in his opening remarks, stating: “Nelson Mandela was one of humanity’s great leaders….today, with human rights under growing pressure around the world, we would be well served by reflecting on the example of this outstanding man.”

Imprisoned in South Africa for almost 30 years for his anti-apartheid activism, Mandela, also known by his clan name Madiba, has been revered as a symbol of peace, democracy, and human rights worldwide.

In his inaugural address to the U.N. General Assembly in 1994 after becoming the country’s first black president, Mandela noted that the great challenge to the U.N. is to answer the question of “what it is that we can and must do to ensure that democracy, peace, and prosperity prevail everywhere.”

It is these goals along with his qualities of “humility, forgiveness, and compassion” that the political declaration adopted during the Summit aims to uphold.

However, talk along of such principles is not enough, said Amnesty International’s Secretary-General Kumi Naidoo.

“These are words that get repeated time and time again without the political will, urgency, determination, and courage to make them a reality, to make them really count. But we must make them count. Not tomorrow, but right now,” he said to world leaders.

“Without action, without strong and principled leadership, I fear for them. I fear for all of us,” Naidoo continued.

Both Machel and Naidoo urged the international community to not turn away from violence and suffering around the world including in Myanmar.

“Our collective consciousness must reject the lethargy that has made us accustomed to death and violence as if wars are legitimate and somehow impossible to terminate,” Machel said.

Recently, a U.N.-fact finding mission, which reported on gross human rights violations committed against the Rohingya people including mass killings, sexual slavery, and torture, has called for the country’s military leaders to be investigated and protected for genocide and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

While the ICC has launched a preliminary investigation and the U.N. was granted access to a select number of Rohingya refugees, Myanmar’s army chief General Min Aung Hlaing warned against foreign interference ahead of the General Assembly.

Since violence reignited in the country’s Rakhine State in August 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh.

Still some remain within the country without the freedom to move or access basic services such as health care.

Naidoo warned the international community “not to adjust to the Rohingya population living in an open-air prison under a system of apartheid.”

This year’s U.N. General Assembly president Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces of Ecuador said that while Mandela represents “a light of hope,” there are still concerns about collective action to resolve some of the world’s most pressing issues.

“Drifting away from multilateralism means jeopardising the future of our species and our planet. The world needs a social contract based on shared responsibility, and the only forum that we have to achieve this global compact is the United Nations,” she said.

Others were a little more direct about who has turned away from such multilateralism.

“Great statesmen tend to build bridges instead of walls,” said Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, taking a swipe at U.S. president Trump who pulled the country of the Iran nuclear deal and has continued his campaign to build a wall along the Mexico border.

Trump, who will be making his second appearance at the General Assembly, is expected to renew his commitment to the “America First” approach.

Naidoo made similar comments in relation to the U.S. president in his remarks on urging action on climate change.

“To the one leader who still denies climate change: we insist you start putting yourself on the right side of history,” he told attendees.

Trump, however, was not present to hear the leaders’ input as he instead attended a high-level event on counter narcotics.

Guterres highlighted the need to “face the forces that threaten us with the wisdom, courage and fortitude that Nelson Mandela embodied” so that people everywhere can enjoy peace and prosperity.

Machel urged against partisan politics and the preservation of ego, saying “enough is enough.”

“History will judge you should you stagnate too long in inaction. Humankind will hold you accountable should you allow suffering to continue on your watch,” she said.

“It is in your hands to make a better world for all who live in it,” Machel concluded with Mandela’s words.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the U.N. awarded Machel an honorary membership of its Nobel Peace Laureates Alliance for Food Security and Peace in recognition of her late husband’s struggle for freedom and peace.

“It is an honour for us to have her as a member of the Alliance. In a world where hunger continues to increase due to conflicts, her advocacy for peace will be very important,” FAO director general José Graziano da Silva said.

In addition to honouring the centenary of the birth of Nelson Mandela, the Summit also marks the 70th Anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights and the 20th Anniversary of the Rome Statute which established the ICC.

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• “We Should Not Wait” — Action Needed on Myanmar
• Damning U.N. Report Outlines Crimes Against Rohingya As Children Suffer from Trauma One Year Later

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Credit Mark Irungu/AGRF

By Korir Sing’Oei
Sep 24 2018 (IPS)

In early September 2018, about 2,800 delegates from 79 countries and high-level dignitaries, including current and former heads of states, international agencies, CEOs of global corporations and youth entrepreneurs, and techies involved in agriculture gathered in Kigali for this year’s African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF).

The convening happened against the backdrop of the sudden death of Kofi Annan, whose clarion call for a unique African green revolution in the mold of India, gave rise to the establishment of the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) which hosts AGRF.

The monumental success of AGRF 2018 is clearly a tribute to the steering role played by Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) secretariat, led by former Rwanda agriculture minister, Dr. Agnes Kalibata and funding partners; notably the Gates Foundation, Rockefeller and other multilateral donors.

But why would a consummate diplomat in the person of Kofi Annan focus his attention on agriculture rather than global governance issues?

Korir Sing’Oei

AGRF’s theory of change appears to be premised on the idea that high level political dialogue and exchanges are a prerequisite to policy coherence for agricultural transformation. In attracting and bringing heads of states, ministers, senior policy makers together with business actors around a conversation on agriculture, several policies, institutional and programmatic ideas become clear, as was witnessed in Kigali.

First, as an institutional design issue, agriculture must be entrenched as a high level political and business priority across the continent as it ought to have been. Left to travail at ministries of agriculture, often underfunded and poorly linked to the rest of government departments, agricultural transformation stands stunted in the intense resource competition, pitting it against seemingly more productive options such as industrialization and infrastructure – including the much-vaunted railway development.

Second, critical delivery required to transform agriculture cannot be driven at ministerial level. The mechanization agenda for instance, cannot be siloed in the ministry of agriculture. It must become an inter-ministerial and whole of governments’ effort.

As it was argued by the Malabo Montpellier Panel at the AGRF 2018, sustainable agricultural growth above 4% annually requires machinery uptake growth of no less than 2.5%. In this trajectory, Kenya like several other African countries falls below the mark, with mechanization of its agricultural systems still way below 35%.

Agriculture in Africa must cease being a struggle to survive and converted into a business that thrives. This, in my view, is what inspired Dr. Kofi Annan, to make agriculture the centerpiece of his post UN Secretary General agenda

The resulting low production levels is partly attributable to the mechanization deficit and measures that allow production of agricultural equipment at reasonable price should be considered, if scale is to be achieved. Regional manufacturing hubs that pool a number of countries can make such manufacturing viable and remove policy constraints.

However, an agenda of this magnitude cannot entirely be based at the agricultural ministries but must become a national and sub-regional imperative. The AGRF 2018 #HowWillYouLead campaign, that seeks to rally public and private sector leaders in Africa and beyond to intensify agricultural transformation in the continent, represents this understanding.

Food is central to the sustenance of the human condition. The cyclical occurrences of drought and hunger, exacerbated by the climate change phenomenon, continues to place the continent’s population in a state of dependency and vulnerability.

Rain fed agriculture can no longer guarantee the food and nutrition requirements of a continent, whose population is projected to reach a billion people by 2050. The assertion by Strive Masiyiwa, Chairman of Econet Group that “crops do not need rain they need water” resonated so much with the AGRF 2018 delegates, becoming a near slogan and a central theme of the conference.

As attested to by the Africa Agriculture Status Report 2018, countries whose agricultural sectors have registered marked transformation over the last decade, such as Ethiopia, have aggressively expanded irrigated farmlands. With 3.3 million hectares under irrigation out of 70 million hectares of arable land, Ethiopia’s food security turnaround was touted as a marker of success that craves continental replication.

Thus, the Kigali Declaration on Farmer-led Irrigation for Smallholder Farming Enterprises was adopted urging “public investment, commercial financing, and capacity building that enable individual smallholders to afford, own, operate and benefit from irrigation systems.”

For a long time, the African Union’s agriculture-related commitments have been an invisible inconvenience, lost in the bureaucratic maze of the Addis diplomatic behemoth that is sold out on the peace and security agenda.

Even the well-known Comprehensive African Agricultural Programme (CAADP) and the Malabo Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth for Shared Prosperity and Improved Livelihoods remain technical scientific niceties of little impact to the development of agricultural sectors at country level. And as demonstrated in Kigali, AGRF, has now become the apposite space that animates these continental commitments, vivifying them with data, content, funding ideas and implementation matrices.

While this revolution is yet to be televised, the young techies that straddled the ornate floors of Kigali Conference Centre at AGRF 2018 demystified agriculture and made it attractive to the burgeoning youth of our continent, who must take center stage in reimagining the sector for the 21st century. This was so much evident that when Deputy President Ruto, reminded the forum that the average age of a farmer in Kenya is 60 years against a mean age of 19, concern regarding the sustainability of the sector was unmistakable.

And as farmers across the continent continue their perennial dance to grow sufficient food and convey it from farm to fork for consumption by the millions of us, more must be done to make farming not only sustainable but profitable. Agriculture in Africa must cease being a struggle to survive and converted into a business that thrives. This, in my view, is what inspired Dr. Kofi Annan, to make agriculture the centerpiece of his post UN Secretary General agenda.

The post The Revolutionary Ambition of AGRF 2018 Must be Sustained appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Korir Sing’Oei is Legal Advisor & Head of Policy at Office of Deputy President, Kenya

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Despite the UN goal to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger globally, Africa's senior citizens are finding themselves cornered with destitution. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo / IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 24 2018 (IPS)

The United Nations warned last month that the accelerating impacts of climate change—“already clearly visible today”– have triggered an unpredictable wave of natural disasters– including extreme heatwaves, wild fires, storms, and floods during the course of this year.

“If we do not change course by 2020”, cautions UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, “we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us.”

Coincidentally, his warning was followed by the annual 2018 report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) which singled out climate change as one of the primary factors responsible for the rise in global hunger – and for the third consecutive year in 2017.

Along with military conflicts and global economic meltdowns, climate change is a driving force in the rise in global hunger while extreme weather, land degradation, desertification, water scarcity and rising sea levels—are collectively undermining global efforts to eradicate hunger.

As the UN continues to express concern over rising natural disasters worldwide, the world body is taking an active role in New York City’s “Climate Change Week” which is scheduled to conclude Sunday September 30—and takes place in the margins of the 73rd sessions of the UN General Assembly where more than 125 world political leaders are due to speak this week.

A primary focus of Climate Change Week will be the number of climate-related disasters, which have doubled since the early 1990s, with an average of 213 of these events occurring every year during the period of 1990–2016, according to FAO.

Asked about the severity of climate change on food security, Cindy Holleman, Senior Economist at FAO, told IPS the number of extreme climate-related disaster events has doubled since the early 1990s (extreme heat, droughts, floods and storms) – “which means we now experience on average 213 medium and large climate-related catastrophic events every year”.

She pointed out that climate-related disasters account for more than 80 percent of all major internationally reported disasters. Climate variability and extremes are already negatively undermining the production of major crops in tropical regions.

“So climate variability and extremes, are not only events that will happen in the future; they are occurring now and are contributing to a rise in global hunger,” she warned.

Holleman said droughts feature among the most challenging climate extremes in many parts of the world. Drought causes more than 80 percent of the total damage and losses in agriculture, especially for the livestock and crop production subsectors.

For almost 36 percent of the countries that experienced a rise in undernourishment since the mid-2000s, this coincided with the occurrence of a severe agricultural drought, she noted.

“Most striking is that nearly two-thirds of these cases (19 out of 28) occurred in relation to the severe drought conditions driven by El Niño in 2015–2016.

During the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event of 2015–2016, this change across so many countries contributed to a reversal of the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU) trend at the global level, she noted.

In its latest 2018 report on “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World” (SOFI), FAO said the absolute number of undernourished people, i.e. those facing chronic food deprivation, has increased to nearly 821 million in 2017, from around 804 million in 2016. These are levels from almost a decade ago.

The share of undernourished people in the world population – the prevalence of undernourishment, or PoU – may have reached 10.9 percent in 2017, according to the report.

Persistent instability in conflict-ridden regions, adverse climate events in many regions of the world and economic slowdowns that have affected more peaceful regions and worsened the food security, all help to explain this deteriorating situation.

The situation is worsening in South America and most regions of Africa, FAO said. Africa remains the continent with the highest PoU, affecting almost 21 percent of the population (more than 256 million people).

The situation is also deteriorating in South America, where the PoU has increased from 4.7 percent in 2014 to a projected 5.0 percent in 2017. Asia’s decreasing trend in undernourishment seems to be slowing down significantly.

The projected PoU for Asia in 2017 is 11.4 percent, which represents more than 515 million people. Without increased efforts, the world will fall far short of achieving the SDG target of eradicating hunger by 2030.

The most recent Typhoon Mangkhut, on September 15, caused considerable devastation in the Philippines.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the typhoon affected 893,000 people, including over 280,000 farmers. Some 236,000 people were displaced — 70 per cent of whom are still in evacuation centres.

The typhoon damaged nearly 1,500 houses. It is also estimated that 1.22 million hectares of rice and corn have been damaged, with losses estimated at $267 million.

The United Nations said it is working closely with its partners and the Government of the Philippines to coordinate rapid assessment and response. Major needs include food, health care, water, sanitation and hygiene, as well as shelter. The United Nations said it stands ready to support the Government’s relief efforts as needed.

Still, there are some who are skeptical about climate change itself.

As Gail Collins, a columnist for the New York Times, pointed out last week the unpredictable US President Donald Trump does not believe in climate change.

“Who among us can forget the time he claimed the whole idea (of climate change) was a Chinese plot to ruin American manufacturing”,? she asked.

Guterres, meanwhile, is convening a Climate Summit in September 2019 to bring climate action to the top of the international agenda. The high-level gathering of world political leaders is scheduled to take place one year before countries are set to enhance their national climate pledges under the Paris Agreement.

“I am calling on all world leaders to come to next year’s Climate Summit prepared to report not only on what they are doing, but what more they intend to do when they convene in 2020 for the UN climate conference,” he said.

Kristen Hite, Oxfam International Climate Policy Lead, told IPS climate change is a factor leaders must take into account as we all collectively try to reach the milestones set by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

She said climate change is already compromising food security and food production, including hitting adaptive limits, with more people migrating because they cannot grow food anymore. And this is only the beginning. With every tick up on the thermometer, millions more are forced into poverty.

Hite said climate impacts on the poor happen through increased food prices, food insecurity and hunger, lost resource base for livelihoods and income, and displacement from flooding and heat waves.

“There is a big difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees, especially for crop production in Sub-Saharan Africa, West Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America. The poor are hit the hardest, and rain-fed agriculture is especially vulnerable.”

As climate emissions barrel on, she said, there is more pressure to displace food farming with carbon farming. It doesn’t have to be this way- if wealthy polluters can get their emissions in check and we all embrace the renewable energy revolution, there is still time to curb this crisis.

Meanwhile, at the upcoming climate change conference, COP24 in Poland in December, there will be an attempt to finalize the rulebook of the Paris Agreement and to deliver on its promises.

FAO’s Holleman told IPS the strongest direct impacts are felt on food availability, given the sensitivity of agriculture to climate and the primary role of the sector as a source of food and livelihoods for the rural poor.

Climate variability and extremes are undermining also the other dimensions of food security. Spikes in food prices and price volatility follow climate extremes and extend well beyond the actual climatic event.

Net buyers of food are the hardest hit by price spikes: these are the urban poor, but also small-scale food producers, agriculture labourers and the rural poor. Those whose livelihoods depend on agriculture and natural resources lose income but also assets and access to food, she pointed out.

The quality and safety of food is affected by more erratic rainfall and higher temperatures: crop contamination, outbreaks of pests and diseases because of rainfall intensity or changes in temperature, she explained.

Hollleman said that stability of production and access to food is also increased by climate variability and extremes. Changes in climate also heavily impact nutrition through impaired nutrient quality and dietary diversity of foods produced and consumed impacts on water and sanitation, with their implications for patterns of health risks and disease.

Prolonged or recurrent climate extremes lead to diminished coping capacity, loss of livelihoods, distress migration and destitution, she declared.

Asked if some of the countries, mostly in Asia, Latin America and sub Saharan Africa, will be able to meet the SDG goal of hunger eradication by 2030, Holleman said ending hunger and all forms of malnutrition is an ambitious goal, but it is one we strongly believe can be reached.

“We need to strengthen our common efforts and work to tackle the underlying causes of hunger and malnutrition, as well as to urgently address key drivers behind the recent rise in hunger,” she said.

“ We should strengthen political will and put hunger elimination and good nutrition as a fundamental goals in the development effort. Extreme poverty, inequality and marginalization is at the roots of hunger and need to be addressed. This is universal, almost a tautology.”

Fundamental entry points to the effort to eliminate hunger is agriculture, the food system in general and social protection. “We also have to deal with the additional challenges created by conflict, climate variability and extremes and economic slowdowns.”

Addressing the root causes of conflict will involve humanitarian, development and peace building strategies which meet immediate needs while making the necessary investments to build resilience for lasting peace and food security and nutrition for all, Holleman declared.

“Meeting the challenge posed by climate variability and extremes requires that we scale-up actions to strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity of people and the agricultural and food systems.”

She added: “We need integrated—rather than dissociated—disaster risk reduction and management and climate change adaption policies, programmes and practices with short-, medium- and long-term vision.”

Meanwhile, in what was described as “an unprecedented global partnership”, the United Nations, World Bank, International Committee of the Red Cross, Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services have announced a plan to prevent future famines.

The international organizations are launching the Famine Action Mechanism (FAM) – the first global mechanism dedicated to preventing future famines.

In the past, responses to these devastating events has often come too late, once many lives have already been lost, incurring high assistance costs.

“The FAM seeks to change this by moving towards famine prevention, preparedness and early action – interventions that can save more lives and reduce humanitarian costs by as much as 30%. The initiative will use the predictive power of data to trigger funding through appropriate financing instruments, working closely with existing systems,” the coalition said in a press release September 24.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

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Damage caused by Hurricane Irma in Road Town, on the British Virgin Island of Tortola. Caribbean leaders want larger countries to pick up the pace at which they are working to meet the climate change challenge and keep global warming from devastating whole countries. Courtesy: Russell Watkins/DFID

By Desmond Brown
SAN FRANCISCO and ST. JOHN’S, Sep 24 2018 (IPS)

Caribbean leaders want larger countries to pick up the pace at which they are working to meet the climate change challenge and keep global warming from devastating whole countries, including the most vulnerable ones like those in the Caribbean.

Diann Black-Layne, ambassador for Climate Change in Antigua and Barbuda’s ministry of agriculture, lands, housing and the environment, said that at present, most studies show that globally we are on track for a 3-degree Celsius temperature rise before the end of this century.

She pointed to extreme impacts already being experienced, such as greater storms, melting ice caps, increased overall temperatures, species fragmentation, increased invasive species and many other impacts.

“Currently, we need to be below 2 degrees Celsius, preferably at 1.5 degrees, to see a drastic improvement in climate,” Black-Layne told IPS.

“To put this in context, globally we are already 1 degree Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels.”

Black-Layne added that governments must back words with action and step up to enhance their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) by 2020 in line with the Paris Agreement and the ratchet up mechanism.

Although the contributions of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to greenhouse gases are negligible, every little action towards alleviating climate change counts.

“More importantly, a global agreement requires everyone to do their part, to build trust and encourage others to act,” Black-Layne said.

“SIDS can be some of the early movers to decarbonise our economies – that means growing an economy without growing emissions.”

At the recent Talanoa Dialogue held in September in San Francisco, newly-elected prime minister of Barbados Mia Mottley said while the Caribbean countries are not responsible for causing the greatest changes in the climate, they are the ones on the frontline. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

Meanwhile, at the recent Talanoa Dialogue held this month in San Francisco, newly-elected prime minister of Barbados Mia Mottley said while the Caribbean countries are not responsible for causing the greatest changes in the climate, they are the ones on the frontline.

“Dominica was hit by [hurricanes] Irma and Maria, in fact devastated to the tune of 275 percent of its GDP last year. And that came on top of [tropical storm] Erica which devastated communities and led to loss of life,” said Mottley, whose Barbados Labour Party won all 30 seats in the May 24 election.

“This is our lived reality in the Caribbean. This is not an academic discussion. This is difficult for us. And therefore, when the discussions took place between whether it is 1.5 or 2 [° C ], others could wallow in the ease of an academic discussion. For us it will have implications for what communities can survive in the Caribbean, in the Pacific and different other parts of the world.”“This is our lived reality in the Caribbean. This is not an academic discussion. This is difficult for us. And therefore, when the discussions took place between whether it is 1.5 or 2 [° C ], others could wallow in the ease of an academic discussion. For us it will have implications for what communities can survive in the Caribbean, in the Pacific and different other parts of the world.” -- prime minister of Barbados Mia Mottley

In 2015, 196 Parties came together under the Paris Agreement to transform their development trajectories and set the world on a course towards sustainable development, with an aim of limiting warming to 1.5 to 2° C above pre-industrial levels.

Through the Paris Agreement, parties also agreed to a long-term goal for adaptation – to increase the ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience and low greenhouse gas emissions development, in a manner that does not threaten food production. Additionally, they agreed to work towards making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development.

In June 2017, United States president Donald Trump ceased all implementation of the non-binding Paris accord.

That includes contributions to the United Nations Green Climate Fund (to help poorer countries to adapt to climate change and expand clean energy) and reporting on carbon data (though that is required in the U.S. by domestic regulations anyway).

But the U.S. remains part of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Forty years ago, Barbados commenced the use of solar water heaters through tax incentives.

Today, Mottley says, no one in the country thinks about building a house without a solar water heater.

“That simple example showed us how the change of behaviour of citizens can make a fundamental difference in the output. We aim by 2030 to be a fossil fuel-free environment but we can’t do it just so,” she said.

Explaining that Barbados has recently entered a staff-level agreement with the International Monetary Fund, she lamented that her new government inherited a situation where Barbados is the third-most indebted country in the world today.

“It means that our options for development and financing are seriously constrained but our reality to fight what is perhaps the gravest challenge of our time continues. We cannot borrow from the World Bank or other major entities because we’re told that our per capita income is too high,” Mottley said.

“But within 48 hours, like Dominica, we could lose 200 percent of our GDP. That is the very definition of vulnerability if ever there was one. And unless we change it we are going to see the obliteration or civilisations or we’re going to see problems morph into security and migration issues that the world does not want to deal with.”

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LI Yong is Director General, United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO)

By Li Yong
VIENNA, Sep 24 2018 (IPS)

Since the turn of the millennium, Africa has experienced a steady and unprecedented economic growth.

However, poverty continues for people across the continent, especially in the sub-Saharan region. Unemployment and inequality have remained high. The rural population and the urban poor, women and youth, have not benefited from economic growth.

African policymakers realize that, for the benefits of growth to be shared by all, there needs to be a structural transformation of the economy. Specifically, there is an acknowledgement that its composition should change, with increased shares of manufacturing and agro-related industry in national investment, output, and trade.

Manufacturing, thanks to its multiplier effect on other sectors of the economy, has always been one of the most important drivers of economic development and structural change, especially in developing countries. Manufacturing is an “engine of growth” that enhances higher levels of productivity and greater technical change, thus creating more jobs with higher wages for both women and men.

Recognizing this, the United Nations has proclaimed the period 2016-2025 as the Third Industrial Development Decade for Africa (IDDA III) in order to increase global awareness and encourage partnerships to achieve inclusive and sustainable industrialization.

Today, Africa has exceptional opportunities for industrialization.

In the next few decades, Africa will become the youngest and most populous continent in the world with a working age population expected to grow by 450 million people. Or close to 70 per cent of the total, by 2035.

With a rapidly growing population, and one of the world’s highest rates of urbanization, the middle class is on the rise too. This will drive consumption of consumer goods, creating a market worth USD 250 billion, set to grow at an annual rate of 5 per cent over the next eight years.

Industrialization, diversification and job creation in Africa, however, cannot happen without continental economic integration. The recent signing of the historic agreement for an African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) by 49 out of 55 countries creates an opportunity for inclusive and sustainable economic development, moving away from structural stagnation and commodity-based economics.

The AfCFTA agreement will create the world’s largest single, integrated market for goods and services, and a customs union that will enable free movement of capital and business travelers in Africa.

This will provide great business opportunities for trading enterprises, businesses and consumers, unlocking trade and manufacturing potential and further enhancing industrialization in Africa.

With the AfCFTA agreement, exports of processed or intermediate goods will increase rapidly, further opening the way to Africa’s economic transformation to dynamically-diversified economies and globally competitive industrial production locations.

Higher trade among African countries will also strengthen African regional value chains, making it easier for local small and medium-sized enterprises, which account for around 80 per cent of Africa’s businesses, to build competitiveness, supply inputs to larger regional companies, and participate in and upgrade to global value chains.

This will give unprecedented opportunities to exploit the full agri-business potential of the continent. Strengthening the continent’s agro-industries can generate high social and economic returns, create jobs in rural areas and for young women and men, as well as responding to the urgent need to ensure food security and poverty reduction.

By taking bold actions in advancing the agenda of the AfCFTA, using it as one of the best means of promoting industrialization, African countries are well-positioned to build an Africa that can become a strong link in today’s interdependent global economy.

Structural transformation, however, is never automatic. Political goodwill and commitments are a first important step; but a multi-pronged, action-based approach with partnerships at the heart, along with concrete industrial policies, is needed for this to become a reality.

That is why UNIDO has developed an innovative country-owned, multi-stakeholder partnership model to provide governments with a platform to bring together various stakeholders, including development finance institutions and the private sector, to mobilize large-scale resources, accelerate industrialization and achieve a greater development impact.

Using this Programme for Country Partnership (PCP) approach, and helping governments to identify priority sectors based on prospects for job creation, strong links to the agricultural sector, high export potential and capacity to attract investment, UNIDO has already started assisting Ethiopia, Senegal, Morocco and other countries in Asia and Latin America in achieving their export goals and enabling the manufacturing sector to compete on the increasingly globalized market.

Now more than ever, such innovative schemes and mechanisms for enabling partnership building and resource mobilization for sustainable industrial development are needed to address the urgent need for structural transformation in Africa and seize the opportunities offered by the AfCFTA.

The post Seize the Opportunity Offered by Africa’s Continental Free Trade Area, says UNIDO Chief appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

LI Yong is Director General, United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO)

The post Seize the Opportunity Offered by Africa’s Continental Free Trade Area, says UNIDO Chief appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: Nichole Sobecki / The Global Fund

By David Bryden
WASHINGTON DC, Sep 24 2018 (IPS)

“I’m alive because of support from my family and the community health worker who brought medicine directly to my house, accompanied me during treatment and gave me hope. Without care and human support, there’s no way I could be here today,” says Melquiades Huauya, a survivor of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) from Peru.

From his harrowing experience with tuberculosis (TB), Huauya now knows a lot about how to stop it, the world’s biggest infectious disease killer. The disease, which claims about 4300 lives a day, is the subject of a United Nations’ High-Level Meeting on September 26 in New York, alongside the 73rd General Assembly.

Tuberculosis is an airborne bacterial infection that is preventable and curable, with the right medication. But, as Melquiades Huauya experienced, in addition to appropriate medication, it is “human support” that makes the difference between life and death.

Miriam Were, a noted Kenyan medical doctor and public health expert, states in a recent online presentation that community health workers are essential to providing culturally sensitive care and overcoming the distrust and “social distance” that keeps people from accessing the formal health care system and getting cured of diseases like TB.

Health facilities can also be many hours away from people’s homes, a common barrier to accessing care. As a result, of the 10 million people developing TB every year, 3.6 million are “missed” by the formal system and are unreported, and likely going untreated. In ten of the countries with high TB burdens, more than 45 percent of the people with TB are “missed.”

This includes children, who are highly vulnerable to TB. By fully tapping the potential of community health workers, we can identify and locate these people, connect them to care, and, ultimately, reduce and prevent further TB infections and other health conditions.

Consider the investment case by the South African Medical Research Council, issued in May 2018, entitled “Saving lives, saving costs.” The researchers found that an expanded and well-supported network of community health workers would have enormous benefits for South Africa, translating into 33,064 MDR-TB averted cases and saving 60,642 livesover a 10-year period.

According to the researchers, while such a strategy requires significant financial investment initially, the cost-saving will, ultimately, be more than offset by preventing the disease and costly hospitalization.

By recruiting previously unemployed people from the same disadvantaged communities to visit the homes of TB patients and seek out others in need of TB screening, the economy will also benefit. And, according to the analysis, other health issues can also be addressed through this approach, including HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, and hypertension.

Several countries are already using an expanded network of community health workers to stop TB, similar to the program in Peru, which was so crucial to Huauya’s recovery. In 2003, Ethiopia began training and employing female village-based health workers, called health extension workers, to regularly visit households in their villages to implement basic packages of healthcare.

These visits have identified people with TB and given essential support to patients already taking the long course of treatment. This has helped deliver very impressive results, with the country seeing a significant reduction in TB. Pakistan and Bangladesh have also successfully used community health workers to reduce TB.

Still, there are also major challenges facing community health workers. Were says most abandon their jobs when they realize it is a dead-end, without prospects of advancement; attrition is as high as 70 percent in some places.

She emphasizes that community health workers need adequate training, supervision, and remuneration to keep serving their communities. They also need back-up from qualified nurses and doctors to whom they can refer patients.

Care-givers also need care themselves. Frontline health workers are frequently exposed to TB and other health risks due to inadequate protection, such as masks and respirators, or environmental measures to lessen the danger.

The result is that healthcare personnel have significantly higher rates of developing TB, including often-deadly MDR-TB , as documented by the South African organization, TB Proof.

Facing a three to six times increased risk, related inadequate working conditions and a lack of supplies or equipment, can lead to poor morale and high rates of attrition, further adversely affecting the quality of care.

Tuberculosis cannot be defeated unless these challenges are addressed head-on. For the UN High Level Meeting, all member states have agreed on a Political Declaration on the Fight Against Tuberculosis, and it contains a key promise: that they “Commit to find the missing people with tuberculosis.”

To keep this promise, governments must lay out specific and costed plans for training, protecting and compensating the frontline health care workers who do the hard work of going out into the community, even going door-to-door, to find people in need and give them hope. As Were puts it, “If it doesn’t happen in the community, it doesn’t happen.”

The post End Tuberculosis by Empowering Community Health Workers appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Women living in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, which is particularly prone to drought, say how hard it is to live off the land and support their families. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By James Jeffrey
ADDIS ABABA, Sep 24 2018 (IPS)

Faced with worsening droughts due to climate change, Ethiopia is joining an international initiative seeking to build global resilience against the problems caused by it, and enable developing countries to become part of a united solution to the ongoing problem. 

Funded by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Global Climate Fund (GCF) was established to help developing countries achieve national efforts to reduce national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change.

The GCF is part of a united global response fuelled by the urgency and seriousness of the climate change challenge. That clarion call gained momentum worldwide after the 2015 Paris Agreement in which signatories agreed to collectively tackle climate change through the mechanism of implementing nationally determined contributions (NDC), a country’s tailored efforts to reduce its emissions and enable it to adapt to climate change-induced challenges.

Ethiopia is taking this multilateral global endeavour particularly seriously due to the massive changes the country is undergoing as it develops economically.

“Ethiopia is one of the few countries that have submitted a very ambitious and conditional NDC to the UNFCCC,” says Zerihun Getu with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Finance and Economic Cooperation. “Ethiopia aims to cut 64 percent of emissions by 2030 and build a climate resilient and middle-income economy.”

Currently Ethiopia has a relatively low carbon footprint compared to many other countries, having not industrialised, but Zerihun notes why it is important to take action now.

“Projections indicate that with population and economic growth, Ethiopia’s level of emissions will grow significantly, from 150 million tonnes in 2010 to 450 million by 2030,” Zerihun tells IPS. “Hence Ethiopia should focus both on mitigation and adaptation measures in order to reduce emission as well as build resilience and reduce vulnerability to the impacts of climate change.”

Approved in October 2017, Ethiopia’s GCF-backed project will be implemented over the course of five years at a cost of USD50 million—with USD5 million co-financed by the government—to provide rural communities with  critical water supplies all year round and improve water management systems to address risks of drought and other problems from climate change.

The funding will go toward a three-pronged approach: Introducing solar-powered water pumping and small-scale irrigation, the rehabilitation and management of degraded lands around the water sources, and creating an enabling environment by raising awareness and improving local capacity.

Guidance on the project’s implementation is coming from the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), a treaty-based international organisation that promotes green growth: a balance of economic growth and environmental sustainability.

Climate change has a disproportionately worse impact on the lives and livelihoods of societies which depend on the natural environment for their day-to-day needs. In Ethiopia, about 80 percent of the population remain dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods.

Those who are subsistence farmers are especially vulnerable to shifting weather patterns that can result in severe water shortages, devastating food production and livelihoods.

When such natural disasters strike, the situation of vulnerable populations can quickly deteriorate into a food and nutrition crisis, meaning the poor, many of whom in Ethiopia are women, are disproportionately affected.

This is what the Ethiopian GCF project seeks to mitigate, hence its focus on improving economic and social conditions for women.  Over 50 percent of the project’s aimed for 1.3 million beneficiaries will be women, with 30 percent of beneficiary households being female-headed.

During the past three years, regions of Ethiopia have experienced terrible drought exacerbated by the ocean warming trend El Niño that is causing unusually heavy rains in some parts of the world and drought elsewhere.

While El Niño is a complex and naturally occurring event, scientific research suggests that global warming could be making this cyclical event occur more frequently and intensely.

Despite there being some scientific uncertainty about how the naturally occurring El Niño event and human-induced climate change may interact and modify each other, Ethiopia has experienced enough climate-related trouble so that its government doesn’t want to take any chances.

Hence Ethiopia is an example of an early adopter of green growth. In 2011 the country launched its Climate-Resilient Green Economy (CRGE), a strategy to achieve middle-income status while developing a green economy.

“The government’s goal is to create climate resilience within the context of sustainable development,” says Mitiku Kassa, Ethiopia’s state minister of agriculture and commissioner for its National Disaster Risk Management Commission. “Then, one day, we will be able to deal with drought without any appeals.”

In addition to challenges posed by El Niño, most of the world’s scientific community agrees that long-term significant changes in the earth’s climate system have occurred and are occurring more rapidly than in the past.

Furthermore, continued emissions into the earth’s atmosphere are projected to cause further warming and increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible effects on every continent, including increasing temperatures, greater rainfall variability with more frequent extremes, and changing the nature of seasonal rainfalls—all of which threaten Ethiopia’s agricultural backbone.

It’s not just scientists making such claims. Ethiopian pastoralists in their seventies and eighties who have lived with frequent droughts say the recent ones have been the worst in their lifetimes—and they aren’t alone in noticing worrying trends.

“While working in Central America, East Africa, and the Middle East, I’ve always talked to elder people, especially those in agriculture, and the message from them is consistent,” says Sam Wood, Save the Children’s humanitarian director in Ethiopia. “Weather patterns are becoming less predictable and when rain comes it is too much or too little.”

As of May 2018, the GCF portfolio has 76 projects worldwide worth USD12.6 billion with an anticipated equivalence of 1.3 billion tonnes of CO2 avoided and 217 million people achieving increased resilience.

“We’re working with GCF in Senegal and Tajikistan [and] we think their work will be vital,” the World Food Programme’s Challiss McDonough tells IPS. “WFP’s goal of ending hunger cannot be achieved without addressing climate change.”

But the GCF can only do so much. The overall bill just for empowering Ethiopia to effectively respond to climate change is estimated at USD150 billion, Zerihun notes, a sum that can only be achieved through “huge investment.”

“Ethiopia allocates its domestic resources for climate actions [but it] should also mobilise support from international communities including the GCF to realise its vision and achieve its NDC targets,” Zerihun says. “The GCF will make a significant contribution to Ethiopia’s vision through financing projects and programmes as well as through helping Ethiopia build capacity to mobilise other climate finance sources and leveraging other investment.”

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The post Ethiopia’s Struggle Against Climate Change Gets a Boost from Green Climate Fund appeared first on Inter Press Service.