Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

By Daud Khan and Leila Yasmine Khan
AMSTERDAM/ROME, Jun 1 2020 (IPS)

As the COVID-19 virus spread rapidly around the globe, so did various theories about what caused the pandemic. According to the standard scientific theory, the virus probably originated in bats and then crossed over to humans, probably via another intermediate host. It then spread rapidly across the globe, piggybacking on the international travel network.

While the mainstream scientific theory sufficed for some, a large number of people saw the pandemic as the work of cold-hearted military or industrial strategists. An equally large number of people saw it as some kind of divine or natural retribution for an increasingly recalcrinant human race. It’s interesting to look at these various alternative theories. It is even more interesting to speculate why they have such a strong hold among the public.

In the first of this two part article, we will look at conspiracy theories; in the second part, at the apocalyptic theories.

Why are conspiracy theories so popular? Why do they persist despite statements by the scientific community that the virus has natural origins and was not humanly manufactured? Why do the President and the Secretary of State of the most powerful nation on earth, with the best universities and research capabilities, continue to maintain that the whole thing was a Chinese plot with connivance of the World Health Organization?

At the start of the pandemic, the most popular candidate for the villain was the USA. According to this set of conspiracy theories – I use the word “set” deliberately, as there were many variants – the CIA had developed and released the virus. It was an easy and low cost way to limit China’s growing economic and political clout. The theory gained support as the next hotspot was Iran – another problematic country for the USA.

However, as the COVID-19 virus spread to other countries, the blame spotlight turned on the Chinese. It was the Chinese who had developed and released the virus to bring the USA and Europe to its knees, and usher in the biggest recession of the century. One objective was to impact western economic and military presence around the globe.

Another was to undermine the soft power of these countries as their democratic systems of governance and their traditions of open debate would inevitably lead to squabbling between and within countries – something that would show the limitations of western democracy in today’s globalized world. At the same time, the fall in stock prices around the world allowed Chinese investors to buy massive quantities of shares in US and European markets with discounts of 30% to 50%. And if all this was not convincing enough, one only had to ask: who is the world’s largest importer of oil and gas? Who stands to benefit most from the collapse of petroleum prices? China!

Of course, there are other candidates for the role of the villain in the COVID saga, including Big Pharma and Big Finance. According to first of these, the big pharmaceutical companies not only developed the virus but already have a vaccine ready.

They are only waiting for sales of standard medicines and medical supplies to peak before announcing the vaccine. They would then sit back and watch the money pouring in. A sub-plot in the big-pharma narrative is that the illness can easily be avoided, or even cured, by low cost interventions such as lemon juice, honey, garlic, hot water or the Artemisia plant. However, these low cost cures are not in the interest of the pharmaceutical companies. Big Pharma is therefore working with the medical profession to discredit such low cost therapies.

According to the second theory, it the big pension funds and insurance companies whose projected earnings and valuations have been badly eroded by the progressive increase in life expectancy. By targeting the old and chronically ill, COVID-19 has been a silver bullet for them. So surely they must be behind it.

Most recently the conspiracy theorists have also found a new villain. Bill Gates, who in a video several years ago – at the time of the Ebola crisis – talked about the risks of a global pandemic. Apparently, his goal is to place a computer chip inside each of us so that we can be monitored at all times. Why in the world Bill Gates would want to do such a thing remains unexplained.

But why are conspiracy theories so popular? Why do they persist despite statements by the scientific community that the virus has natural origins and was not humanly manufactured? Why do the President and the Secretary of State of the most powerful nation on earth, with the best universities and research capabilities, continue to maintain that the whole thing was a Chinese plot with connivance of the World Health Organization?

There is certainly a personality type that would choose a good conspiracy theory over other explanations any day. It is a way of demonstrating that they know more than others and that they can see through the smoke screens and disinformation fed to the general public. It is a way of asserting inserting intellectual superiority.

But in the case of COVID-19, there is also a huge amount of collective anxiety that feeds on a primordial fear of the unknown, of death and of economic deprivation. This anxiety is like a virus that lives in our minds and is spread through millions of messages on Facebook and WhatsApp, by dramatic images on TV, and by graphs and statistics in the print media.

Although this fear is universal, it has a particularly strong hold in Europe and the USA where consistent improvements over the last 50 years in living standards, health care and life expectancy has created a feeling of invincibility which COVID-19 has badly shaken.

This collective anxiety is much placated through having a clear target on whom to pin blame. The assumption is that by unmasking the villains and by punishing them, the problem will likely go away. Clearly this is what is happening in the USA and why so many believe whatever untruths the President and his team is feeding them. There is also a huge risk that populist political parties in Europe, as well as Asia, Africa and Latin America will also find it expedient to take the same tack: give us a chance and we will take strong and determined action that will solve the problem. This is a time to beware!

 

Daud Khan is a former United Nations official who lives between Italy and Pakistan. He holds degrees in Economics from the London School of Economics and Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a degree in Environmental Management from the Imperial College of Science and Technology.

Leila Yasmine Khan is an independent writer and editor based in the Netherlands. She has Master’s degrees in Philosophy and in Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric from the University of Amsterdam, as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy from the University of Rome (Roma Tre).

 

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The post COVID 19 – Conspiracy or Apocalypse? – Part I appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Kenya's Matrimonial Property Act, which is discriminatory towards women and inconsistent with the country's constitution, means few married women own land. Less than five percent of all land title deeds in Kenya are held jointly by women and only one percent of land titles are held by women alone. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Jun 1 2020 (IPS)

Ida Njeri was a civil servant with access to a Savings and Credit Cooperative Society (SACCO) through her employer, and her husband a private consultant in the information and communication sector, when she began taking low-interest loans from the cooperative so they could buy up land in Ruiru, Central Kenya. She’d willing done it. Part of their long-term plan together for having a family was that they would acquire land and eventually build their dream home. But little did Njeri realise that 12 years and three children later the law would stand against her right to owning the matrimonial property.

“As a private consultant, it was difficult for my husband to join a SACCO. People generally join SACCOs through their employer. This makes it easy to save and take loans because you need three people within your SACCO to guarantee the loan,” Njeri tells IPS.

“My husband had a savings bank account so we would combine my loans with his savings. By 2016, I had 45,000 dollars in loans. My husband would tell me the amount of money needed to purchase land and I would take out a loan,” she adds, explaining that her husband handled all the purchases.

By 2016 the couple had purchased 14 different pieces of land, each measuring an eighth of an acre. But last year, when the marriage fell apart, Njeri discovered that all their joint land was in her husband’s name.

“All along I just assumed that the land was in both our names. I never really thought about it because we were jointly building our family. Even worse, all land payment receipts and sale agreements are also in his name alone,” she says.

Worse still, there was little she can do about it within the current framework of the country’s laws.

Despite Article 45 (3) of the 2010 Constitution providing for equality during marriage and upon divorce, and despite the fact that  Njeri’s marriage was registered (effectively granting her a legal basis for land ownership under the Marriage Act 2014) there is another law in the country — the Matrimonial Property Act 2013 — which stands against her. 

More specifically, it is Section 7 of the act that states ownership of matrimonial property is dependent on the contributions of each spouse toward its acquisition.

• “Ownership of matrimonial property rests in the spouses according to the contribution of either spouses towards its acquisition, and shall be divided between the spouses if they divorce or their marriage is otherwise dissolved,” Section 7 states.  

Because Njeri had no proof of jointly purchasing the land, upon her divorce she is not entitled to it.

Hers is not an isolated case of married women struggling to ensure their land rights.

In 2018, the Kenya Land Alliance (KLA), an advocacy network dedicated to the realisation of constitutional provisions of women’s land rights as a means to eradicate poverty and hunger, and promote gender equality, in line with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), released an audit of land ownership after the disaggregation and analysis of approximately one third of the 3.2 million title deeds issued by the government between 2013 and 2017 — the highest number of title deeds issued in any regime.

Odenda Lumumba is a land rights activist and founder of KLA, which is a local partner for Deliver For Good, a global campaign that applies a gender lens to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and powered by global advocacy organisation Women Deliver. She explains that the data on land ownership is a pointer to the reality that gender disparities remain a concern, especially because of the intricate relationship between land tenure systems, livelihoods and poverty.

“There is very little progress towards women owning land. There are so many obstacles for them to overcome,” Lumumba tells IPS. 

• The KLA audit of land ownership found that only 103,043 titles or 10.3 percent of title deeds were issued to women compared to the 865,095 or 86.5 percent that went to men.

• Even greater gender disparities were found in terms of the actual land size. While men own 9,903,304 hectares in titled land, representing 97.76 percent of land, while women own 1.67 percent or 10,129,704 hectares of land during this five year period.
• Further, this audit found that men own 75 percent of land title deeds of all allocated land settlement schemes.

In 2018, the Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) in Kenya petitioned Kenya’s High Court, arguing that Section 7 of the Matrimonial Property Act was discriminatory towards women and inconsistent and in contravention of Article 45 (3) of the Constitution.

The court dismissed the petition, ruling out a blanket equal sharing of marital property as it would “open the door for a party to get into marriage and walk out of it in the event of divorce with more than they deserve”.

Within this context, less than five percent of all land title deeds in Kenya are held jointly by women and only one percent of land titles are held by women alone who are in turn disadvantaged in the manner in which they use, own, manage and dispose land, says FIDA-Kenya.

But as gender experts are becoming alarmed by the rising numbers of female headed households — 32 percent out of 11 million households based on government estimates — securing women’s land rights is becoming more urgent.

“The Matrimonial Property Act gives women the capacity to register their property but a majority of women do not realise just how important this is. Later, they struggle to access their property because they did not ensure that they were registered as owners,” Janet Anyango, legal counsel at FIDA-Kenya’s Access to Justice Programme, tells IPS. FIDA-Kenya is a premier women rights organisation that, for 34 years, has offered free legal aid to at least three million women and children. It is also another Deliver For Good/Women Deliver partner organisation in Kenya.

Anyango says that in law “the meaning of ‘contribution’ was expanded to include non-monetary contributions but it is difficult to quantify contribution in the absence of tangible proof. In the 2016 lawsuit, we took issue with the fact that the law attributes marital liabilities equally but not assets”.

• In 2016 FIDA-Kenya sued the office of the Attorney General with regards to act, stating the same issues of discrimination against women. 

In addition to the Matrimonial Property Act, laws such as the Law of Succession Act seek to cushion both surviving male and female spouses but are still skewed in favour of men as widows lose their “lifetime interest” in property if the remarry. And where there is no surviving spouse or children, the deceased’s father is given priority over the mother. 

Women Deliver recognises that globally women and girls have unequal access to land tenure and land rights, creating a negative ripple effect on development and economic progress for all.

“When women have secure land rights, their earnings can increase significantly, improving their abilities to open bank accounts, save money, build credit, and make investments in themselves, their families and communities,” Susan Papp, Managing Director of Policy and Advocacy at Women Deliver, tells IPS.

She says that applying a gender lens to access “to resources is crucial to powering progress for and with all during the COVID-19 pandemic, even as the world continues to work towards the SGDs”.

And even though marriage services at the Attorney General’s office have been suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as have all services at the land registries, women like Njeri will continue to fight for what they rightfully own.

 

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The post For Love or Land – The Debate about Kenyan Women’s Rights to Matrimonial Property appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Less than five percent of all land title deeds in Kenya are held jointly by women and only one percent of land titles are held by women alone. IPS investigates.

The post For Love or Land – The Debate about Kenyan Women’s Rights to Matrimonial Property appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Kabili-Sepilok Forest Reserve, Sabah, Borneo. Copyright: Dr. Lindsay F. Banin

By Bruno de Pierro
SÃO PAULO, Brazil, Jun 1 2020 (IPS)

Tropical forests can develop resistance to a warmer climate, but 71 per cent will come under threat in the next decade if global average temperatures reach two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a new study warns.

Forest-dependent communities and the global climate will be affected if tropical forests are further degraded, experts say.

Led by scientists at the University of Leeds and published in Science, the study involved 226 researchers from around the world. The cohort analysed carbon stock data in 590 permanent forest plots in South America, Africa, Asia and Australia, with most in the Amazon region.

The Amazon rainforest acts as a huge carbon sink, absorbing and storing carbon dioxide (CO2) and helping to cool global temperatures. Even under high temperatures, trees remove CO2 — a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming — from the atmosphere.

However, the ability to store high levels of carbon drops dramatically if the forest is exposed to average temperatures above 32.2 degrees Celsius, the researchers found.

 

Researchers measured diameters of thousands of trees across 24 tropical countries. This one is in the Brazilian Amazon forest.
Image credit: Erika Berenguer.

 

Sustainable development in tropical regions will be directly impacted if the biodiversity of tropical forests is altered by rising temperatures and they lose their ability to absorb carbon, says Luiz Aragão, head of the remote sensing division at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research and a co-author of the study.

“Understanding how climate change impacts carbon absorption in tropical forests can help us identify the most vulnerable areas where biomass loss can interfere with local economies and human development,” he says.

Plínio Barbosa de Camargo, a researcher at the Centre of Nuclear Energy in Agriculture at University of São Paulo and a study co-author, has been monitoring permanent plots in Santarém, in Brazil’s Amazon, for 20 years. His team monitors the growth of about 20,000 trees and measures the forest’s biomass and carbon balance.

“Understanding how climate change impacts carbon absorption in tropical forests can help us identify the most vulnerable areas where biomass loss can interfere with local economies and human development.”

Luiz Aragão, National Institute for Space Research, Brazil.

“The region we monitor still has the capacity to absorb carbon and recover after prolonged periods of drought,” he says.

“This gives room for different societies to continue investing in the development of products and services from biodiversity.”

But, the resilience potential of forests can only be achieved with proper climate change mitigation and solutions for the conservation and restoration of native vegetation, the researchers say.

“The results suggest that intact forests can withstand heating to some extent,” but for this to happen it is vital that forests remain intact, agronomist and study co-author Simone Aparecida Vieira, from the Centre for Environmental Studies and Research at São Paulo’s University of Campinas (Unicamp), tells SciDev.Net.

This requires reducing deforestation rates and the frequent fires associated with forest clearing, as well as mining, illegal logging and intensive low-productivity livestock farming.

Yet, it is unclear whether cooler forests in Asia and Africa will respond to global heating in the same way as those in South America or whether they can adapt in time, says Lara Kueppers, associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s energy and resources group, who did not take part in the study.

“I don’t have confidence that forests are going to be able to adjust on the time scale they will need to,” she says in a related Science commentary.

But, the research offers a good starting point to deepen knowledge about forests’ abilities to adapt to climate change, says biologist Ricardo Ribeiro Rodrigues from the Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture at the University of São Paulo, who was not involved in the study.

“The findings presented in the survey are encouraging because they show that forests do indeed have a certain resilience to warming. And this has been shown based on robust mathematical modelling,” he says.

However, Rodrigues warns that more research is necessary to understand how rising temperatures impact different plant species.

“The study deals with forests as a whole, but we know that each species reacts differently to global warming,” he says.

“It is important, therefore, that we identify which species are most resistant so that more effective reforestation actions can be put into practice.”

This story was originally published by SciDev.Net

The post Two-thirds of Tropical Forests ‘Under Threat in Next Decade’ appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: UNDP, Ghana

By Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori Panin Okyenhene
ACCRA Ghana, Jun 1 2020 (IPS)

The tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic and its associated challenges have thrown our world into chaos, with the virus destroying lives and livelihoods in its path.

The whole world is presently seized by the effects of the pandemic, but there is a silent crisis of equal measure that has long been ravaging lives, devastating livelihoods, destroying property and threatening the fate of our entire planet.

This is the global climate crisis.

Unlike COVID-19, climate change and its impacts are not novel processes. What is new is the severity, frequency and rapid rate of change laced with extreme events that are slowly becoming metaphors for human suffering and deprivation.

Incontrovertible evidence firmly anchored in science suggest that the climate crisis is reaching a tipping point, with huge and potentially irreversible damage to our planet, our economies and overall human security.

The World Meteorological Organisation states emphatically that the impact of climate change on our planet is ‘reaching a crescendo, with the past five years being the hottest on record’.

Our world cannot be in denial of the climate crisis any longer. COVID-19 is devastating thousands of lives and threatening millions, but the impacts of climate change are endangering the lives and livelihoods of billions of people.

The ongoing pandemic must be a wake-up call to our global community of the ultimate costs of inaction on the silent, but rapidly unfolding, catastrophic climate crisis.

The shock of the sudden onset coronavirus pandemic and the dreadful experience that the world is presently going through must laser-focus us all on the benefits of proactive action on climate change.

Against the lessons that the pandemic is painfully teaching us, it would be irresponsible to wait until the climate crisis reaches ‘pandemic’ levels for the world to act aggressively. We must take politics out of the climate crisis, embrace the evidence generated by science, and act decisively on climate change now.

Okyenhene Osagyefuo Amoatia Ofori Panin is the reigning king of Akyem Abuakwa, an ancient powerful kingdom in the Eastern region of Ghana. He is a Champion of the environment, taking a strong stance against environmental degradations.

As climate activist, Emily Atkins, aptly puts it ‘the pandemic is showing us that rejecting science doesn’t make the laws of nature go away’.

As with the coronavirus pandemic, climate change is a threat multiplier. It makes existing problems worse, creates new ones, makes a mockery of boundaries whilst striking with great force in rich and poor countries alike.

And crucially, dealing with the climate crisis now is in itself a mitigation action against future pandemics. Protecting the environment and addressing climate change is not about abstract emotionalism. It is about protecting people, saving lives and livelihoods and safeguarding our heritage.

As a traditional leader, I deem saving our heritage a non-negotiable goal, and I am determined to do exactly that.

The climate crisis is as much a global crisis as the on-going pandemic, and there are real parallels between the two. As the debilitating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are forcing changes in our ways of life and lifestyles, we must, with a sense of urgency, move from business as usual and confront the existential threat posed by the climate crisis head-on.

We must focus on, and accelerate actions on the necessary adjustments needed to safeguard our ecosystems, halt and reverse the effects of climate change, protect our planet and its future, as the Sustainable Development Goals enjoin us to do.

Although we have yet to win the war, our collective experience in fighting the coronavirus should serve as an inspiration and spur the needed changes and global actions.

The extraordinary cooperation in the global response to the pandemic, evidenced amongst others, in China sending critical supplies to the United States, the US donating ventilators to Europe, and Cuban doctors being sent to Italy to treat patients must serve as a shining example for global action on climate change.

It is manifestly clear that the effects of the virus, just as those of climate change, are not circumscribed to national boundaries, and that solidarity, whether in the context of a climate crisis or a health pandemic is about our shared humanity.

We must muster the same vigour, the equivalent political will and the bountiful energy that we are seeing in the battle against the pandemic to fight climate change.

As nations unveil trillions in stimulus packages to deal with the economic effects of the pandemic, environmental equity and environmental protection must be integral components to help build back better, and address the needs of millions of global citizens so vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Our aspirations and desires to address the climate crisis are right and those aspirations must be non-negotiable. But with the consequential lessons that the coronavirus pandemic is teaching us, we must be resolute in our resolve to move from aspirations to swift and robust actions.

We must pool and scale up our efforts to deal a mighty blow to climate change using all the worthy lessons that have emerged through the unfortunate and dreadful COVID-19 pandemic.

We must act now and do so with gusto, to protect the future of the planet and our shared humanity, as the cost of inaction to our common future, our joint heritage and our shared humanity is too dire to ponder.

The post The Consequential Effects of Covid-19 on the Climate Crisis appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori Panin Okyenhene is King of Akyem Abuakwa, Ghana

The post The Consequential Effects of Covid-19 on the Climate Crisis appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: Bigstock

By External Source
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, May 31 2020 (IPS)

Tobacco use kills more than 8 million people each year. Most adult smokers start smoking before the age of 20. This implies that if one can get through adolescence without smoking, the likelihood of being a smoker in adulthood is greatly reduced.

Preventing young people from becoming addicted to tobacco and related products is therefore key to a smoke-free future.

With the advent of novel tobacco products and the tobacco industry falsely marketing them as less harmful than their combustible counterparts, the adage “prevention is better than cure” has never been more important for governments to heed if we are to achieve a smoke-free future.

Here are five things that governments need to do to ensure that a smoke-free future is realised.

1. Raise taxes on tobacco products

Tobacco taxation is one of the most effective population-based strategies for decreasing tobacco consumption. On average, a 10% increase in the price of cigarettes reduces demand for cigarettes by between 4% and 6% for the general adult population.

Because they lack disposable income and have a limited smoking history, young people are more responsive to price increases than their adult counterparts. Young people’s price responsiveness is also explained by the fact that they are also more likely to smoke if their peers smoke. This suggests that an increase in tobacco taxes also indirectly reduces youth smoking by decreasing smoking among their peers.

2. Introduce 100% smoke-free environments

Smoke-free policies reduce opportunities to smoke and erode societal acceptance of smoking. Most countries have some form of smoke-free policy in place. But there are still many public spaces where smoking happens. Many of these places are frequented by young people – or example, smoking sections in nightclubs and bars – contributing to the idea that smoking is acceptable and “normal”.

Research from the United States shows that creating smoke-free spaces reduces youth smoking uptake and the likelihood of youth progressing from experimental to established smokers. In the United Kingdom, smoke-free places have been linked to a reduction in regular smoking among teenagers, and research from Australia finds that smoke-free policies were directly related to a drop in youth smoking prevalence between 1990 and 2015. By adopting 100% smoke-free policies governments can denormalise smoking and turn youth away from tobacco and related products.

3. Adopt plain packaging and graphic health warnings

The tobacco industry uses sleek and attractive designs to market its dangerous products to young people. All tobacco products should therefore be subject to plain packaging and graphic health warnings so that their attractive packaging designs do not lead youth to underestimate the harm of using these products. Currently 125 countries require graphic images on the packaging of tobacco products. Countries like South Africa that rely on a text warning message are far behind the curve. Plain packaging on tobacco products has been adopted in 13 countries to date and, in January 2020, Israel became the first country to apply plain packaging to e-cigarettes.

4. Outlaw tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship

Traditional advertising and promotion of tobacco products has been banned in most parts of the world. But the tobacco industry has developed novel ways of keeping its products in the public eye.

Some common strategies used by the industry to target youth include hiring “influencers” to promote tobacco and nicotine products on social media, sponsoring events, and launching new flavours that are appealing to youth, such as bubble gum and cotton candy, which encourages young people to underestimate the potential harm of using them. Evidence also shows how the tobacco industry uses point-of-sale marketing to target children by encouraging vendors to position tobacco and related products near sweets, snacks and cooldrinks, especially in outlets close to schools.

Governments need to outlaw these tactics and impose hefty fines on tobacco companies that make any attempt to circumvent the law.

5. Educate young people

Given that tobacco kills half of its long-term users, the tobacco industry needs to get young people addicted to its products to ensure its survival. Young people need to be made aware of this. Governments should launch counter-advertising campaigns that educate young people on the tactics employed by the industry to target them so that they do not fall prey to them.

Sam Filby, Research Officer, Research on the Economics of Excisable Products,, University of Cape Town and Corné van Walbeek, Professor at the School of Economics and Principal Investigator of the Economics of Tobacco Control Project, University of Cape Town

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

The post Young People are Key to a Nicotine-free Future: Five Steps to Stop them Smoking appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Traveling man: the Goodwill Ambassador shares a joke with two residents of a leprosarium in Krantau, Uzbekistan during a visit in 2013.

By External Source
May 29 2020 (IPS-Partners)

 
Warm greetings from Sasakawa Health Foundation in Tokyo.

The 100th Issue of the WHO Goodwill Ambassador’s Newsletter has been published. Read special interviews with the Goodwill Ambassador and the UN Special Rapporteur on leprosy, and check out the Timeline of all that has happened since the first issue.

My Journey Continues

I started this newsletter in April 2003 to share information about the fight against leprosy. This marks the 100th issue. Over the years I have reported my views on leprosy elimination and activities taking place around the world. As I write, we are in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic. I commend the tireless efforts of medical personnel and hope the outbreak will be contained as quickly as possible.

As Goodwill Ambassador I have visited some 100 countries and attach particular importance to three points: 1) going to see the situation for myself, listening directly to what people have to say and clarifying what the issues are; 2) making use of newspapers, TV, radio, social and other media to communicate correct information about the disease to people around the world; and 3) meeting with presidents and prime ministers to persuade them to actively tackle leprosy.

My motto is “knowledge and practice go together.” While I respect the insights and information contained in reports, I believe there is no substitute for checking the situation in the field with my own eyes as this represents a more direct route to finding real solutions. Therefore, I have made a point of traveling to remote areas where experts have not been in the belief that my words will be more persuasive and catch people’s attention.

Yohei Sasakawa visits Office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2003 to raise leprosy as human rights issue, the start of repeated visits to Geneva.

In my lifetime I have met with 458 current and former presidents and prime ministers to explain about leprosy and request their cooperation. That number runs into thousands if I add ministers, deputy ministers and governors. Compared to diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis or HIV/AIDS, there are far fewer cases of leprosy. Unless you regularly engage with the person at the top, chances are the budget for the leprosy program will be cut.

What has left a lasting impression on me are my encounters with persons affected by leprosy who have found the strength to overcome the challenges they face. All over the world I have met individuals existing in unimaginably desperate circumstances, abandoned by their families and living on their own for many years. For some, there has been no other recourse but to begging to survive.

But in India, Indonesia, Brazil, Ethiopia and many other countries, persons affected by leprosy are making their voices heard and becoming increasingly organized. What they have to say carries more weight and is more persuasive than if I were to make 1,000 speeches. The role they have to play in advancing our efforts against the disease is particularly important.

Global Forum of People’s Organizations on Hansen’s Disease, Manila, Philippines in 2019. Participants underscore that Hansen’s disease is not just a health issue but at an issue of human rights.

As Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, I have worked with governments over the years to achieve the numerical target that was set by the WHO of eliminating leprosy as a public health problem, where elimination was defined as a prevalence rate of less than one case per 10,000 population. But achieving ‘elimination’ did not equate to no more leprosy. Elimination was a milestone.

In recent years, “Zero Leprosy” has been put forward as the goal. Many people have asked me if this is possible. My answer is that it doesn’t matter where the goal is; what is important is to keep heading toward it. No matter how long the tunnel, if you keep going you will eventually see the light at the end. Everyone just needs to continue their efforts.

My dream is for an inclusive society in which not only persons affected by leprosy but also persons with disabilities, minorities and other vulnerable groups suffering from social discrimination all have a place.

Hence this journey I am embarked on will continue. I do not know if the goal of zero leprosy and zero discrimination will be achieved in my lifetime, but I believe it will be realized one day and so I will continue to do my best to help us get there.

— Yohei Sasakawa, WHO Goodwill Ambassador

(This is an extended version of the Goodwill Ambassador’s Message appearing in the print edition of Issue #100 of the newsletter.)

IN THIS ISSUE

Message:
My Journey Continues

Special Interview I:
Our Goal Is Not Yet in Sight, Yohei Sasakawa, Goodwill Ambassador

Timeline:
Reviewing developments in leprosy over the course of 100 issues of the newsletter

Special Interview II:
Encouraging Signs, Alice Cruz, UN Special Rapporteur on leprosy

News:
Leprosy and COVID-19

The post Elimination of Leprosy appeared first on Inter Press Service.

COVID-19 has resulted in hunger and famine at historic proportions, with some 60 million people pushed into extreme poverty and half the global workforce -- 1.6 billion people -- left without work, and $8.5 trillion in global output lost. The setback in attaining the sustainable development goals (SDGs) has been tremendous and unless global leaders act now, the devastation will be unimaginable. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, May 29 2020 (IPS)

Unless global leaders act now, the COVID-19 pandemic will cause unimaginable suffering and devastation around the world, the Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres said yesterday, May 28. He painted a picture of hunger and famine at historic proportions, with some 60 million people pushed into extreme poverty and half the global workforce — 1.6 billion people — left without work, and $8.5 trillion in global output lost. 

Guterres was speaking at an online event as world leaders and economists gathered at a high-level meeting to call for global solidarity and an acute focus on the interest of developing countries in the next steps for reviving the declining global economy. 

The talk, which focused on generating solutions to the development emergency resulting from the global pandemic, was co-convened by the U.N. Secretary-General, Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

All three leaders highlighted the need to keep the concerns of developing and underdeveloped countries as a priority in the decision-making process. 

Guterres laid out six key areas of focus that need to be addressed going forward: 

• enhance global liquidity;
• preventing debt crises; 
• engaging with private creditors on joint debt relief efforts; 
• global financial systems and sustainable development goals; 
• putting an end to illicit financial flows; and 
• rebuilding in improved manners.

“Many developing and even middle-income countries are highly vulnerable and already in debt distress – or will soon become so, due to the global recession,” Guterres said, adding that alleviating debt should be considered for middle-income countries in addition to Least Developed Countries.  

The Secretary-General further lauded the preparedness shown by the Caribbean and Pacific islands’ “early and decisive action” that ensured them protection from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Holness highlighted the need for a “large-scale, comprehensive multilateral effort” to address the financial fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“We are determined to support countries, particularly those most in need,” Holness said. “Our goal is to not only relieve the hardship they are currently experiencing, but to enable them to recover better.”

Trudeau echoed the same thoughts, and echoed the notion that keeping intact the economies of developed countries are beneficial for developing countries who may depend on them. 

“Our citizens need to have confidence in international institutions that leave no one behind and are capable of overcoming global challenges,” Trudeau said. “We know that jobs and businesses in each of our countries depend on the health and stability of economies elsewhere.”

David Malpass, President of the World Bank Group, pointed out that the COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown of developed economies will result in poverty for 60 million people, highlighting issues such as reduced incomes for migrant workers and a drop in remittance flows. 

“Wide spillover from the pandemic and the shutdown in advanced economies hit the poor and vulnerable, women, children, and healthcare workers hardest, deepening the inequality from the lack of development and making the health crisis even worse.” 

He announced a “milestone” they reached last week, having approved their emergency health operations which is now running in over 100 developing countries embedded in this programme and framework for finance.

Going forward, he said, the team is taking up new support programmes that “in coming weeks will help developing countries overcome the pandemic and reclaim focus on growth and sustainable development”. 

Dr Donald Kaberuka, Special Envoy from the African Union, who also spoke at a panel afterwards, warned against the world resorting to an individualistic approach as they reel from the economic collapse of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“After the global financial crisis, every country went back to address their own problems. Global solidarity declined very quickly,” Kaberuka said. “We can’t afford to let this happen this time.”

Holness further announced that the next step will bring together the government, international financial institutions and other key actors, to play their role: to create a plan based on the issues discussed at the high-level meeting, to report back to their co-conveners three times over the course of the rest of the year. 

 

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UNICEF installation on the North Lawn at the UN Headquarters in New York highlights the grave scale of child deaths in armed conflicts during 2018. Credit: UN News/Elizabeth Scaffidi

By Dragica Mikavica
NEW YORK, May 29 2020 (IPS)

On February 26 this year, 15 South Sudanese children were released from armed groups and handed over to civilian child protection actors, including UNICEF and UNMISS, UN’s peacekeeping operation in South Sudan, who were able to facilitate the children’s safe return to their families.

Just a few months earlier, MONUSCO’s Child Protection team had secured the release of 62 children, also from armed groups, in the restive South Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

These types of releases only happen due to UN teams’ proactive advocacy and dialogue with all parties to the conflict around the delicate issue of protecting children recruited, used or deprived of their liberty, which requires specialized skills, consistent presence and sustained engagement.

The ongoing worldwide pandemic complicates the already sensitive process of removal of children from armed groups and other parties to the conflict, which already requires trained professionals and dedicated resources to ensure their children’s safety and well-being.

For instance, temporary transit centers for released children need to be properly equipped and sanitized to protect staff and children from infections – and all that in areas where already securing running water and functioning sanitation facilities is a major challenge.

Fortunately, for the most part, UN peacekeeping operations are equipped with dedicated child protection staff including Senior Child Protection Advisers and Child Protection Officers.

Many of these staff are deemed essential during the ongoing COVID-19 lockdowns, but these specialized posts are in constant jeopardy from being reduced or cut down by UN Member States.

The process of cutting happens far away from the peacekeeping operations themselves. It happens in the UN’s budget committee in New York every June.

 

Credit: United Nations

 

This year, before the usual bargaining process over missions’ Child Protection budgets and staffing occurs, the COVID-19 emergency should serve as a reminder to Member States of why this should not happen under any, especially these, circumstances.

In their race to cut costs and reduce budgets in UN peacekeeping missions over the last five years, United States and China have been known to negotiate over bulk dollar amounts and the more controversial themes like gender, human rights and protection.

What is less known is that for instance, Child Protection sections occupy .03 percent of most mission budgets where these mandates exist, so the savings are minuscule while the political cost to children is high.

For more than 20 years, the Security Council has been mandating UN peacekeeping operations with a specialized child protection mandate to be jointly implemented by UN civilian, military and police peacekeepers.

The core of the mandate has been documentation of the grave violations against children and dialogue with armed groups for the purposes of ending and preventing these violations.

Advocates and supportive countries already fear the impact that a severe restriction of movement due to COVID-19 may have on the UN’s ability to monitor and report on violations, as well as on the Child Protection staff’s capacity to carry on their outreach to armed groups.

This creates an urgent imperative for Member States to provide Child Protection teams in peacekeeping operations with sufficient human and financial resources to overcome these restrictions.

COVID-19 emergency further complicates the process of reintegrating children and child protection actors need to be equipped for accepting future releases of children, making resources even more indispensable.

The child protection staff are currently relying almost exclusively on technology to conduct remote monitoring of the violations and needed advocacy with parties to the conflict.

While often being the only entry point with armed groups and the communities themselves, these civilian child protection staff on- and off- UN compounds must be equipped with basic materials and technology, including internet connectivity, SIM cards and cell phones, to ensure the implementation of the mandate bestowed upon them by the Security Council.

Next month, Secretary-General António Guterres will present his 2020 report on children and armed conflict to the UN Security Council, noting violations across 20 country situations for calendar year 2019.

To overcome the already anticipated risks to the UN’s ability to monitor, report and respond to violations in face of COVID-19, donors and Member States should pay particular attention to ensuring that UN missions have adequately resourced stand-alone Child Protection functions.

Otherwise, the Secretary-General’s 2021 annual report on grave violations of children’s rights next year is poised to be slim and the UN Security Council stands a chance of losing track of the picture of what is happening to children in war-affected countries.

This monitoring forms the basis of the UN’s ability to hold perpetrators to account, for example through its action plans signed with parties to conflict to end and prevent grave violations.

Now is the time to boost, not reduce, this capacity if governments are serious about protecting children in conflict.

 

*Dragica Mikavica is Senior Advocacy Adviser, Save the Children. She has spent the last six years advocating rights of children, affected by conflict, through the UN, and is currently working for Save the Children in New York. She grew up in Bosnia during its civil war, in the early 1990s.

 

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Excerpt:

The United Nations commemorates International Children’s Day on June 1

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Regional efforts to control the spread of COVID-19 have so far proven successful. Image Credit: Pacific Community

By William W. Ellis
TORONTO, May 29 2020 (IPS)

By now, the impact of COVID19 on our daily lives has been well documented, especially in advanced economies. Anxiety about the future continues to grow everywhere. Much of the corporate news coverage we consume has focused on the toll this pandemic will take on mainland countries. Often neglected, however, is the unique position Pacific Island States find themselves in.

Globally, there are close to 6 million confirmed cases of COVID19. According to the Pacific Community (SPC), there are 292 cases of the virus across its membership – a truly small number, considering Papua New Guinea’s population of 8.6 million people. Indeed, many of the SPC’s members are seemingly untouched by the global pandemic – as of May 6th, for example, American Samoa had no cases of the virus at all.

Despite the current picture, the Pacific Islands share unique challenges. Small in size, geographically remote, vulnerable to extreme environmental shock, and limited in economies of scale, these islands could be devastated by COVID19.

Over 80% of Papua New Guinea’s population, for example, reside in rural regions where health care infrastructure is limited. Clinics frequently run out of supplies and 4,000 nurses recently went on strike due to a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE). In the outer islands and in rural villages across the Pacific, basic services and access to intensive care or fully equipped hospitals is impossible. As reported in The Guardian, Vanuatu only has two ventilators for a population of 300,000 people. Only a few Pacific nations can test effectively for COVID19 and processing samples through Australia, New Zealand or the United States may delay results.

Infectious diseases and non-communicable diseases are also a worrisome factor – the Pacific has the world’s highest levels of Type 2 diabetes and suffer from exceptionally high levels of obesity. These chronic conditions tend to place people in death’s path when exposed to the virus.

Samoan nurses on duty during national measles outbreak. Credit: Pacific Community

Furthermore, Pacific Island culture revolves around large extended families, exacerbating the risk of community transmission. Social isolation may have worked in large, industrial nations, but is exceedingly difficult to implement in the Pacific diaspora. And the U.N. recently warned that misinformation about the virus could be another deadly risk for these people. A high-profile malpractice scandal in 2018 destroyed public trust in the Samoan health care system, contributing to low vaccination rates during a 2019 measles outbreak. The mistrust was also stoked by anti-vaccination misinformation campaigners overseas.

The economic impact of this global crisis is already being felt in the Pacific as well. Reliant on the export of commodities to shuttered buyers overseas, some countries face massive challenges as demand crashes. Travel and tourism – a principal economic driver – have come to a screeching halt, and countries like Fiji and Vanuatu could see their GDP fall by almost 50%. Unemployment figures are likely to be staggering as well, as close to 40% of the latter’s workforce is dependent on tourism.

Dr. Stuart Minchin, Director-General SPC. Credit: Pacific Community

There is a silver lining to all these issues. According to Dr. Stuart Minchin, Director General of the Pacific Community (SPC), the region is no stranger to disasters and challenges, having endured cyclones and the recent measles epidemic. In a recent interview he suggested that the community has “very good regional mechanisms in place to help countries deal with these issues, and more importantly to recover from these issues when they occur.”

The SPC is the principal scientific and technical organization in the Pacific region. An international development organization, owned and governed by its 26 country and territory members, the SPC’s mission is to work for the well-being of Pacific people through effective and innovative application of science and knowledge, guided by a deep understanding of Pacific Island contexts and cultures.

Working closely with the World Health Organization (WHO) in the region, the SPC has been supporting countries through this global crisis. In Dr. Minchin’s words, “with this invisible enemy we’re facing, we’re only as strong as our weakest link, so we have to work together as a region to make sure we can tackle this crisis together.”

“It is important to recognize that this crisis is not going to be over quickly. The health emergency may pass, but there will likely be an economic impact on local economies in the region over quite an extensive period of time. It is therefore really important that we help the countries and territories plan for that.

It is not going to reduce the importance of anything SPC does. In fact, the importance of the work that we do is going to be heightened because the countries will have to deal with challenges in terms of food security, access to water and sanitation, education, livelihoods and the continuing impacts of climate change. There are going to be risks around social and human rights issues as well, so we really need to be focused on how we help countries face these potential crises.”

The approach taken by the SPC reflects the Pacific region’s familial culture and fortitude. So far, the region has warded off the virus by imposing strict quarantines and taking advantage of their isolation from the rest of the world. For example, the Marshall Islands was one of the first countries in the world to impose a travel ban in January. And whilst Samoa’s health system is still strained in the aftermath of the measles outbreak, it has been a clear influence on the region, prompting swift reaction to the threat of COVID19.

As Dr. Minchin has said, “Pacific Countries have done a wonderful job in acting quickly and decisively to protect us but making a difference on how we act and interact every day is in our hands.”

 

 

 

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Protest against anti-abortion law in Opole, Poland. Credit: Iga Lubczańska.

By External Source
BEIRUT / GENEVA, May 28 2020 (IPS)

Health systems around the world are prioritising health care services and equipment to treat people diagnosed with Covid-19, which means that many procedures deemed to be elective and non-essential are being suspended or simply not provided. Abortion, for instance, has been categorised as a non-essential health service by some States, while others have removed certain restrictions to accessing abortion.

To find out more about the current state of women and girls’ reproductive rights, and how activists are responding, CRIN spoke with Paola Salwan Daher, the Senior Global Advocacy Advisor at the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Some countries are trying to impose restrictions on access to abortion, including the US and Poland. Can you tell us more about these measures, and how is the Center for Reproductive Rights and its partners responding?

The Covid-19 response has created a lot of violations of sexual and reproductive health rights, including in the US where we are seeing a lot of bills being pushed to try to restrict abortions. States like Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Idaho and others have decided that abortion is a non-essential health service. That is something that we are challenging in court.

In the majority of cases courts have sided with us, but it has happened that courts haven’t. We continue pushing against these restrictions because we are talking about States that already have very shaky access to abortion with very limited options for women and very few clinics that have remained open.

In Europe, Poland is using the pandemic to further a very conservative agenda and is instrumentalising the crisis to cut down on women’s rights. Our partners there have raised the alarm because the parliament was set to discuss two harmful bills: one of them was looking at removing a ground to access abortion, another is looking at criminalising providers of sexual reproductive rights services.

Online advocacy is an issue in Poland because it was the mass mobilisation of women in the streets that was able to stop the bills previously. There’s a reason why the government is reactivating these bills now, as it’s not possible for women to be present on the streets.

 

Has it been happening elsewhere?

We know that there were instances of hospitals in Sao Paolo, Brazil that are not categorising abortions as an essential medical service. It’s also happening in other countries but it’s been less documented than cases in the US and Poland.

You also have very unhelpful speeches made by people in power like the President of El Salvador who decided to reiterate that he is against abortion while commenting on the crisis. Another example is the Pope coming out and stating that he wants to protect the world from war and abortion. Surely they have other priorities they should be focusing on instead of policing women’s bodies.

There are also good examples where States are saying that abortion is an essential health service. In France, activists have been able to push the goverment to extend the [time] limit to access medical abortion, extending it from seven to nine weeks in response to the delay in accessing services because of how the health system is overwhelmed by Covid-19 cases. In the UK, they are also facilitating access to medical abortion via tele-medicine.

 

In your opinion, why is abortion seen as a non-essential procedure?

Where there have been attempts at taking off abortion from the list of essential services, it has been done mainly in places where abortion access was already restricted and the Covid-19 crisis provided an excellent political opportunity to further restrict access. Drugs used for medical abortion are listed as essential medicines by the World Health Organization (WHO), [which] reiterated the message contained in the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), that every woman has the recognised human right to decide freely and responsibly, without coercion and violence, the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. Access to legal and safe abortion is essential for the realisation of these rights. Not recognising the essential character of access to abortion care is to go against international human rights law and WHO guidance.

 

How is the Covid-19 pandemic impacting other areas of your work? And how were you able to respond?

We are also seeing violations of the right to maternal health care. Under the pretext of the Covid-19 response, some hospitals are denying women birth partners despite [the] WHO’s recommendation that there are better maternal health and infant health outcomes when women have the ability to have a partner [present] when they are giving birth. We have successfully pushed the United Nations’ Special Procedures to issue a statement speaking to these issues.

We have also seen instances of scheduling unnecessary c-sections, sometimes going against the wishes of the person, or discharging women earlier than they would normally, saying it’s a measure to avoid contamination. It’s a very fine balance between the excuses given of wanting to protect women and infants and punishing women and curtailing their rights. What we really should be interrogating is the state of health systems and why they are built in a way that countries cannot respond to a pandemic without curtailing women’s rights.

 

Have you seen anything specific to girls?

No, not that I have heard of. The issue with girls is that whenever there’s a restrictive legal framework with respect to abortion, for them it’s even worse. Even when the abortion law for women isn’t very restrictive, for girls there are always additional barriers because of their age, like third party authorisation, which contravenes legal obligations of States under human rights law. One of the recommendations that came out of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment on children’s rights during adolescence is that States should include a presumption of legal capacity of adolescents to access sexual reproductive services.

 

We don’t often hear about reproductive rights explicitly in terms of children’s rights. Why might that be?

Human rights standards are very clear on the right to sexual and reproductive health being applicable to both women and girls (see the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights General Comment 22). Also as per the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, General Comment 20, “The risk of death and disease during the adolescent years is real, including from preventable causes such as childbirth, unsafe abortions, road traffic accidents, sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, interpersonal injuries, mental ill health and suicide, all of which are associated with certain behaviours and require cross-sectoral collaboration.”

Girls have sexual and reproductive rights because they are sexual beings that will have sex, might want to get pregnant, but also might be at a higher risk of violence, rape and sexual abuse, that would require access to sexual and reproductive information and services.

The reason why some are reluctant to recognise girls’ reproductive rights is because of pervasive stereotypes that cast girls as non-sexual persons, or who at least shouldn’t be having sex. These stereotypes are deeply harmful and refuse to take into account girls’ agency, right to bodily autonomy, as well as the need for accountability when girls’ sexual and reproductive rights are violated.

 

Even though the answer to this question may be evident, can you explain why governments are trying to restrict women and girl’s access to reproductive rights?

It’s this willingness to control women’s bodies. Reproductive justice and women’s right to bodily autonomy is one of the foundations of women’s equality. When a woman is able to decide for herself how many children she wants to have – if [any] at all – and the spacing of these children and with whom she wants to have them, it puts her at the same level as a man.

She will then want the same rights, which is a problem for the establishment. It’s social control over women to make sure that we are continuing to provide free reproductive labour, we continue to be the primary caregiver of children, thus limiting our ability to take up more of a productive role and more community and political roles. The rise of fundamentalism and of populism and the conservative idea that women and their bodies need to be controlled along with gender stereotypes are the root causes of restrictions to reproductive rights.

 

Do you believe that governments will increase these regressive proposals/measures?

In times of crisis it’s women and marginalised groups that are the worst hit and primary target of restrictive policies. It might very well be that we see an increase of the backlash that we have been witnessing on women’s rights for the past couple of years because of the crisis. It’s also an opportunity for women and marginalised groups because the workers on the frontlines are disproportionately women. Reproductive health work is the kind of work that is holding societies together.

We’re not in need of bankers, we’re not in need of people in advertising right now, we are actually in need of people who provide care work and health work. These people are disproportionately women and I see a window of opportunity for women and marginalised groups to organise and mobilise because they’re the worst hit. I see a window of opportunity to ask for changes.

 

Sabine Saliba is Regional Advisor for the Middle East and North Africa at CRIN – Child Rights International Network and is based in Lebanon.  

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Head of the Department for the Fight Against Smuggling and Human Trafficking, Abdiwakil Abdullahi Mohamud told IPS that pointed out that it was not possible to control all Somalia's borders as they had limited resources available. Credit: Shafi’i Mohyaddin Abokar/IPS

By Shafi’i Mohyaddin Abokar
MOGADISHU, May 28 2020 (IPS)

While simultaneously suffering from the coronavirus pandemic, flooding and a locust crisis, Somalia, could well see a rise in the number of people who are susceptible to human trafficking.

According to the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the rainy season in Gu resulted in twice the average rainfall, causing floods across this East African nation, affecting almost a million people and displacing over 400,000 people. 

“As more people find themselves in vulnerable circumstances as a result of displacement from floods, drought and conflict, it is assumed that some of them are likely to seek “greener pastures” it is anticipated that in this state of vulnerability they could become susceptible to human trafficking and exploitation,” Isaac Munyae, Programme Manager for Migrant Protection and Assistance at the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) Somalia, told IPS over email.

This Horn of Africa nation is considered a source, transit and destination country for trafficking in the region and each year a unknown number of migrants pass through the country’s borders. According to Federal Government of Somalia (FGS) officials, trafficking has been rampant in the country for decades.

“Many Somalis are trafficked across the borders and are often moving along the southern and northern routes through Sudan, South Sudan and Kenya. On the other hand there are some Somalis  and a lot of Ethiopians travelling to Yemen along the eastern route that pass through Somalia and also fall prey to exploitation,” Munyae said.

The IOM added that the COVID-19 outbreak — Somalia has some 1,711 confirmed cases as of May 27 — “poses an additional challenge in an already fragile context where it may further hinder access to basic services, leaving the population highly vulnerable”. 

• According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, the country has some 2.6 million displaced people. 

• Since the start of this year, more than 220,000 Somalis were internally displaced because of drought and climate-related disasters, including 137,000 due to conflict.

• And in March and April, more than 50,000 people were forced to flee their homes as operations against the Islamic insurgent group, Al Shabab, resumed in Lower Shabelle.

With continued political and food insecurity, and the second-longest coastline in Africa after Madagascar (3,333 kilometres) which is difficult to patrol, the U.N.-backed FGS said it is doing its utmost to end human trafficking. 

“Somalia has a very long coastline and as I am speaking to you, we don’t have the capacity to control all of it, but our police maritime unit who have close cooperation with other forces in the country are always engaged in routine operations using speed boats, but to fully control such a long coastline needs much capacity than we currently have,” the head of the Department for the Fight Against Smuggling and Human Trafficking, Abdiwakil Abdullahi Mohamud, told IPS.

Mohamud and Somali parliament member Mohamed Ibrahim Abdi both lamented the lack of an existing human trafficking law.

“Human trafficking is a big problem which must be tackled, but I can confirm that Somali parliament hasn’t yet a human trafficking law. We recognise the importance of a law, but right now there is nothing on the table, I hope we will get the law in place in the future, I cannot say when,” Abdi, told IPS.

However, the federal state of Puntland has a human trafficking act in place, which requires enforcement. While in the breakaway region of Somaliland, “a referral mechanisms for supporting victims of human trafficking was developed and adopted this year,” said Munyae. 

In December, the FGS and IOM signed a cooperation agreement where “IOM proposes to work with the government in establishment of appropriate legal frameworks and referral mechanisms in collaboration with other UN and I/NGO partners,” Munyae told IPS.

There are no official figures of trafficking in Somalia.

• According to Mixed Migration Centre, in May 2019 there was an increase of 41 percent of the number of people migrating from Somalia to Yemen.
• Those migrants were from Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya. The center said that in April 2019 alone some 18,904 Somali and Ethiopian migrants were recorded to have arrived in Yemen.

Mohamud said his department developed a close cooperation with the Department of Immigration and has so far been able to end the trafficking of people through airports and sea ports.

However, he pointed out that it was not possible to control all land borders as they had limited resources available.

According to Mohamud, his department prevented thousands of young Somali men and women from being trafficked out of the country since it was established three years ago. But he is mindful that people previously saved from trafficking could once again become susceptible.

“We do not have the financial capacity to create jobs for them, but we teach them some skills and we then hand them over to their families. That is what we are able to do for them at the moment,” he said, adding that high unemployment meant young Somalis were vulnerable to human traffickers.

• According to a figure released by the International Labour Organisation in 2019, the youth unemployment rate in Somalia was 24.89 percent.

Munyae added that additional factors that resulted in susceptibility to human trafficking included, “poverty as a result of loss in livelihoods caused by displacements for whatever reason, family pressures, social factors such as child marriages and forced labour and customary practices and lack of appropriate legal frameworks for protecting the rights of mobile population”.

However, Muna Hassan Mohamed, the chairlady of Somali Youth Cluster, believes that many youth are risking their lives in the hands of human traffickers as they are promised dual nationality.

“Of course, the unemployment and insecurity are very big problems that we can’t deny, but the main factor that drives young Somalis to be exploited by human traffickers is what I can call [the passports].

“When I say passports, I mean European, American, Canadian or Australian passports, because if you are a citizen of any of these countries, then it is easier for you to be an MP, a minister or get a well-paid job in Somalia,” she told IPS, adding that most Somali parliament members, government ministers, general directors and other key staffers are all dual citizens.

“Almost every well-paid job in Somali government’s institutions has been taken by Somalis with foreign passports, while international NGO’s in the country do not have an equal opportunity policy when employing Somali nationals,” she said explaining that those Somalis with dual citizenship were paid more than locals. 

Meanwhile, Omar Ahmed Tahriib-diid, who irregularly migrated to Europe in 2014, wants to spare others the hardships he faced.

Tahriib-diid, who now lives in the relatively peaceful Puntland State northeast of Somalia, said he decided to return to his native region.

“Every day I witnessed people dying of hunger or being tortured to death by the cruel human traffickers. We always hear in the news that migrants drowned at sea, but the underreported thing is that many more die even before reaching the sea,” Tahriib-diid told IPS of what he experienced when he left the country, travelling through Sudan and Libya.

“In Sudan they dealt with us well, but I can say that there was a widespread brutality in Libya which I can describe as a hell on earth,” he said.

Eventually, he made his way to Germany where he tried for an entire year and had been unable to get a job. Upon his return to Somalia, he landed a job as the regional coordinator for Sanaag region at the Ministry of Justice in Puntland State.

Now he remains engaged in awareness programmes and “succeeded to prevent many young people from risking their lives. Some of them are now running their own business or secured jobs through my awareness campaigns with the help from the government”.

** Additional reporting by Nalisha Adams in Bonn.

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

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

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The post Triple Emergencies of COVID-19, Flooding & Locusts Makes Somalia Susceptible to Human Trafficking appeared first on Inter Press Service.

George Mahuku, IITA plant pathologist and lead author of the paper.

By External Source
May 28 2020 (IPS-Partners)

A paper published by a team led by scientists from IITA was among the top 10% most downloaded of all papers published between January 2018 and December 2019 in Wiley’s Plant Pathology journal.

The research team received the news in a congratulatory message and an online certificate from the Journal. Part of the message stated: “We are excited to share that your research, published in Plant Pathology, is among the top 10% most downloaded papers! What it means: Among work published between January 2018 and December 2019, yours received some of the most downloads in the 12 months following online publication. Your research generated immediate impact and helped to raise the visibility of Plant Pathology.”

The open-source paper, “Sources of resistance in Musa to Xanthomonas campestris pv. musacearum, the causal agent of banana xanthomonas wilt” published on 17 September 2018, announced a breakthrough in the search for banana varieties that are resistant to the lethal bacterial banana wilt disease. It proved wrong the belief that all banana varieties in the Great Lakes region are susceptible to the condition and provided hope in the banana breeding efforts for varieties resistant to the disease—one of the most effective ways to control the disease.

Victor Manyong, the IITA hub director, congratulated the team, noting that this was an indication of the quality of science generated by the team and the potential impact of the work to address the challenges facing agriculture productivity for smallholder banana farmers in the region.

The findings of the paper are significant for smallholder farmers in the Great Lakes region of Africa where banana is an important food and staple crop as its production has been greatly affected by the bacterial banana wilt disease.

The bacterial banana wilt disease, which is regarded as the most devastating disease of banana in the region, is transmitted by insect vectors, contaminated garden tools, and infected planting material. The disease, which causes premature ripening and rotting of the fruits, wilting, and eventually death of the plant, has drastically affected the production of highland cooking banana in the region and the food and income of millions of farmers.

“This is exciting news for the team. We are extremely pleased with the recognition”, says George Mahuku, the IITA plant pathologist based at IITA Tanzania and lead scientist for the work.

“As a follow-up to this work, we are now screening a population made from one of the resistant varieties ‘Monyet’ and a susceptible variety ‘Kokopo’ to identify biological markers (quantitative trait loci – QTL) of genes associated with resistance. This information will be used to develop protocols for the rapid transfer of resistance genes to susceptible but farmer-preferred cultivars. We are also continuing with screening other banana types to identify more sources of resistance,” Mahuku said.

Other researchers in the team are drawn from the Centre of the Region Haná for Biotechnological and Agricultural Research, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic, the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute at the University of Pretoria, South Africa as well as IITA banana researchers based in Uganda and Arusha.

The research was funded by the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB).

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Health workers applause back to the public applauding them. Madrid, Spain, 22 March 2020. Credit: Burak Akbulut

By Djaffar Shalchi
COPENHAGEN, May 28 2020 (IPS)

For the past few decades, many big corporations and very wealthy individuals have operated according to the myth that they are “self-made”, that their success owed nothing to anyone else.

From that narrative has come the notion that they are entitled and able to cut themselves off from others, contributing as little as possible in taxes and workers’ wages.

But now that the myth has run into the fact of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s clear that none of us are independent; that we are, in fact, interdependent.

I am a one of those who gets highlighted as a self-made man. I am told that I fit the storyline: I am an immigrant son of a single mother from Iran; while my mum cleaned in hotels, I studied hard, worked hard, and went on to be a successful entrepreneur. I rose to be a multimillionaire – the American Dream, except in Denmark!

It has always been obvious to me, however, that I have not risen all by my own efforts: that I am not a self-made man, that the welfare state made me. Without the creche care and schooling and health care I received, I could not have flourished; and without Denmark’s strong public services, neither could my business.

That’s why, in real life, contrary to the Hollywood tale, kids are more likely to achieve the American dream in Denmark than in America. That’s why I recognise that it is my responsibility to help others rise, by giving back – not only as a philanthropist, but also, and preferably, as a taxpayer.

That’s why I am helping to lead an international campaign – Move Humanity – that is demanding that governments increase taxes on people like me.

A number of governments have shared that pressure from the richest individuals is a major obstacle in the way of key inequality-reducing reforms. Studies show that the super-rich have been avoiding as much as 30% of their tax liability. Poor countries have been losing $170 billion of tax revenues every year as a result of tax dodging.

Djaffar Shalchi. Credit: Move Humanity

Many corporations and wealthy individuals have lobbied against higher taxes, arguing that they would be anti-business. But, as we have seen, the fact is that tax is not anti-business, pandemics are anti-business.

A small number of plutocrats are profiteering in this crisis in obscene ways and appear to be planning for dystopia. But most businesses are ultimately threatened by the combination of health collapse, economic collapse, systems collapse and trust collapse that Covid-19 has wrought.

Progressive taxation – from corporate profits, and from personal income and wealth – is the only sustainable way to fund the public services and infrastructure on which restoration depends.

Public health, stability and trust are the platforms on which business viability stands. To do what is right is also to do what is practical.

It is time for millionaires to back redistribution. Over 175 millionaires signed the open letter launched at Davos in January 2020, “Millionaires against Pitchforks”, that called for higher taxes on people like themselves.

But these 175 were seen as outliers. Now, after the Covid-19 crisis, that could change, and must change.

The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted just how much society depends on frontline workers, these no longer hidden heroes. It has also highlighted, in the Financial Times’s words, that “radical reforms — reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. Redistribution will again be on the agenda.”

It is no surprise that countries which value public goods and the active role of the state like Denmark, Germany and South Korea, are holding up more strongly to the Covid-19 crisis than the more laissez-faire US and UK, or that, in India, Kerala is holding up more strongly than the states in the north of the country.

Across the world now, politicians of many stripes, economists of almost all stripes, and ordinary people of every stripe increasingly recognise the essential role of government action, funded by progressive taxation.

Experts say a 1% wealth tax on the world’s top 1% could bring in over $1.6 trillion.

Tackling inequality is central to restore consumer demand, strengthen human capital, ensure collective health security and prevent societal breakdown. If we allow inequality to rise any higher, we will all be in danger – of an even more intensified economic crisis and of violent instability.

For the rich to hide in bunkers, offends others’ dignity and their own, and is no way to truly thrive. Even before Covid-19, a multimillionaire whom I visited in Brazil could, when he looked out of his window, see only metal bars, as if he was caged in.

From my window in Denmark, the view is of flowers. As is noted in The Spirit Level, and in the yearly World Happiness Report, more equal societies are safer, healthier, happier, and more stable. They have longer-running growth, and higher social mobility. And they are much better able to cope with crises.

The Covid-19 pandemic is revealing not only how unjust the world’s inequalities are, but also how these inequalities have been rooted in a fallacy that denied the reality of our interdependence.

The difference between clinging to individualized and inward-looking approaches, and unleashing the power of collective action from the local to global, will be millions of lives saved and billions of lives improved.

Higher taxes on very wealthy few, and on the biggest corporations, are crucial to restoring trust and to funding the common services we all need to thrive. Through this we can put the world back in business, and reconnect business with the world. It’s worth every penny. Even millionaires should back it.

*This piece was co-authored with Ben Phillips, an advisor to governments and international institutions on how to tackle inequality.

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Excerpt:

Djaffar Shalchi is an entrepreneur and business owner and founder of the Move Humanity campaign

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By External Source
May 27 2020 (IPS)

Between 2002 and 2004, the World Health Organization (WHO) faced the first pandemic of the globalized 21st century, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). Under the leadership of Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland and through epidemiological, clinical, and logistical coordination, the WHO facilitated a strong and ultimately successful response to the outbreak. Today, the WHO is facing the coronavirus pandemic in an even more globalized and urbanized world, further complicating response and coordination efforts. What similarities do these two pandemics share, and what lessons in leadership might we be able to learn from the past?

The post LIVE STREAM: Former Norwegian Prime Minister Brundtland on Pandemic Leadership appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Chicago Council on Global Affairs

 

Gro Brundtland, Former Prime Minister of Norway; Former Director-General, World Health Organization. Moderated by Catherine Bertini.

The post LIVE STREAM: Former Norwegian Prime Minister Brundtland on Pandemic Leadership appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Djibouti Port. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By External Source
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, May 27 2020 (IPS)

The African Continental Free Trade Area was launched two years ago at an African Union (AU) summit in Kigali. It was scheduled to be implemented from 1 July 2020. But this has been pushed out until 2021 because of the impact of COVID-19 and the need for leaders to focus on saving lives.

Studies by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and others state that the free trade area has the potential to increase growth, raise welfare and stimulate industrial development on the continent. But there are concerns. Some countries, particularly smaller and more vulnerable states, could be hurt. For example, they could suffer revenue losses and other negative effects from premature liberalisation.

African countries are increasingly connected to the global economy, but tend to operate at the lowest rung of the ladder. They are mainly supplying raw materials and other low-value manufactured outputs. Cooperation is needed between Africa’s emerging entrepreneurs and industries to improve their competitiveness in global markets

The impact of COVID-19 will only worsen these structural weaknesses. The Economic Commission for Africa has reported that between 300,000 and 3.3 million people could lose their lives if appropriate measures are not taken. There are several reasons for this level of high risk. These include the fact that 56% of urban dwellings are in overcrowded slums, 71% of Africa’s workforce is informally employed and cannot work from home and 40% of children on the continent are undernourished.

Africa is also more vulnerable to the impact of COVID-19 because it is highly dependent on imports for its medicinal and pharmaceutical products and on commodity exports. The latter include oil, which has suffered a severe collapse in price.

Other contributing factors are high public debt due to higher interest rate payments than Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, a weak fiscal tax base, and the negative impact on Africa’s currencies due to huge stimulus measures taken by OECD countries.

The COVID-19 crisis has brought these weaknesses into sharp relief. But it also provides an opportunity for African countries to address them. For example, they could accelerate intra-regional trade by focusing on the products of greatest need during the health crisis. Countries could also start building regional value chains to advance industrialisation, improve infrastructure and strengthen good governance and ethical leadership.

These are all vital to guiding African countries through the current crisis.

These goals can be achieved if African states adopt a “developmental regionalism” approach to trade integration. This would include fair trade, building regional value chains, cross-border investment in infrastructure and strengthening democratic governance.

 

Fair trade

A number of conditions need to be met for a free trade area to succeed.

Firstly, African states vary widely in size and economic development. As a result some may warrant special attention and specific treatment. In particular, among Africa’s 55 states 34 are classified by the United Nations as least developed countries. These are low income countries that have severe structural problems impeding their development.

Building trade agreements in favour of small and less developed economies will contribute to fairer outcomes of the free trade deal.

Secondly, African governments should include their stakeholders – businesses (both big and small), trade unions and civil society organisations – in the national consultation process. This will require effective institutions that enable the fullest participation.

Additional steps countries should take to cope with the fallout from COVID-19:

• Reduce tariffs on vital pharmaceutical products (such as ventilators), personal protective equipment and food products;
• Stimulate intra-regional trade by prioritising these products for an immediate or early phase down in the free trade area.

 

Building regional value chains

African countries are increasingly connected to the global economy, but tend to operate at the lowest rung of the ladder. They are mainly supplying raw materials and other low-value manufactured outputs.

Cooperation is needed between Africa’s emerging entrepreneurs and industries to improve their competitiveness in global markets. This would have a number of positive outcomes including:

• triggering industrialisation, which will transform economies
• helping African countries obtain a fairer share of the value derived from African commodities and labour, and
• improving the lives of people on the continent.

The current crisis creates an opportunity for African countries to build value chains on medical equipment, pharmaceuticals and personal protective equipment.

The clothing and textile sector could also be restructured to meet the needs of the health sector while taking advantage of the breakdown in supply chains from China and Europe.

As more countries lock down their economies and apply movement controls, agricultural and processed food supply chains are disrupted. This creates opportunities to build regional supply chains and partner with retailers.

There are also opportunities to build infrastructure to support the health response: hospitals, water and sanitation, schools, low-cost housing and alternative energy.

African countries can also benefit from the growing interest in environmental tourism.

 

Cross-border infrastructure investment

Since most African countries are less developed, and many are small, intra-regional trade will require them to cooperate to improve their infrastructure. This includes physical ports, roads and railways as well as customs procedures, port efficiency and reduction of roadblocks.

Progress is already being made. Examples include the Mombasa-Nairobi Corridor; the Addis to Djibouti road, rail and port connection; and the Abidjan-Lagos Corridor, which handles more than two-thirds of West African trade.

Increased investment in these types of cross-border infrastructure projects will benefit regional integration.

 

Democracy and governance

Most African states have started accepting multi-party systems of governance. Many have also embraced a culture of constitutionalism, rule of law and human rights.

Democratic governance supported by active citizenship will create an environment of transparency and predictability that encourages domestic and foreign investment. Both are vital for growth and industrialisation. The process is also essential for the sustainability of regional economic integration and democracy in Africa.

Countries are becoming better at fulfilling their democratic obligations. For example, 40 African countries, including the Seychelles and Zimbabwe, voluntarily joined the African Peer Review Mechanism. The mechanism is a remarkable achievement that the free trade area agreement must build on.

 

The way forward

The free trade area could become a landmark in Africa’s journey towards peace, prosperity and integration. The COVID-19 pandemic, notwithstanding its devastating impact on the health and economies of Africa, could be an opportunity to advance the free trade area in a more developmental, inclusive and mutually beneficial way for African countries.

Faizel Ismail, Director of the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town

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

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A communal farmer harvesting her maize crop in Seke communal lands, Zimbabwe. In recent years, Zimbabwe has witnessed a rapid growth in digital agriculture. Credit: Tonderayi Mukeredzi/IPS

By Tonderayi Mukeredzi
HARARE, May 27 2020 (IPS)

Shurugwi communal farmer, Elizabeth Siyapi (57) can no longer be scammed by unscrupulous middlemen to sell her crops cheaply. Nowadays, before she takes her produce to market she scours her mobile phone, which has become an essential digital agriculture data bank, for the best prices on the market.

“When my livestock are sick, instead of waiting for an extension officer to physically visit me for help, which may take days, I just consult my phone to look for information on what to do,” she told IPS.

Siyaphi is one of approximately 34,000 small holder farmers across the country collectively using two smart phone-based solutions, Kurima Mari and Agrishare, promoted by German development agency, Welthungerhilfe Zimbabwe, to find markets, extension services, weather information and hire agriculture equipment.

Tawanda Mthintwa Hove, the head of digital agriculture at Welthungerhilfe Zimbabwe, said farmers have been using Kurima Mari to learn good agricultural practices and link with markets since 2016.

“Kurima Mari is available offline which eliminates the need for buying data. An extension officer updates the application on a regular basis and the updates are shared using bluetooth making it costless to the farmer,” he told IPS. “Whilst Agrishare is an online-based solution, it enables farmers to secure the best equipment in their homes, which reduces mobility costs.”

Over the last three years Siyaphi has utilised digital agriculture to find good agricultural practices. And her maize yield has multiplied from two 50-kilogram bags of maize to over three and a half tonnes.

• Though during the current COVID-19 lockdown in this southern African nation, her yields have reduced because of water restrictions.
• She told IPS that while markets remain available through the app, mostly via farmer to farmer contacts, transporting her produce to market has become the biggest problem because of lockdown restrictions. The current lockdown is in place indefinitely, though reviewed every two weeks by government. 

Hove said that mobile digital technologies improve the quantity and quality of farmer’s harvests by giving them current information on production practices. They also facilitate linkages, weather advisory services, add efficiency to commodity systems, which in the long run help increase farmer’s yields and make them more profitable.

In recent years, Zimbabwe has witnessed a rapid growth in the use of digital agriculture.

• Other digital agriculture innovations include the Zimbabwe Farmers Union (ZFU) and Econet Wireless championed, Ecofarmer Combo programme, which delivers weather-based insurance, real time location-based weather information and farming tips to over 80,000 communal farmers.
• Started by the churches in 2019, Turning Matabeleland Green, is another digital agriculture programme that uses satellite technology to send weather information and farming advice to over 2,000 farmers via the short message service.

Paul Zakariya, ZFU executive director, told IPS that mobile technology has enabled farmers to get farming advice in real-time, make online payments for inputs and services and access extension services from the tap of a phone, services that were previously available only through pamphlets and meetings.

According to the Food Sustainability Index, created by the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition (BCFN)  and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), “Precision farming and new digital tools can help, enhancing the efficiency and sustainability of farming, while improving yields”.

But Charles Dhewa, the chief executive officer of Knowledge Transfer Africa, an indigenous systems company that operates eMkambo, another digital agriculture solution, said mobile applications were not yet directly benefitting smallholder farmers here.

“A few elite farmers with appropriate android phones could be benefitting here and there. That is why we have not positioned eMkambo Nest as a lead solution in our eMkambo platform,” he told IPS. 

Dhewa stated that although content was important, many farmers and traders don’t have time and bandwidth to toy with many of the available mobile and digital farming applications. The channels have reached their limits and are disintegrated, in addition to causing information asymmetry amongst farmers.

Digital literacy and the high cost of mobile communication is also reversing gains that could have been made by digital technology.

“The high cost of mobile money is worsening the situation, rendering mobile technology more of a luxury than a necessity,” he said. “Paying for agricultural commodities through mobile money is now more expensive.” 

Zakariya said despite an increased deployment of digital technologies in agriculture, farmers were using ICTs much less to improve agri-business. Beyond mobile applications, the country has been slow in adopting other appropriate technologies and innovations crucial in commercialising the country’s agriculture, which remains mostly subsistence. 

There is little use of high-end technologies with potential to enhance production and value chain competitiveness such as crop protection technology, soil and moisture sensors, drones, precision farming, molecular technology, use of global positioning systems and geographic information systems (GIS).

Zakariya said the uptake of modern, sophisticated technologies was capital intensive for most farmers while many more farmers lacked knowledge on the use and efficacy of the newer technologies.

Dhewa said that GIS has a better future in agriculture than mobile applications sharing information.

• The Digitalisation of the African Agriculture Report 2018-19 said there has been a significant growth in digitalisation for agriculture across the continent during the past 10 years.
• The report, authored by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation, said by 2019, there were about 390 distinct, active digitalisation for agriculture solutions, where 33 million small holder farmers were registered.
• But despite the impressive growth figures, only 42 percent of the registered farmers and pastoralists are using the solutions with any frequency.

According to Hove, it is rural farmers that have been hit hard by COVID-19 lockdown restrictions and prohibitive data costs, as such many can’t move their produce easily and have been deprived of income. This has forced some farmers to resort to middlemen.

Still, Hove said, some rural farmers have been able to find markets through the contact list (farmer to farmer) on the app as opposed to using the real-time markets list.

Meanwhile Siyapi said that she and other farmers struggle to buy data. As a lead and successful farmer, she requires about $16 a month in data but says other farmers can make do with $2.20 to download updates and peruse the marketplace.

Related Articles

• Food Markets in the Caribbean Take Stock of Vulnerability during COVID-19
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• COVID-19: India’s Harvests also Locked Down

The post Digital Agriculture Benefits Zimbabwe’s Farmers but Mobile Money is Costly appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

In recent years, Zimbabwe has witnessed a rapid growth in the use of digital agriculture but uptake of modern technology is capital intensive for farmers.

The post Digital Agriculture Benefits Zimbabwe’s Farmers but Mobile Money is Costly appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Dr Julia Stamm
BERLIN, May 27 2020 (IPS)

Crises make us think smaller. When everything is uncertain, we turn inward: to our families, our communities, the immediate needs around us. We focus on the essential and the immediate; we survive.

On an individual level, this instinct can be clarifying, as it may bring into focus the realm of the Truly Important: our closest human relationships, our health, our community, our freedom.

Looking past this circle of immediacy, however, it’s clear to see that the current global pandemic will demand much more of us. Beyond the here and now, it is becoming increasingly clear that he Covid-19 crisis is creating enormous need and essential work for the future.

Preparing for and addressing these future challenges is also a matter of great urgency. Responding to the urgent needs of the moment while keeping the futures we want in our field of vision requires us to be intentional and thoughtful about the choices we make now.

The Futures Project exists precisely at this juncture where present and future come into conversation, and from this vantage point, it is clear that we cannot talk about problem-solving in the present without making sure we know where we want to go.

One need not look far to see the roadmap of future needs that is emerging in light of the Covid-19 crisis. If you follow the cracks, long-existent but willfully ignored, that have come starkly into view in the past few months, you can trace your way to some of the challenges that will shape our future.

With the closure of schools, we see not only the fact of disparate access to internet networks, but also the direct translation of this disparity into outcomes: some students will return to school having kept up with their learning, and others will fall further behind.

We see that for those without stable housing and access to food and water, social distancing, handwashing, and safe shelter at home are simply not possible. We see that our essential workers have long been the least celebrated, their livelihoods among the least protected. These are only a few examples.

Julia Stamm

We see also that solutions are possible—that, especially if we are willing to acknowledge the inequalities that we’ve grown comfortable with, in the parts of the world that benefit from them, we can fix our problems. This will take a massive reimagining of what’s possible, and a massive recalibrating of what is acceptable to us.

The UN75 global conversation initiative, launched to celebrate the 75th birthday of the United Nations in October 2020, has opened an international dialogue on precisely these topics.

The initiative asks people to talk about the future, asking three “big questions”: what kind of future do we want to create? Are we on track? What do we need to bridge the gap?

Of course, when these questions were written and the initiative launched, no one foresaw the upheaval that was to come. Given the massive disruption that Covid-19 has caused, these questions may, at first glance, feel out of place. In a crisis, everything feels immediate. And to some extent, it is true: we have to adapt, respond, pull together, and make it through.

Our view, though, is that crisis response and thinking about the future go hand-in-hand. In this uncertain moment, asking ourselves and each other about the futures we want to inhabit provides light for our path.

Given the sometimes-overwhelming scope of the crisis, using the future as our guide will help us find our next small step. 2020 was to be the beginning of a crucial decade for the UN Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and even though most did not factor a global pandemic into their response plans, the SDGs also provide a blueprint for the future that can serve to guide our crisis response.

If we have any hope of repairing the cracks, of finding solutions to urgent problems that not only carry us through the moment but also pave the way to a more resilient future, we must bring people together across borders, sectors, and boundaries to create a vision for the future and make plans to act.

This is exactly the task that the UN75 questions facilitate, and the backdrop against which The Futures Project builds its work.

Our commitment during this time is to serve as a steward of thinking and doing that helps us all keep the futures we want to inhabit, and the futures we hope future generations can inhabit, in our field of vision.

Our current initiative, Innovators for the Future, bridges reflection and action, thinking and doing, by building off of the UN75 questions. By identifying projects that are having positive impacts on their communities now, while also keeping an eye on the future they want to see, we are looking at what the UN75 questions look like in action.

Innovators for the Future extends the UN75 dialogue by asking not only what kind of future we want to create, but also, what are we doing to get there? And for our part at the Futures Project, we’re asking: how can we help build the bridge between thinking and doing; between present and future?

Through our Social Impact Accelerator, we’re also lending a hand, supporting the do-ers of the world and the future visions for their communities towards which they are building.

Above all, The Futures Project and the Call for Innovators are about commitment to the idea that we can—and will—build better futures. We do not know exactly what this looks like.

Creating these future visions are part of the work. We do, however, believe wholeheartedly that our imagined world of tomorrow can teach us about how to do better today. We are committed to doing the work it takes to build the world that we see outlined in the UN Vision, and we remain hopeful.

The post UN@75 & the Future We Want appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr Julia Stamm is Founder & CEO, The Futures Project, described as a “nonprofit initiative to transform the way we think about and shape the future, re-envisioning the role that technology and innovation can play in helping us realise the futures we want to create.”

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Open drainage ditch, Ankorondrano-Andranomahery, Madagascar. Credit: Lova Rabary-Rakontondravony/IPS

By Gareth Willmer and Fiona Broom
May 26 2020 (IPS)

Crucial global goals to reduce hunger and poverty and curb climate change have gone backwards or stalled, the United Nations Secretary-General warns in a new report, as the COVID-19 outbreak moves from being a health crisis to becoming the “worst human and economic crisis of our lifetimes”.

The number of people suffering hunger has increased, climate change is occurring faster than predicted, and inequality is increasing within and among countries, António Guterres says in his ‘Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals’ 2020 report.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were launched four years ago to address the most pressing global needs for a sustainable future, including education and health improvements and reductions in social and economic inequalities.

“The effects of the pandemic and the measures taken to mitigate its impact have overwhelmed the health systems globally, caused businesses and factories to shut down and severely impacted the livelihoods of half of the global workforce,” he says in the report.

It comes on top of an existing slowing in progress towards many of the SDGs, and Guterres had launched a Decade of Action in September to turn things around.

The latest report, published last week (14 May), illustrates “the continued unevenness of progress and the many areas where significant improvement is required”.

The report has been released ahead of UN Economic and Social Council high-level meetings scheduled for July to provide a global, data-driven overview of the SDGs.

 

Women and girls

Last year’s report had already warned that there was “simply no way that we can achieve the 17 SDGs without achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls”.

In the 2020 review, Guterres says “the promise of a world in which every woman and girl enjoys full gender equality and all legal, social and economic barriers to their empowerment have been removed, remains unfulfilled”.

Only half of the world’s women who are married or ‘in-union’ make their own decisions regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights, based on 2007-2018 data from 57 countries, the report says.

“People are talking about a global response in terms of a vaccine, I think we should pay attention to those who are talking about a global response to the coming food crisis.”

Social and economic development has been shown to accelerate when women have access to mobile phones, the report says, but phone ownership remains higher for men than for women.

More than 260 million children were out of school in 2017 and 773 million adults — two-thirds of whom are women — remained illiterate in 2018.

As of 2019, less than half of primary and lower secondary schools in Sub-Saharan Africa had access to electricity, computers, the internet and basic handwashing facilities, the report states.

Billions of people worldwide still lack access to safely managed water and sanitation services, including 2.2 billion people without safe drinking water.

And, the world is projected to miss the target to end poverty in all its forms as hunger increased for the fourth consecutive year and about 50 million children experienced acute undernutrition. Globally, 144 million children under five were still affected by stunting in 2019, with three quarters of these children in Central and Southern Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa.

Claire Heffernan, director of the London International Development Centre, a membership organisation, says the SDGs are incompatible with the COVID-19 pandemic on a political level.

“The SDGs reflected the political will of the time,” she says. “Today, in the midst of this pandemic, I think it’s safe to say global political will is in short supply.”

 

Food crisis

Subir Sinha, senior lecturer in institutions and development at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), says he is sceptical of suggestions in the report that progress has been made on poverty, because the quality of data from national governments has become worse.

He says that wage protections and labour rights need to be made into political issues to ensure they stay on governments’ radars.

“COVID-19 is going to make questions of hunger much worse,” Sinha says. “People are talking about a global response in terms of a vaccine, I think we should pay attention to those who are talking about a global response to the coming food crisis.”

The SDG progress report comes after the United Nations predicted last week that the COVID-19 crisis could push 130 million more people into poverty in the next 10 years.

About 35 million people are expected to fall below the extreme poverty line this year as a result of the pandemic, with 56 per cent of them in Africa, the UN’s World Economic Situation and Prospects as of mid-2020 report predicted.

The global economy is forecast to lose a staggering US$8.5 trillion in production over the next two years due to the pandemic, the UN report says.

This is a “tremendous setback” for sustainable development, Elliott Harris, UN chief economist and assistant secretary-general for economic development, told SciDev.Net.

“[The pandemic] is particularly affecting the more vulnerable groups … because these are the ones whose activities generally require some form of physical proximity to others.”

 

Remittances

Remittances from migrant workers in the global North could face a hit – in countries such as Haiti, South Sudan and Tonga, remittances constitute more than a third of gross domestic product.

“You have an abrupt cut of people’s livelihoods and incomes, and then you’ve got different kinds of cascading effects through the bigger food system,” says Sophia Murphy, senior specialist in agriculture, trade and investment at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

There are also fears about what the pandemic could mean for long-term food security, with the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) estimating that 130 million more people in low- and middle-income countries may be pushed into acute food insecurity this year.

Bumper crops in some regions are at risk of being wasted. India has been hit by COVID-19 at harvest time, with crops left unpicked and difficulties getting grain to market for sale before it spoils.

This comes after rising hunger in the three years to 2018 pushed undernourishment back to levels seen around 2010.

Evidence of price rises has already emerged. In Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of the Congo, the WFP notes a 10 per cent surge in the price of a typical local basket of food – comprising fish, pulses, peanut paste, cassava flour, oil and condiments – in the space of two weeks.

The organisation expects food price rises to occur more widely, as this is happening in countries such as Syria, where prices have more than doubled in the past year.

“I think it’s probably much more widespread than we realise because we’ve never encountered an emergency on this sort of scale before,” says Jane Howard, head of communications, marketing and advocacy at the WFP’s London office.

“It’s like having an emergency in every single country that you’re working in.”

Some countries are already reeling from other problems, such as the locust swarms in East Africa, leading to potentially “devastating” impacts, she adds.

 

This story was originally published by SciDev.Net

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By Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
SINGAPORE, May 26 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Despite all the preoccupation with the current raging pandemic, it sadly appears that there has been no let-up in the global arms race among the major powers. In mid-May, the United States President Donald Trump, at an event for his new Space Force at the White House made a significant announcement, It was that the US was building right now an “incredible” new missile which would travel faster than any other in the world “by a factor of almost three”. This was obviously a response to the latest Russian ‘Avangard’ missile, which Russian President Vladimir Putin claims in invincible, with a speed of twenty times that of sound. The Chinese, reportedly are also feverishly working on their own hypersonic counterparts. All these would be strategic tools to significantly alter the war-fighting capabilities of humanity in the future.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury

Up until recently, around the times of the First Great War (1914-1918) war fighting was based on come rather simple techniques Battlefield outcomes could be based on certain straight forward equations. One was a mathematical model, named after its proponent, called ‘Lanchester’s Law’. According to it, between two confronting sides, the higher number or greater firepower had better chances of winning. More complex formulae were derived therefrom. But it had too many limitations for use in contemporary conflict.

So, ideas evolved further. A system called ‘network’ enabled smaller numbers with lesser firepower to be more effective in an ‘asymmetric conflict’ which is also now called ‘sub-conventional’ war Non-state actors like the ‘Hizbulllah’ in Lebanon used these principles involving a hierarchical mode of communications effectively against an ostensibly more powerful Israeli army.

In 1996 two researchers of the US Rand Corporation, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt gloated a more refined concept in a document entitled ‘The Advert of Network’. The US has since pioneered an even more sophisticated version, which only modern well-equipped armies were capable of implementing. This was called ‘Network-centric operations’. Simply put, it involved four loops of sensors: First, identification of enemy assets, second, command and control of decision-making; third, target elimination, and fourth, logistics. Most modern armies now have ‘net-work command’, with latest communications and computers, with the Signals Branch at its care.

Now there are those who hold that even this ‘network-centrism’ is vulnerable. This is particularly go with the advent of ‘Artificial intelligence (AI) in warfare. The ‘Networks’ could be susceptible to disabling by such weapons. Today, as the new US space Force makes evident, battlefield domains are no longer confined to land, air, and sea. It now also includes space, deep-sea, cyber-space, and the solar electro-magnetic spectrum. Cyber-attacks can knock-out high value assets, including not only military command and control, but also critical civilian functions like banking, travel and telephony which would paralyze life-style, without a single shot being fired!

Today there is a race to build ever more ‘autonomous weapons’ such as smarter drones. Contemporary ‘intelligent machines’ can react at superhuman speeds, that are hard presses to match. There are those who argue future ‘Artificially intelligent’ weapons may be able to think ahead of the human brain, which could cause unique issues.

Actually, this is not much different from some 2500 years ago, the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote : “speed is the essence of war”. Military analysts are already speaking of a coming “battlefield singularity” in which the pace of combat will eclipse the pace of human decision-making. Fastest reaction in the shortest possible time will be the key to overwhelming the adversary. It would be akin to what is known as “OODA’ in aerial dogfighting. The ‘Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act’. So, will machines in battlefield take over from the human protagonists? The answers, at least for now, is happily, no. Even if fully autonomous weapons could possible led humans to code battlefield control, the ultimate critical decisions about how this technology is used, will still rest in human hands.

The principal security threat that the world confronts now is not military, it is an unconventional one, a malady, COVID-19 like the ‘Smart Weapon’, it is a ‘smart virus’, It is unseen, moves swiftly, adapts fast and mutates easily. Any battle-strategy, classical of modern, would advocates to those equally susceptible, the need to combine budget and brains to combat this unforeseen and deadly foe. True, it is easier said than done. But the clear absence of any-logical alternative would be a powerful factor in achieving this end. Uniting against this common, enemy COVID-19, is our Hobson’s Choice, one that has no option.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury is Principal Research Fellow at ISAS, National University of Singapore, former Foreign Advisor and President of Cosmos Foundation Bangladesh.

This story was originally published by Dhaka Courier

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South Africa’s white rhinoceros recovered from near-extinction thanks to intense conservation efforts. Experts around the world have called for international and local cooperation for biological preservation to prevent future pandemic. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, May 26 2020 (IPS)

A future repetition of the current COVID-19 pandemic is preventable with massive cooperation on international and local levels and by ensuring biological diversity preservation around the world, experts recently said.

How to prevent the current crisis in the future

• According to the World Health Organisation the coronavirus originated in bats, and original theories had circulated the virus spread to humans from a wet market in Wuhan, China.

In celebration of the International Day for Biological Diversity held on Friday, May 22, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) held a series of panels, bringing together experts to speak about this year’s theme “Our solutions are in nature”.

The current COVID-19  pandemic was the key theme in all the discussions and various experts from around the world shared their thoughts on topics such as the link between the current coronavirus crisis and biodiversity, methods and practices that can unite different communities and solutions that humans can carve out from our access to nature.

Many of the experts echoed the notion that better conservation can play a crucial role in preventing such a crisis in the future.

“Better conservation of large intact natural areas, including natural world heritage sites and urgent measures to address illegal wildlife trade are really considered important to limit the emergence of new diseases in the future,” Mechtild Rössler, director of the World Heritage Centre (WHC), said at the panel. 

“Focus should not only be gazetting protected areas but also on creating and [enabling] conditions [where] these areas can fulfil their biodiversity conservation objectives,” she added.

Paul Leadley, a researcher at the University of Paris-Saclay, pointed out that human health is “linked indissociably” with the condition or health of nature, and that about 70 percent of emerging diseases are a result of human contact with animals, including causes such as deforestation and trade and consumption of wild animals.

As such, he said, it’s crucial that we have preventative measures instead of carving out measures only in response to a crisis, as is happening now.

“We need to be more proactive and researchers and decision makers must understand that we need it to be upstream,” he said at the “What changes are necessary?” panel. “We need to identify diseases that could emerge before they spread, [and] we [need to] start to better understand the change from transmission from animals to man.”

And these issues have an economic impact as well.

Rössler noted that heritage sites in 90 percent of the countries where heritage properties are located have been partially or fully closed due to loss of entrance fees, thus contributing to the local economy in a negative way.

Closures of sites have caused major socioeconomic impact for communities living in and around these sites, Rössler said, including disruption of community life, aggravated poverty and serious issues related to the monitoring of conservation practices.

Rössler isn’t alone in this observation.

Roderic Mast, co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature SSC Marine Turtle Specialist Group, recently told IPS that they have been receiving reports of how a lack of monitoring and enforcers on the ground have caused increased illegal poaching in places such as Indonesia and French Guiana.

International and local cooperation

Leadley, who is also an Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) expert, further said it’s crucial for international and local cooperation in order to prevent such transmissions.

Rössler echoed a similar thought, and called for a “stronger commitment” between all parties.

“We need a stronger commitment from all governments to conserve and manage these areas, to exclude them from unsustainable development activities and we need increased solidarity and cooperation among nations to achieve that,” she said, adding that it will also help communities further contribute to actions surrounding climate change.

Tim Christophersen, coordinator of the Nature for Climate Branch at United Nations Environment, highlighted the youth’s activism on the matter.

“We see the emergence of a global restoration movement from youth networks to communities that want to rebuild their livelihoods all across the world so this movement is already emerging,” he said at the panel “What are the possible ways to regenerate ecosystems and restore our connections with biodiversity?”

Christophersen is also a focal point for the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem restoration 2021-2030, and said the next decade has a lot of opportunities for learning between local and international communities.

“What we can do with the U.N. decade is to link local activities to a global umbrella to give people at a local level more tools and hopefully more resources, more inspiration and a connectedness to a global movement where we can learn from each other,” he said.

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