BRUSSELS, Belgium, Apr 28 (IPS) – On May 1, United Nations member states’ special envoys on Afghanistan will meet in Doha, Qatar to discuss how to address the Taliban’s latest restrictions on humanitarian operations.
The two-day meeting follows a week of confused messaging from the UN that could directly affect next steps for helping Afghans in need of aid.
On April 18, the UN Development Programme Administrator (UNDP) Achim Steiner warned that unless the Taliban revoked their ban on Afghan women working for the UN, the UN was “ready to take the heartbreaking decision to pull out of the country.”
The next day, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed suggested member states use what little leverage they have to explore “baby steps” that could put the Taliban “on the path to recognition.”
Surely there is a solution between the threat of total UN withdrawal and the dangled carrot of recognition. And it seems the special envoys are expected to find it.
Unfortunately, divisions among the special envoys on approaches to the Taliban mirror those on the UN Security Council. China, Russia, and Japan want the UN to focus on aid and Afghanistan’s economic crisis. The United States, United Kingdom, and France have pushed a hard line with the Taliban on human rights.
In March, when the Security Council passed a resolution extending the mandate of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, it passed a second resolution calling for an independent assessment of the UN’s operations aimed at finding “an integrated and coherent approach … to address the current challenges.”
Meanwhile, the Taliban’s latest restrictions have been catastrophic for the Afghan people, two-thirds of whom are dependent on food aid, most of them women and girls.
The Taliban’s increasingly repressive stand banning women from working for humanitarian organizations (except in health and primary education) and the UN, has forced aid agencies and organizations to have to choose between ending their programs or negotiating ways to provide life-saving assistance without compromising principles. This is not a choice they should have to make.
The special envoys should make this clear in Doha and maintain a firm line that only a reversal of the Taliban’s oppressive policies will open the door to further engagement.
Patricia Gossman is an associate director for the Asia division of Human Rights Watch. Prior to joining HRW, Dr. Gossman was Director of the Afghanistan Program at the International Center for Transitional Justice on Afghanistan, and was the founder and director of the Afghanistan Justice Project, an OSI-funded project to document war crimes committed during the Afghan conflict, 1978-2001.
An aerial photograph of a busy roundabout in Lusaka Zambia. Credit: UNRSF.
Opinion by Nneka Henry (geneva)
Inter Press Service
GENEVA, Apr 27 (IPS) – Nneka Henry is Head of UN Road Safety FundCrises may be a centuries-old phenomenon, but so too is human resilience.
The high number of road deaths and life-changing injuries in the global south is a crisis that affects millions of people every year. In 2018 alone – the year that the UN Road Safety Fund was established – 1.3 million people died on the world’s roads, and another 50 million were injured or disabled.
These numbers are even more sobering against the backdrop of multiple global crises that range from the coronavirus pandemic to the climate emergency, the cost of living crisis to geopolitical conflicts. As daunting as the mounting crises facing the world may be, the millions of lives and livelihoods lost to road crashes has made the Fund as resolute as ever to continue to mobilize and coordinate effective responses to very real road safety needs.
Recognizing the world’s state of increasing complexities, the Fund has been meeting the global road safety challenge head-on. It has done this through a coordinated and multi-faceted approach that addresses the underlying cause of unsafe roads whilst also addressing interconnections with other global development crises.
As the only United Nations body solely dedicated to channelling resources and expertise to tackling the root cause of the crisis, preventing further loss of life is, and will always be, our ultimate goal.
How could it not be – considering that road traffic crashes take the lives of around 3,700 people each day; the equivalent of losing a large cruise ship of passengers at maximum capacity. Through annual Calls for Proposals, the Fund coordinates and finances projects that help ensure road safety is treated as the significant public health issue that it is.
In Brazil, our project partner, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, worked with the Department of Transport to correct and improve speed control operations including with the use of portable equipment on all of the Pará State highways. The project resulted in a doubling breathalyzer tests to over 78,000 carried out in 2022 and contributed to decreasing the rate of traffic deaths by a third, down from 6.13 per 10,000 vehicles in 2021 to 4.13 in 2022.
Underpinning the Fund’s ability to effectively address the road safety crisis is our comparative advantage of encouraging international collaboration and cooperation through pooled financial resources and technical knowledge. The more financial and technical partners that participate in the Fund the more comprehensive our response has been, spanning road safety-related legislation, enforcement, education, use of technology and implementation of international regulations and standards.
In the case of West Africa – led by our project partners the UN Environment Programme and UN Economic Commission for Europe – the Fund collaborated on an initiative with the UN Economic Commission for Africa, FIA, and the International Motor Vehicles Inspection Committee.
This has supported the 15 ECOWAS members states to adopt and roll out a regionally-harmonized vehicle directive and technical inspection system, which sets a common standard to safeguard the safety and environmental-friendliness of used vehicles on West African roads. It is now helping to decrease the number of vehicles involved in fatal crashes due to technical defects by 50%, saving thousands of lives.
Nneka Henry, Head of UN Road Safety Fund
Key to strengthening the Fund’s global outreach and engagement is our commitment to communicate clearly and effectively with the public, stakeholders, and decision-makers to ensure that everyone is up-to-date and engaged in the response efforts.
In addition to project planning information sessions which encourage knowledge exchange, and building synergies and complementary financing opportunities before projects are finalized; the Fund also delivers three main flagship events. These include the virtual Open Day for project partners to share project results, the launch of the Annual Impact Report, which takes place on the margins of the International Transport Forum Summit, and the Highlights Country Visit for stakeholders to deep dive into projects that the Fund is supporting.
As global citizens we are all facing a crossroads of crises. The Fund’s response has been to invest in supporting interconnections with other development priorities as a way to build resilience and preparedness for future crises.
Mindful of economic crises, the Fund’s investment in safe transport and road infrastructure is vital. This is what we have been doing in support of the Tanzanian government – with project partners the International Road Assessment Programme, International Road Federation and the UN Economic Commission for Africa.
This initiative has been helping to reduce traffic crashes that place a heavy additional economic burden on families, governments and employers – spanning medical expenses, lost income, and reduced productivity – all of which costs the global economy US$ 1.85 trillion each year.
Low- and middle-income countries devote considerable public personnel and other resources to the treatment and rehabilitation of people injured in road crashes. There is, therefore, a compelling need to reduce the road crash burden on national healthcare systems freeing up critical resources to address other pressing health issues.
Considering ongoing health crises, the Fund is investing in effective post-crash responses – a focus area for the 2023 Call for Proposals and an issue we address in countries like Bangladesh and Azerbaijan, which suffer high rates of road casualties.
Mitigating the effects of climate change, the Fund also invests in cleaner ways of moving safely, including through the Reclaiming the Streets project across Africa to prioritize safe walking and cycling lanes for pedestrians and cyclists who also happen to be our most vulnerable road users.
During these years of polycrises, the Fund has relied on the global solutions approach to rise to the global road safety challenge. And, this month, as the Fund celebrates five years, I challenge more nations, companies and individuals to invest in the only global response comprehensively addressing the root causes of poor national road safety systems across the world. Join us in our sustained effort and rise to meet the serious and interconnected challenges that is the global road safety crisis today.
The replanting of palm oil plants aimed at producing better trees through good agricultural practices. The UNDP’s Good Growth Partnership (GGP) in Indonesia included several projects under one umbrella. Credit: ILO/Fauzan Azhima
by Cecilia Russell (johannesburg)
Inter Press Service
JOHANNESBURG, Apr 27 (IPS) – Smallholder farmers are critical to the success of Indonesia’s efforts to address deforestation and climate change. Creating an understanding and supporting this group, internally and abroad, is a crucial objective for those working towards reducing deforestation and promoting good farming practices, especially as smallholders often work hand-to-mouth and are vulnerable to perpetuating unsustainable farming practices.
Musim Mas, a large palm oil corporation involved in sustainable production, says smallholders “hold approximately 40 percent of Indonesia’s oil palm plantations and are a significant group in the palm oil supply chain. This represents 4.2 million hectares in Indonesia, roughly the size of Denmark. According to the Palm Oil Agribusiness Strategic Policy Initiative (PASPI), smallholders are set to manage 60 percent of Indonesia’s oil palm plantations by 2030.”
Since last year a new World Bank-led programme, the Food Systems, Land Use and Restoration (FOLUR), incorporates the United Nations Development Programme Good Growth Partnership (GGP). It will continue to be involved in the success of palm oil production and smallholders’ support—crucial, especially as a study showed that the “sector lifted around 2.6 million rural Indonesians from poverty this century,” with knock-on development successes including improved rural infrastructure.
Over the past five years, GGP conducted focused training with about 3,000 smallholder farmers, says UNDP’s GGP Global Project Manager, Pascale Bonzom:
“The idea was to pilot some public-private partnerships for training, new ways of getting the producers to adopt these agricultural practices so that we could learn from these pilots and scale them up through farmer support system strategies,” Bonzom says.
Farmer organizations speaking to IPS explained how they, too, support smallholder farmers.
Amanah, an independent smallholder association of about 500 independent smallholders in Ukui, Riau province, was the first group to receive Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) certification as part of a joint programme, right before the start of GGP, between the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture, UNDP, and Asian Agri. This followed training in good agricultural practices, land mapping, high carbon stock (HCS), and high conservation value (HCV) methodologies to identify forest areas for protection.
“The majority of independent smallholders in Indonesia do not have the capacity to implement best practices in the palm oil field. Consequently, it is important to provide assistance and training on good agricultural practices in the field on a regular and ongoing basis,” Amanah commented, adding that the training included preparing land for planting sustainably and using certified seeds, fertilizer, and good harvesting practices.
A producer organization, SPKS, said it was working with farmers to implement sustainable practices. It established a smallholders’ database and assisted them with ISPO and Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certifications.
Jointly with High Conservation Value Resource Network (HCVRN), it created a toolkit for independent smallholders on zero deforestation. This has already been implemented in four villages in two districts.
“At this stage, SPKS and HCVRN are designing benefits and incentives for independent smallholders who already protect their forest area (along) with the indigenous people,” SPKS said, adding that it expected that these initiatives could be used and adopted by those facing EU regulations.
SPKS sees the new EU deforestation legislation as a concern and an opportunity, especially as the union has shown a commitment to supporting independent small farmers—including financial support to prepare for readiness to comply with the regulations, including geolocation, capacity building, and fair price mechanisms.
Amanah also pointed to the EU regulations, which incentivize independent smallholders to adhere to the certification process.
“As required by EU law, the EU is also tasked with implementing programs and assistance at the upstream level as well as serving as an incentive for independent smallholders who already adhere to the certification process. The independent smallholder will be encouraged by this incentive to use sustainable best practices. Financing may be used as an incentive. The independent smallholders will be encouraged by this incentive to use sustainable best practices,” the organization told IPS.
SPKS would like to see final EU regulations include a requirement for companies importing palm oil into the EU to guarantee a direct supply chain from at least 30 percent of independent smallholders based on a fair partnership.
“In the draft EU regulations, it is not yet clear whether the due diligence is based on deforestation-related risk-based analysis. Indonesia is often considered a country with a high deforestation rate, and palm oil is perceived to be a factor in deforestation. Considering this, we hope the EU will consider smallholder farmers by ensuring that EU regulations do not further burden them by issuing Technical Guidelines specifically designed for smallholder farmers.”
In April 2023, the European Parliament passed the law introducing rigorous, wide-ranging requirements on commodities such as palm oil. The UNDP is now researching how it should step up its assistance to producers to meet the criteria.
Setara Jambi, an organization dedicated to education and capacity building for oil palm smallholders for sustainable agricultural management, says that while they are concerned about the EU regulations, small farmers have “many limitations, which are different from companies that already have adequate institutions.
“This concern will not arise if there is a strong commitment from both government and companies (buyers of smallholder fresh fruit bunches) to assist smallholders in preparing and implementing sustainable palm oil management.”
The next five years with FOLUR will face significant challenges. There is a need to ensure that the National Action Plan moves to the next level because it is going to expire at the end of 2024. It will require updating and expanding.
Traceability and Deforestation
In Indonesia, there are 26 provinces and 225 districts that produce palm oil. And at the time of writing, eight provinces and nine districts have developed their own versions of the pilot Sustainable Palm Oil Action Plan and developed their own provincial or district-level Sustainable Palm Oil Action Plans.
There is a lot to do, including supporting the Indonesian government’s multi-stakeholder process, capacity building for the private sector, supporting an enabling environment for all, and working with financial institutions to make investment decisions aligned with deforestation commitments.
The biggest issue is to get the smallholder farmers on board. Because they live a life of survival, often they are vulnerable to “short-termism.”
On the positive side, the FOLUR initiative has the government’s backing. At the launch in Jakarta last year, Musdhalifah Machmud, Deputy Minister for Food and Agriculture at the Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs, said that the implementation of the FOLUR Project was expected to be able to create a value chain sustainability model for rice, oil palm, coffee, and cocoa through sustainable land use and “comprehensively by paying attention to biodiversity conservation, climate change, restoration, and land degradation.”
At that launch workshop in Jakarta, the World Bank’s Christopher Brett, FOLUR co-leader, noted: “Healthy and sustainable value chains offer social benefits and generate profits without putting undue stress on the environment.”
Bonzom agrees: “At the end of the day, they (smallholders) will need to see the benefits—better market terms, better prices, better, more secure contracts—that’s what is attractive for them.”
NEW YORK, Apr 26 (IPS) – For the last five years, the United Nations Development Programme has worked with some of the world’s biggest producers of commodities like beef, soy, palm oil, and cocoa to protect livelihoods and the planet.In 2015, just over 30 cocoa farmers from Padre Abad in Ucayali, a province in the lush and ecologically diverse Peruvian Amazon, formed an alliance to tackle long-standing concerns such as soil quality, access to markets, fair prices for their produce and a growing number of illegal plantations. The result was the Colpa de Loros Cooperative, and from the start, the goal was to produce the finest quality, export-ready cocoa.
Membership would grow to over 500 partners covering 200 hectares of land today.
For almost four years, the cooperative’s small producers worked tirelessly on the transition of the area from traditional but environmentally taxing cocoa harvesting to growing premium cocoa that could meet export demand in the chocolate industry. This was no easy feat, as fine-flavor cocoa production demanded significant investment in technical training for members, initiatives to monitor deforestation, and data systems to ensure cocoa traceability, production, and sales. On the education side, it demanded a change from centuries-long cocoa farming practices to the principles of agroecology.
Then in 2022, as the farmers worked to meet demanding international certifications, the European Parliament passed a new law that is introducing rigorous, wide-ranging requirements on commodities such as palm oil, soy, beef and cocoa. Now the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is researching how it should step up its assistance to producers to meet the new criteria.
New EU Requirements
Colpa de Loros sells 100 percent of its cocoa to a European buyer, the French company Kaoka. When word of the new European regulations hit, the cooperative had already achieved organic production and fair-trade certification. It had also attained ‘fair for life’ certification, a Kaoka-led initiative.
Attaining these credentials meant that members had been working on a blueprint for environmentally friendly agriculture systems. However, for Peru, the world’s third largest cocoa supplier to Europe, the new regulations triggered frenetic action to maintain contracts with buyers and protect the almost 100,000 small producers who depend on cocoa exports to sustain their households.
“The law affects not only Colpa de Loros, but all producers,’ said Ernesto Parra, Manager of Colpa de Loros Cooperative.
“We already have laws which require analysis of pesticides, which makes costs higher. To ensure compliance with this rule, they implement measures like regular audits. Every grain must be free of contamination. There are organizations bigger than Colpa that are experiencing difficulties to respond, and no actions have been taken by the government to support them,” he said.
The European Commission has now also introduced new forest conservation and restoration rules. The Commission said the deforestation regulation would promote EU consumption of deforestation-free supply chain products, encourage international cooperation to tackle forest degradation, reroute finance to aid sustainable land-use practices, and support the collection and availability of quality data on forests and commodity supply chains.
Parra says this commitment to the environment complements the Cooperative’s core values.
“The cooperative aligns with this green pact signed by all actors in Europe to not buy chocolate from deforested areas or involving child or forced work. They not only promote the protection of the environment, but reforestation, land protection, recycling programmes, and biogas from cacao liquid. We agree that cocoa can’t come from deforested areas or make new plantations in protected areas.”
While the cooperative is firm in its environmental consciousness, Parra says the investment is needed in educational activities and technical support for rural farmers who are struggling to accept the realities of land degradation and climate change.
“Some of them are still burning forests. Organizations need to convince the base of producers and farmers to change. Not only their partners but all people in the communities. Incentives can help. For example, I can be carbon neutral, but I’m going to have a higher cost, and if the market does not recognize it, if I don’t have an incentive, the standard will be difficult to maintain. Our cooperative gives its own incentives: those who commit to the organic certification receive fertilizer produced by Colpa de Loros to increase production.
“It is a start, but this is not enough. The state or the market needs to offer incentives as well.”
UNDP Support – and Good Growth Partnership Scoping
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has been working with the world’s commodity-producing countries to put sustainability at the center of supply chains.
From Brazil to Indonesia, the GGP has embraced an Integrated Approach, working with producers, traders, policymakers, financial institutions, and multinational corporations to build sustainability in soy, beef, and palm oil supply chains.
Peru has so far not been covered by GGP but is being scoped for possible assistance under a next phase of the programme.
In the meantime, the UN agency has been supporting Peru to achieve sustainable commodity production- a target that remains crucial in the face of the new EU regulation.
“The control and monitoring of all production processes had to be doubled, and UNDP is vital here. With its finance, the technical department was strengthened, agricultural technology was incorporated, and members received capacity building in sustainability and food security,” said Parra.
Each member of Colpa de Loros is responsible for 3-4 hectares of land. The GEF-financed Sustainable Productive Landscapes (SPL) in the Peruvian Amazon project, led by the Ministry of Environment with technical assistance from UNDP, has been supporting projects that enhance food production while protecting water and land resources.
“The organization’s cocoa is not conventional cocoa. It is a fine aroma cocoa. So, producers needed equipment for special analysis. Then all information needed to be organized in a digital platform. UNDP helped in these areas,’ he added.
“The GEF-financed SPL project provided US$150,000 to complement the work of the organization with maps, digital platforms, and traceability. As there is no global system of traceability, Colpa is using its own, which is expensive.”
Action Plans
The UN organization, working closely with the Ministry of Agriculture, has also been assisting the Government and industry partners to develop and implement national action plans for the cocoa and coffee sectors. The Peruvian National Plan for Cocoa and Chocolate was unveiled in November 2022. It breaks down divisions between production, demand, and finance issues in agriculture. It also contains clear strategies to increase sustainability based on science, technology, and tradition.
The plan complements the values of UNDP and represents a win for both farmers and the environment.
“It is important to recognize that many Peruvian farmers’ cooperatives and companies, regardless of the EU regulation, are concerned about the potential impacts of their production systems on the environment, and they are increasingly conscious of the impacts that climate change is having on their production systems,” said James Leslie, Technical Advisor Ecosystems and Climate Change at UNDP Peru.
“Now, the concern is the feasibility of complying with the EU regulation and in the timeframe required. This concern is directly related to the fact that the EU markets are important for Peruvian agricultural products, particularly coffee, and cocoa. There is a concern that with the new EU regulation, there can be restricted or more challenging access to the market.”
The UNDP official says meeting stringent sustainable production requirements comes at a hefty cost to owners of small and medium-sized farms.
“There is not necessarily a price premium for their products due to certification,” he said. Incentives are a key factor in GGP’s work in encouraging farmers to adopt sustainable practices.
“It’s important also to recognize that there is a difference within the farmer population. Some farmers are organized and are part of cooperatives. For example, roughly 20 percent of cocoa and coffee farmers are organized in some way, which means that 80 per cent are not. Those unorganized farmers are less likely to be certified, and they are less likely to be accessing stable markets that provide some price guarantee.”
According to the UNDP, Peru ranks 9 in the world’s top ten cocoa producers and tops the world in organic cocoa production. The majority of farmers are small-scale and medium scale. Leslie says many of these farmers are either living in poverty or vulnerable to falling below the poverty line.
“Add to that additional restrictions and costs in order to access markets, and it poses a risk for these farmers—for their wellbeing and livelihoods,” he said.
The Future of Sustainable Agriculture
Looking ahead, Leslie says access to traceability systems is important. The farmers will need to prove that their production has met the EU requirements.
He says the Government will also need to expand technical assistance, increase investment in science and technology, including the purchase of climate change-resistant crop varieties, and ensure that farmers can receive finance aligned with the EU regulation’s sustainability criteria.
Clear land use policies will also be needed to delineate land that is appropriate for agriculture and particular types of crops. Areas that must be regenerated should be clearly marked, along with those that should be conserved, such as watersheds and zones of high biodiversity value.
For Colpa de Loros, Parra says the goal must be to strike a balance between sustainable land use and livelihoods.
“For deforestation, there is a big relation to poverty. The majority of the time a producer cuts down a tree, it’s because of need.”
He says the challenge is to create a supply chain that is sustainable, competitive, and inclusive – a goal that is attainable with adequate support and buy-in from every link in the value chain.
ECW High-Level Mission to Colombia
ECW Executive Director Yasmine Sherif meets a young female student at the ECW-supported learning facility ‘Eustorgio Colmenares Baptista’, in Cúcuta, Colombia. Disability and inclusion are at the forefront of ECW-supported learning activities.
Credit: ECW
by Joyce Chimbi (new york & nairobi)
Inter Press Service
NEW YORK & NAIROBI, Apr 24 (IPS) – The largest external displacement crisis in Latin America’s recent history is unfolding as countries open their borders to an influx of refugees from Venezuela following unprecedented political turmoil, socio-economic instability, and a humanitarian crisis.
“Venezuela’s ongoing regional crisis is such that more than 6.1 million refugees and migrants have fled the country, triggering the second largest refugee crisis today. Colombia alone is host to 2.5 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants in need of international protection,” Yasmine Sherif, Executive Director of Education Cannot Wait (ECW), tells IPS.
Sherif applauds Colombia for opening its borders despite ongoing challenges within its borders. For, 2.5 million refugees and migrants from Venezuela are in addition to Colombia’s own 5.6 million internally displaced persons (IDPs).
“The Government of Colombia has taken remarkable measures in providing refugees and migrants from Venezuela with access to life-saving essential services like education. By supporting these efforts across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, we are creating the foundation to build a more peaceful and more prosperous future not only for the people of Colombia but also for the refugees and migrants from Venezuela above all,” she emphasizes.
An influx of refugees and IDPs has heightened the risk of children and adolescents falling out of the education system. As life as they knew it crumbles and uncertainty looms, access to safe, quality, and inclusive education is their only hope.
Girls, children with disability, and those from indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples are highly vulnerable as they are often left behind, forgotten as a life of missed learning and earning opportunities beckons.
ECW High-Level Mission Delegation, led by Executive Director Yasmine Sherif, and in-country partners, Fundación Plan, Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children, UNICEF, World Vision at the ECW-supported learning facility ‘Eustorgio Colmenares Baptista’ in Cúcuta, Colombia. Credit: ECW
To avert an education disaster, as many children risk falling off the already fragile education system, ECW intends to continue expanding its investments in Colombia. To deliver the promise of holistic education and give vulnerable children a fighting chance.
ECW has invested close to USD 16.4 million in Colombia since 2019. The fund intends to extend its support with an additional USD 12 million for the next three-year phase of its Multi-Year Resilience Programme, which, once approved, will bring the overall investment in Colombia to over USD 28 million.
The new Multi-Year Resilience Programme will be developed during 2023 – in close consultation with partners and under the leadership of the Government of Colombia – and submitted to ECW’s Executive Committee for final approval in due course.
Sherif, who announced the renewed support during her recent one-week visit to Colombia, stresses that ECW works closely with the Ministry of Education and other line ministries in Colombia to support the government’s efforts to respond to the interconnected crises of conflict, forced displacement, and climate change and still provide quality education.
This collaboration is critical. Despite the government’s commendable efforts to extend temporary protection status to Venezuelans in Colombia, children continue to miss out on their human right to quality education.
In 2021 alone, the dropout rate for Colombian children was already 3.62 percent (3.2 percent for girls and 4.2 percent for boys). The figure nearly doubles for Venezuelans to 6.4 percent, and reaches 17 percent for internally displaced children.
“But even when children are able to attend school, the majority are falling behind. Recent analysis shows that close to 70 percent of ten-year-olds cannot read or understand a simple text, up from 50 percent before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools across Colombia,” Sherif observes.
Against this backdrop, she speaks of the urgent need to provide the girls and boys impacted by the interconnected crises of conflict, displacement, climate change, poverty, and instability with the safety, hope, and opportunity of quality education.
ECW’s extended programme will advance Colombia’s support for children and adolescents from Venezuela, internally displaced children, and host-communities, as well as indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities impacted by these ongoing crises.
“ECW’s investment closely aligns with the Government of Colombia’s strategy on inclusion and will strengthen the education system at the national level and in regions most affected by forced displacement. The programme will also have a strong focus on girls’ education so that no one is left behind,” she says.
A young girl does arts and crafts at the ECW-supported Yukpa indigenous school of the Manüracha community in Cúcuta, Colombia. Credit: ECW
As of November 2022, over half a million Venezuelan children and adolescents have been enrolled in Colombia’s formal education system. ECW investments have reached 107,000 children in the country to date.
“Financing is critical to ensure that no child is left behind. But funds are currently not enough to match the challenges on the ground and the growing needs. An estimated USD 46.4 million is required to fully fund the current multi-year resilience response in Colombia,” Sherif explains.
ECW investments in Colombia provide access to safe and protective formal and non-formal learning environments, mental health and psychosocial support services, and specialized services to support the transition into the national education system for children at risk of being left behind. A variety of actions to strengthen local and national education authorities’ capacities to support education from early childhood education through secondary school.
The concept of people-centred health care is based on fundamental principles that prioritize human rights, dignity, participation, equity, and partnerships.
Additionally, promoting participation of marginalized groups in decision-making and ensuring malaria interventions respect human rights and promote social justice.
Not only will this help advance Sustainable Development Goals towards gender equality but importantly will also contribute to decolonising global health and empowering communities that remain most impacted by the disease.
This means engaging with communities and other stakeholders to identify their needs and priorities and working together to develop evidence-based malaria control strategies.
Addressing the power dynamics associated with malaria prevention requires acknowledging and tackling gendered dimensions linked with malaria prevention.
To avoid reinforcing power dynamics in malaria control, it is crucial to involve and empower marginalized groups in decision-making. This involves consulting communities to identify their needs and priorities, promoting participation of women and marginalized groups, and designing interventions that promote equity and inclusion.
The foundation for improving community dialogue and community-led actions towards malaria elimination has been established over the years.
On the other hand, a people-centred approach, which does not consider power dynamics, can unintentionally reinforce social hierarchies and exclude vulnerable populations from accessing preventative and curative treatment for malaria.
In conclusion, achieving malaria elimination through people-centred approaches requires a holistic approach that actively considers issues of gender, intersectionality, and balance of power. It is crucial to ensure that these approaches do not perpetuate existing inequalities, but instead centre the experiences and knowledge of marginalized groups.
By acknowledging and addressing the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect and compound to create experiences of marginalization and exclusion, we can make meaningful strides towards malaria elimination.
To achieve this, sustaining a commitment to inclusivity, equity, and social justice is imperative in all efforts aimed at eradicating malaria and improving the health and well-being of communities affected by this disease.
This includes actively involving marginalized groups in decision-making processes, addressing social determinants of health, tailoring interventions to specific cultural and contextual factors, and promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment.
By taking a proactive and inclusive approach, we can ensure that malaria control efforts are effective, equitable, and sustainable, leading to more just and healthier communities.
Arthur Ng’etich Kipkemoi Saitabau is Post-Doctoral Fellow of the United Nations University – International Institute for Global Health.
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Apr 21 (IPS) – The world is becoming increasingly coexistent with crises. A pandemic, the Ukraine-Russia war, and cost-of-living crisis are only a few of the ordeals we’ve seen in just the last two years.
As is characteristic of such crisis settings, those already marginalized are further pushed back, augmenting existing barriers to accessing services, resources and opportunities.
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals centered around leaving no-one behind become all the more difficult to achieve.
Crisis settings are now leading to a worrying trend where those not categorically marginalized are becoming increasingly vulnerable. The World Bank estimates that the COVID-19 pandemic pushed 71-100 million people into extreme poverty, giving rise to the “new poor”, those above the poverty line pre-pandemic who fell below the marker during it.
Against this backdrop, identifying vulnerabilities for development assistance becomes an exponentially more difficult – yet necessary process.
In Bangladesh, around 20 percent of the population was below the poverty line before 2020. This figure has increased substantially since, and is becoming a phenomenon less temporary than expected. In accurately identifying the vulnerabilities of such groups, conventional, income-centred measures of poverty may fall short.
Policy measures must therefore be dispensed using tools that can effectively deal with a range of vulnerabilities, beyond income.
One is the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which captures deprivations in non-monetary dimensions of wellbeing, utilizing a range of indicators in calculating poverty levels for a particular population. Poverty levels are then represented by an MPI score. The higher the figure, the greater the level of poverty.
To see whether multidimensional approaches to addressing vulnerability could potentially be more helpful during crises the Research Facility at the UNDP Bangladesh country office analyzed data from its “Livelihoods Improvement of Urban Poor Communities” (LIUPC) project.
This is a poverty reduction programme covering four million urban poor in 19 Bangladeshi cities, and employs the MPI metric to identify deprivation levels of potential beneficiaries. Conditional cash grants are provided to help eligible MPI-poor households start a business or expand an existing one.
These households also received COVID-19 relief in the form of cash, food, or preventive materials as unconditional support, separate from grants intrinsically part of the project.
A study presented in a recent UNDP Development Futures Series brief compared the before-and-during COVID MPI figures of the beneficiary group with two other household categories – MPI-poor non-grantee households, and vulnerable MPI non-poor households. The detailed methodology and results of the study can be seen here.
Some of the findings from the study were intuitive, business grants disbursed by the project generally helped poor households reduce their multidimensional poverty levels, despite the pandemic.
Far more interesting however were the rather less intuitive policy insights from the analysis:
Consider vulnerable non-poor groups in development programming.
The study’s findings corroborated the emergence of the “new poor”. Households with MPI scores not high enough to be eligible for grants (but still vulnerable, just below the MPI poverty threshold) experienced on average an increase in their multidimensional poverty levels during the pandemic.
People in these categories usually remain outside the purview of emergency policy measures, having not met eligibility requirements of being “poor” under normal circumstances. As such, their vulnerabilities remain unaddressed and are exacerbated during crises.
Cash support helps vulnerable groups during crises.
Findings suggest that the improvement in MPI levels was concentrated amongst the poor groups, including non-grant receivers, while the vulnerable group, who did not receive grants, saw poverty levels deteriorating.
The latter group barely received cash support even in the form of COVID-19 relief, unlike the poor groups. This suggests that in crisis situations, households that receive unconditional cash support may be able to use it to improve living conditions in the immediate term, including households that are not the neediest judging solely by MPI score, but are still vulnerable and at-risk during crises.
Context-specific MPI can complement income-based poverty measures.
Increases or decreases in a household’s MPI score may obscure changes in households with specific vulnerabilities, such as members with disabilities, members belonging to a particular age group, or geographical and regional characteristics.
Despite an overall decline in MPI scores amongst poor households who received grants, the improvement in multidimensional poverty was not reflected for grantee households with disabled members.
Thus, the use of a uniform MPI metric in programming, irrespective of variations in local contexts, also risks overlooking specific needs of vulnerable communities.
Understanding multidimensional poverty would greatly benefit from dynamic data.
The study used static data which cannot account for real-time changes occurring after collection. In this case, if the data had been dynamic and could be updated during the pandemic, the project may have been able to identify beneficiaries and discern the nature of relief needed more appropriately.
Nuzhat Fatima is a Research assistant at UNDP Bangladesh.
The Maipo River on its way from the Andes mountain range to the valley of the same name is surrounded by numerous small towns that depend on tourism, receiving thousands of visitors every weekend. There are restaurants, campgrounds and high-altitude sports facilities. The water comes down from the top of the mountain range and is used by the company Aguas Andinas to supply the Chilean capital. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS
by Orlando Milesi (santiago)
Inter Press Service
SANTIAGO, Apr 19 (IPS) – Good management of the 101 hydrographic basins which run from the Andes mountain range to the Pacific Ocean is key to solving the severe water crisis that threatens the people of Chile and their main productive activities.
This vulnerability extends to the economy. Since 1990 Chile has gradually become wealthier, but along with the growth in GDP, water consumption has also expanded.
Roberto Pizarro, a professor of hydrology at the universities of Chile and Talca, told IPS that this “is an unsustainable equation from the point of view of hydrological engineering because water is a finite resource.”
According to Pizarro, “there are threats hanging over this process. From a production point of view, Chile’s GDP depends to a large extent on water. According to figures from the presidential delegation of water resources of the second administration of Michelle Bachelet (2014-2018), at least 60 percent of our GDP depends on water.”
This South American country, the longest and narrowest in the world, with a population of 19.6 million people, depends on the production and export of copper, wood, agricultural and sea products, as well as a growing tourism industry. All of which require large quantities of water.
And water is increasingly scarce due to overuse, excessive granting of water rights by the government, and climate change that has led to a decline in rainfall and snow.
To make matters worse, since 1981, during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), water use rights have been privatized in perpetuity, separated from land tenure, and can even be traded or sold. This makes it difficult for the branches of government to control water and is a key point in the current debate on constitutional reform in Chile.
Ecologist Sara Larraín maintains that the water crisis “has its origin in the historical overexploitation of surface and groundwater by the productive sectors and in the generalized degradation of the basins by mining, agro-industry and hydroelectric generation. And the wood pulp industry further compounded the problem.”
Larraín, executive director of the Sustainable Chile organization, adds that the crisis was aggravated by a drought that has lasted for more than a decade.
“There is a drastic decline in rainfall (of 25 percent) as a result of climate change, reduction of the snow surface and increase in temperatures that leads to greater evaporation,” she told IPS.
The small town of El Volcán has just over a hundred inhabitants, 80 kilometers from Santiago and 1,400 meters above sea level, in the Andes foothills. Local residents are witnessing a sharp decrease in snowfall that now rarely exceeds 30 centimeters in the area, a drastic reduction compared to a few years ago. CREDIT: Arturo Allende Peñaloza/IPS
First-hand witnesses
The main hydrographic basin of the 101 that hold the surface and underground water in Chile’s 756,102 square kilometers of territory is the Maipo River basin, since it supplies the Greater Santiago region, home to 7.1 million people.
In this basin, in the town of El Volcán, part of the San José de Maipo municipality on the outskirts of Santiago, on the eastern border with Argentina, lives Francisco Rojo, 62, a wrangler of pack animals at heart, who farms and also works in a small mine.
“The (inactive) San José volcano has no snow on it anymore, no more glaciers. In the 1990s I worked near the sluices of the Volcán water intake and there was a surplus of over 40 meters of water. In 2003 the snow was 12 to 14 meters high. Today it’s barely two meters high,” Rojo told IPS.
“The climate has been changing. It does not rain or snow, but the temperatures drop. The mornings and evenings are freezing and in the daytime it’s hot,” he added.
Rojo gets his water supply from a nearby spring. And using hoses, he is responsible for distributing water to 22 families, only for consumption, not for irrigation.
“We cut off the water at night so there is enough in the tanks the next day. Eight years ago we had a surplus of water. Now we have had to reduce the size of the hoses from two inches to one inch,” he explained.
“We were used to a meter of snow. Now I’m glad when 40 centimeters fall. It rarely rains and the rains are always late,” he said, describing another clear effect of climate change.
Agronomist Rodrigo Riveros, manager of one of the water monitoring boards for the Aconcagua River in the Valparaíso region in central Chile, told IPS that the historical average at the Chacabuquito rainfall station, at the headwaters of the river, is 40 or 50 cubic meters, a level that has never been surpassed in 12 years.
“This decade we have half the water we had in the previous decade,” he said.
“Farmers are seeing their production decline and are losing arable land. Small farmers are hit harder because they have a more difficult time surviving the disaster. Large farmers can dig wells or apply for loans, but small farmers put everything on the line during the growing season,” he said.
Large, medium and small users participate in the Aconcagua water board, 80 percent of whom are small farmers with less than 10 hectares. But they coexist with large water users such as the Anglo American mining company, the state-owned copper company Codelco and Esval, the region’s sanitation and drinking water distribution company.
“The decrease in rainfall is the main problem,” said Riveros..”The level of snow dropped a lot because the snow line rose – the altitude where it starts to snow. And the heavy rains increased flooding. Warm rain also falls in October or November (in the southern hemisphere springtime), melting the snow, and the water flows violently, carrying a lot of sediment and damaging infrastructure.
“It used to snow a lot more. Now three meters fall and we celebrate. In that same place, 10 meters used to fall, and the snow would pile up as a kind of reserve, even until the following year,” he said.
In Chile, the water boards were created by the Water Code and bring together natural and legal persons together with user associations. Their purpose is the administration, distribution, use and conservation of riverbeds and the surrounding water basins.
Many residents of El Volcán, in the foothills of the Andes mountains, lack drinking water and have built tanks to collect water from a nearby spring. They have also reduced the diameter of their hoses to a minimum because the flow of water is steadily shrinking, only providing a supply for domestic use and not enough to irrigate their crops and trees. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS
Enormous economic impact
Larraín cited figures from the National Emergency Office of the Ministry of the Interior and Public Security and from regional governments that reveal that State spending on renting tanker trucks in the last decade (2010-2020) was equivalent to 277.5 million dollars in 196 of the total of 346 municipalities that depend on this method of providing drinking water.
“The population served in its essential needs is approximately half a million people, almost all of them from the rural sector and shantytowns and slums,” said Larraín.
According to the environmentalist, Chile has not taken actions to mitigate the drought.
“Although the challenge is structural and requires a substantial change in water management and the protection of sources, the official discourse insists on the construction of dams, canals and aqueducts, even though the reservoirs are not filled due to lack of rainfall and there is no availability in the regions from which water is to be extracted and diverted,” she said.
She added that the mining industry is advancing in desalination to reduce its dependence on the water basins, “although there is still no specific regulation for the industry, which would prevent the impacts of seawater suction and brine deposits.”
Larraín acknowledged that the last two governments established sectoral and inter-ministerial water boards, but said that coordination between users and State entities did not improve, nor did it improve among government agencies themselves.
“Each sector faces the shortage on its own terms and we lack a national plan for water security, even though this is the biggest problem Chile faces in the context of the impacts of climate change,” the environmental expert asserted.
Chile’s Colina hot springs, in the open air in the middle of the Andes mountains and just 17 kilometers from the border with Argentina, in the east of the country, can now be visited almost year-round. In the past, it was impossible to go up in the southern hemisphere winter because the route was cut off by constant rain and snow storms. CREDIT: Arturo Allende Peñaloza/IPS
Government action
The Ministry of the Environment admits that “there is still an important debt in terms of access to drinking water and sanitation for the rural population.”
“There is also a lack of governance that would make it possible to integrate the different stakeholders in each area for them to take part in water decisions and planning,” the ministry responded to questions from IPS.
In addition, it recognized that it is necessary to “continue to advance in integrated planning instruments that coordinate public and private initiatives.
“We coordinated the Inter-Ministerial Committee for a Just Water Transition which has the mandate to outline a short, medium and long-term roadmap in this matter, which is such a major priority for the country,” the ministry stated.
The committee, it explained, “assumed the challenge of the water crisis and worked on the coordination of immediate actions, which make it possible to face the risk of water and energy rationing, the need for rural drinking water, water for small-scale agriculture and productive activities, as well as ecosystem preservation.”
The ministry also reported that it is drafting regulatory frameworks to authorize and promote the efficiency of water use and reuse.
Furthermore, it stressed that the Framework Law on Climate Change, passed in June 2022, created Strategic Plans for Water Resources in Basins to “identify problems related to water resources and propose actions to address the effects of climate change.”
The government of Gabriel Boric, in office since March 2022, is also promoting a law on the use of gray water for agricultural irrigation, with a focus on small-scale agriculture and the installation of 16 Pilot Basin Councils to achieve, with the participation and coordination of the different stakeholders, “an integrated management of water resources.”
The IMF has made some encouraging improvements in paying attention to social protection, health, and education, but it needs to do much more to avoid, in its own words, “repeating past mistakes”, says new report. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS
by Baher Kamal (madrid)
Inter Press Service
MADRID, Apr 19 (IPS) – As many as 45 African countries –out of the Continent’s 54 nations–, all of them grouped in what is known as Sub-Saharan Africa, have now been further squeezed to their bones, as funding shrinks to lowest ever levels, and as a portion of the so-called aid goes back to the pockets of rich donor countries.
It says that the road to global economic recovery is “getting rocky.’ And that while inflation is slowly falling, economic growth remains ‘historically low,’ and that the financial risks have risen.
Squeezed
Well. In its April Outlook, the IMF devotes a chapter to Sub-Saharan Africa, titled “The Big Funding Squeeze”.
It says that growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to slow to 3.6 percent as a “big funding squeeze”, tied to “the drying up of aid and access to private finance,” hits the region in this second consecutive year of an aggregate decline.
If no measures are taken, “this shortage of funding may force countries to reduce fiscal resources for critical development like health, education, and infrastructure, holding the region back from developing its true potential.”
Some arguments
According to the IMF:
Public debt and inflation are at levels not seen in decades, with double-digit inflation present in half of countries—eroding household purchasing power and striking at the most vulnerable.
The rapid tightening of global monetary policy has raised borrowing costs for Sub-Saharan countries both on domestic and international markets.
All Sub-Saharan African frontier markets have been cut off from market access since spring 2022.
The US dollar effective exchange rate reached a 20-year high last year, increasing the burden of dollar-denominated debt service payments. Interest payments as a share of revenue have doubled for the average SSA country over the past decade.
With shrinking aid budgets and reduced inflows from partners, this is leading to a big funding squeeze for the region.
The giant monetary body says that the lack of financing affects a region that is already struggling with elevated macroeconomic imbalances.
Unprecedented debts and inflation
In a previous article: The Poor, Squeezed by 10 Trillion Dollars in External Debts, IPS reported on the external debt of the world’s low and middle-income countries, which at the end of 2021 totalled 9 trillion US dollars, more than double the amount a decade ago.
Such debts are expected to increase by an additional 1.1 trillion US dollars in 2023, thus totalling 10.1 trillion US dollars.
Now, the IMF reports that “public debt and inflation are at levels not seen in decades, with double-digit inflation present in about half of the countries—eroding household purchasing power and striking at the most vulnerable.”
In short, “Sub-Saharan Africa stands to lose the most in a severely fragmented world and stresses the need for building resilience.”
Like many other major international bodies, the IMF indirectly blames African Governments for non adopting the “right” policies and encourages further investments in the region, while some insist that the way out is digitalisation, robotisation, etcetera.
The big contradiction
Here, a question arises: are all IMF and other monetary-oriented bodies’ recommendations and ‘altruistic’ advice the solution to the deepening collapse of a whole continent, home to around 1,4 billion human beings?
Not really, or at least not necessarily. A global movement of people who are fighting inequality to end poverty and injustice, grounded in the commitment to the universality of human rights: Oxfam, on 13 April 2023 said that multilateral lender’s role in helping to insulate people in low- and middle-income countries from economic crises is “incoherent and inadequate.”
For example, “for every $1 the IMF encourages a set of poor countries to spend on public goods, it has told them to cut four times more through austerity measures.”
Countries forced to cut public funding
Then the global civil society movement explains that an important IMF initiative to shore up poor people in the Global South from the worst effects of its own austerity measures and the global economic crisis “is in tatters.”
New analysis by Oxfam finds that the IMF’s “Social Spending Floors” targets designed to help borrowing governments protect minimum levels of social spending— are proving largely powerless against its own austerity policies that instead force countries to cut public funding.
“The IMF’s ‘Social Spending Floors’ encouraged raising inflation-adjusted social spending by about $1 billion over the second year of its loan programs compared to the first year, across the 13 countries that participated where data is available.”
IMF’s austerity policiesBy comparison, the IMF’s austerity drive has required most of those same governments to rip away over $5 billion worth of state spending over the same period, warns Oxfam.
“This suggests the IMF was four times more effective in getting governments to cut their budgets than it is in guaranteeing minimum social investments,” said incoming Oxfam International interim Executive Director, Amitabh Behar.
“This is deeply worrying and disappointing, given that the IMF had itself urged countries to build back better after the pandemic by investing in social protection, health and education,” Behar said.
“Among the 2 billion people who are suffering most from the effects of austerity cuts and social spending squeezes, we know it is women who always bear the brunt.”
Oxfam’s report: “The Assault of Austerity” found inconsistencies between countries. There is no standard or transparent way of tracking progress and many of the minimum targets were inadequate.
The IMF has made some encouraging improvements in paying attention to social protection, health, and education, the report goes on, but it needs to do much more to avoid, in its own words, “repeating past mistakes”.
According to the OECD report, in 2022, official development assistance (ODA) by member countries of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) amounted to USD 204.0 billion.
This total included USD 201.4 billion in the form of grants, loans to sovereign entities, debt relief and contributions to multilateral institutions (calculated on a grant-equivalent basis); USD 0.8 billion to development-oriented private sector instrument (PSI) vehicles and USD 1.7 billion in the form of net loans and equities to private companies operating in ODA-eligible countries (calculated on a cash flow basis), it adds.
Total ODA in 2022 rose by 13.6% in real terms compared to 2021, says the OECD.
“This was the fourth consecutive year ODA surpassed its record levels, and one of the highest growth rates recorded in the history of ODA…”
The rich pocketing ‘obscene’ percentage of aid
In response, Marc Cohen, Oxfam’s aid expert, said: “In 2022, rich countries pocketed an obscene 14.4 percent of aid. They robbed the world’s poorest people of a much-needed lifeline in a time of multiple crises.
“Donors have turned their aid pledges into a farce. Not only have they undelivered more than 193 billion dollars, but they also funnelled nearly 30 billion dollars into their own pockets by mislabeling what counts as aid”.
Rich countries inflating their aid budgets
“They continue to inflate their aid budgets by including vaccine donations, the costs of hosting refugees, and by profiting off development aid loans. It is time for a system with teeth to hold them to account and make sure aid goes to the poorest people in the poorest countries.”
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Apr 18 (IPS) – The Future We Want was the groundbreaking outcome of the Rio+20 Summit, the summit, held in 2012, where the idea of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was first conceptualized.
Amid the unfolding of several global crises, where geopolitics mixes with structural unbalances that are putting at risk the long-term viability of planet Earth, isn’t really high time we got serious about our future?
Can the SDGs be turned not just in a tool for global pressure and advocacy but also a planning tool that involves, mobilizes and empower the people? There is still so much to be done and the levels of urgency can’t be greater.
According to the recently released Asia and the Pacific SDG Progress Report 2023, “the region will miss all or most of the targets of every goal unless efforts are accelerated between now and 2030”.Can localizing the SDGs in the Asia Pacific region and also elsewhere, change the status quo?
In theory, localizing the goals can make a huge difference but we need to ensure that such process means the truly involvement and engagement of the citizens.
A recent online workshop tried to assess where we stand following the Rio+20 Summit whose ultimate scope was, twenty years after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, to relaunch humanity’s commitment towards a different model of development.
One of the key points that emerged in the event, which also saw the participation of Paula Caballero, one of key architects of the SDGs, is the fact that these goals still remain a powerful but mostly unleveraged tool for change.
While it is essential to mobilize more funding for their implementation, the Secretary General is rightly pushing with the idea of an SDG Stimulus— a missed goal to see the SDGs as a tool to radically re-think the way governance works.
The best intentions and the many, often overlapping efforts now at play in terms of localizing the SDGs, do not even aim at such scope of ambition. At the best, localizing the SDGs is about planning local actions rather than new ways of governance.
Moreover, the UN is struggling to come up with anything effective at operational level. For example, the Local 2030 Platform remains still an unfinished job despite its ambitious objectives.
A December 2021 analysis about ways to strengthen it, authored by the Stockholm Environment Institute, did indeed confirm the need to an all-encompassing platform that brings the SDGs closer to the people.
Still, there is so much to be done to ensure that Local2030 Platform can become a catalyst for change. Unfortunately, we are still far from a global mechanism capable of turning the goals in a such a way that the people can use them as a tool of participation and genuine deliberation. The scattered, fragmented and often ineffectual way the UN System works certainly does not help the cause.
A similar initiative, the SDG Acceleration Actions, is supposed to be an accelerator of SDG implementation that is “voluntarily undertaken by governments and any other non-state actors – individually or in partnership”.
As important as they are, such initiatives lack linkages and risk becoming not only overlapping but also a duplication to each other. Could local bodies do the job and truly democratize the SDGs?
Such entities, both local and regional governments (LRGs) have a huge role. For example, the United Cities and Local Governments, a powerful advocacy group based in Barcelona, is undoubtedly breaking ground in this direction.
With now a much user-friendly web site and with a new catchy messaging, UCLG is a global force pushing strong towards empowering local governments and cities so that they can truly take the lead in matter of localizing the SDGs. UCLG also runs the most updated database on local efforts to implement the SDGs, the Global Observatory on Local Democracy and Decentralization or GOLD.
For example there are the “Voluntary Subnational Reviews (VSRs), considered as “country-wide, bottom-up subnational reporting processes that provide both comprehensive and in-depth analyses of the corresponding national environments for SDG localization”.
Still there is a disconnection among all these initiatives despite the fact that UCLG has been championing the Global Task Force of Local and Regional Governments. As an attempt at bringing together a myriad of like-minded groups run by mayors and local governments around the world, it is a praiseworthy undertaking.
While it is essential to create coherence and better synergies between what the UN is trying to do and the actions taken by mayors and governors globally in the area of SDGs localization. But it is not enough. There is even one bigger and more worrying disconnection.
Even if local authorities are truly given the resources and powers to shape the conversation about the implementation of the SDGs and back it up with actions on the grounds, we are at risk of forgetting those who should be truly at the center of the debate: the people.
Localizing the SDGs should mean truly giving the people the voice and the agency to express their opinions and ideas rather than become an exclusive fiefdom of local politicians.
Finding ways to truly allowing and enabling people to take central stage in implementing the SDGs implies a rethinking of old assumptions where local officials, elected or not, have the sole prerogative of the decision making. This is fundamentally a question of reinventing local governance and make it work for and by the people.
But it is easier saying it than doing it!
It is a real conundrum because, if it is certainly possible to come up with symbolic initiatives, all tainted by forms of fake empowerment, a totally different thing is to devise new forms of genuine bottom up, inclusive governance indispensable to achieve the SDGs.
The Global Platform in its Vision 2045 refers to genuine and better democracy practices leading the planning of local governments.What are they going to do to translate these words into real deeds?
It is an important event and the regional commission has been striving to be more inclusive and each year the summit also counts with a People’s Forum and even a Youth Forum. The problem is that, while integral part of the discussions, they are officially considered just as “associated and pre- events”.
Changing the protocol and the way the UN works is not easy but why should we keep holding such important engagements as just nice “add-ons”?
Even with the release of comprehensive Call to Action by the youths of the region before the APFSD summit, what real difference are their opinions and voice making? As simplistic as it sounds, much more should be done in making these conclaves really inclusive even though the real game won’t happen in these fora but at grassroots levels.
It is there where the challenge of localizing the SDGs must be won. It is where citizens really need to be listened to and where their power should be exercised.
In imaging the future, we really want, is to put citizens at the center of it. And it is high time we truly democratized the SDGs. After all, there is no, better form of localizing them.
Simone Galimberti is the co-founder of ENGAGE and of the Good Leadership, Good for You & Good for the Society.
The opinions expressed in this article are personal.
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 17 (IPS) – The world is at a crossroads. This week, the United Nations Secretary-General, government ministers and senior leaders are gathered in New York at the ECOSOC Financing for Development Forum. (scheduled to take place April17-20).
This follows the recent World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings of heads of international financial institutions leaders, finance ministers, and other leaders. These discussions are a timely chance to decide on urgent action to address the global crises we face.
Among others, the war in Ukraine, the resultant food and energy crisis, the effects of COVID-19, climate change impacts and rising global interest rates – all have contributed to increased hunger and poverty.
Many hard-hit developing countries have slow growth, high inflation, and unsustainable debt, which undermine development prospects and prevent them from investing in health, education, infrastructure, and the energy transition.
Given the scale and number of crises, it won’t be a surprise to learn that financing needs for the Sustainable Development Goals are growing. Unfortunately, development financing is not keeping pace.
Navid HanifWe estimate that by 2027 LDCs and other low-income countries will need US$220 billion in external financing, 30% higher than the US$172 billion they needed in 2021. Many countries are falling behind, or even going backwards on the SDGs.
Faced with food and energy shocks, there may be a temptation to concentrate resources on urgent short-term problems. But FSDR 2023 emphasizes that delaying long-term investment in sustainable transformations would put the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and climate targets out of reach and further exacerbate financing challenges down the line.
The Financing for Sustainable Development Report 2023 calls for: (i) a new generation of sustainable industrial policies to chart national green transformations; (ii) immediate international action to scale up development cooperation and SDG investments to support this investment boost, the SDGs, and climate action; and (iii) reforms to the international financial architecture that are needed to support this boost in investment, and to make the system more equitable and fit for purpose.
The possibilities of green industrialization
There is hope.
We have seen in recent years a sharp and swift uptake in new technology and in the transition to green solutions. Energy transition investments rose to US$1.11 trillion in 2022, surpassing fossil fuel system investments for the first time. The green economy became the fifth largest industrial sector, totalling US $7.2 trillion in 2021.
A new green industrial age is not only possible, but it can be the breakthrough needed to bring the SDGs back on track. Industrialization has historically been an engine for progress. Sustainable industrialization—which would include low-carbon transitions—can lead to growth, job creation, technological advancement, and lay the foundation for poverty reduction and enhanced resilience. Industrialization must also be made equitable and sustainable, aligned with the SDGs, and deliver climate action.
Unfortunately, most developing countries are not yet able to benefit from the new technological advances. Many, especially least developed countries, have insufficient resources to invest in the needed transformations, including green energy and sustainable agriculture. Developing countries cannot make the necessary progress on their own, though their advancement would benefit all countries.
An SDG investment push
The international community must scale up investment to support sustainable transformations, the SDGs, and climate action. The push for greater investment is in line with the UN Secretary-General’s call for an SDG Stimulus, aimed at scaling up affordable long-term financing for countries in need by at least US$500 billion a year.
The SDG Stimulus calls on the World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) to massively expand lending and offer it on better terms. Development banks can do this through both increased capital bases and better leveraging of existing paid-in capital.
This includes urgently rechanneling special drawing rights through the MDBs, which can then leverage the impact by borrowing on capital markets, building on the model developed by the African Development Bank.
Debt challenges faced by developing countries are among the obstacles to progress. Already, about 60% of poorer countries are in or at a high risk of debt distress, twice the level from 2015. The international community must work together to urgently develop an improved multilateral debt relief initiative.
Reforms to the international financial architecture
Fixing the debt architecture is just one element of needed architecture reforms. The international financial architecture system, which guides how global funds are invested, is in a state of flux, with multiple reform processes taking place simultaneously.
We are undergoing the biggest rethink of our international systems since the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. But unlike Bretton Woods, which was done as one under the UN umbrella, the current multiple reform processes are piecemeal, fragmented, and lack inter-institutional coherence.
From debt architecture to international tax norms, to trade rules, to revamping investment agreements, the reform processes must aim for a coherent international system that takes the Sustainable Development Goals and climate action fully into account. We must have targeted action to make the architecture fit for purpose to serve the needs of the world, and developing countries in particular.
Failure is not an option
Given current trends, 574 million people – nearly 7% of the world’s population – will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030. Without urgent and scaled up action on sustainable development financing, the prospects for achieving the SDGs grow dimmer.
In fact, the already great gulf between developed and developing countries could widen to become a permanent sustainable development divide. It will take deliberate and coordinated action to ensure that reforms serve the needs of developing countries – and thus help deliver the SDGs. But it must be done.
There must be a recognition that we all share a common future as we share a common earth. With global financial assets of almost $500 trillion, there is no shortage of money. The world has the means: all that is lacking is the will.
Navid Hanif is a United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and Acting Director, Financing for Sustainable Development Office, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. He is also the UN sous Sherpa to the G20 finance and main tracks.
The 2023 Financing for Sustainable Development Report: Financing Sustainable Transformations is a joint product of the Inter-agency Task Force on Financing for Development, which is comprised of more than 60 United Nations Agencies and international organizations.
The Financing for Sustainable Development Office of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs serves as the substantive editor and coordinator of the Task Force, in close cooperation the World Bank Group, the IMF, World Trade Organization, UNCTAD, UNDP and UNIDO. The Task Force was mandated by the Addis Ababa Action Agenda and is chaired by Mr. Li Junhua, United Nations Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs.
There is an urgency for the loss and damage fund to become a reality as many developing countries are impacted due to climate change. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS
by Busani Bafana (bulawayo)
Inter Press Service
BULAWAYO, Apr 14 (IPS) – In March 2023, more than 600 people died in Malawi after Tropical Cyclone Freddy dumped heavy rain, flooding the southern part of the country, displacing over half a million people, and damaging property and livelihoods.
The Malawi calamity is a stark example of “loss and damage” – the negative impacts of human-caused climate change that is affecting many parts of Africa.
Last November, COP 27 achieved a historic agreement to establish a dedicated Fund for damage, and the growing negative impacts of climate change highlight the urgency of financial support to address loss and damage for vulnerable countries.
Climate finance now
Malawi, like many developing countries, neither has the capability nor the capacity to defend itself against climate change events such as floods and droughts that are increasingly experienced across the African continent.
The need for climate action in tackling loss and damage is articulated in Article 8 of the Paris Agreement, which recognizes the “importance of averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage” associated with the adverse effects of climate change.
Loss and damage have taken centre stage in all UN climate discussions for more than 30 years, championed by the Pacific island state of Vanuatu, itself threatened by climate change. Recently Vanuatu led a global campaign for the International Court of Justice to give an advisory opinion on states’ legal obligation for climate action and making them liable for climate failures.
Nearly 200 countries meeting at the annual Conference of the Parties to the IPCC in Sharm El Sheikh last November agreed to establish a “loss and damage” fund to help poor countries, many suffering adverse weather events. The establishment of the Fund comes after spirited resistance by developed countries on taking responsibility for causing climate change through their historic carbon emissions.
Africa has suffered the brunt of climate change impacts even though it contributes a minuscule amount to global carbon emissions. From tropical cyclones in Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar, flooding in Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa to devastating drought in the Horn of Africa.
Pakistan’s climate minister Sherry Rehman, whose country was hit by heavy floods that killed more than 1,000 people and damaged property worth billions of dollars, described the decision to establish the Loss and Damage fund as a “down payment on climate justice”.
However, climate justice may be denied than delayed for many vulnerable countries like Pakistan and Malawi, given divisions on the operationalization of the new funding arrangements for Loss and Damage and the associated fund – key issues that formed the agenda of the first meeting of the Transitional Committee.
The Transitional Committee established at COP27 comprises 10 members from developed countries and 14 members from developing countries. It met in Luxor, Egypt from 26-29 March 2023 to ‘present recommendations on the institutional arrangements, modalities, structure, governance, and terms of reference for the Loss and Damage fund’.
Furthermore, the Committee discussed the elements of the new funding arrangements; and identified and expanded sources of funding. In addition, the coordination and complementarity with existing funding arrangements on climate change formed the agenda of the meeting.
While the initial meeting has been described as successful, there were no agreements on the key questions as to who will finance the fund and who qualifies for the funding under the fund. However, Mohamed Nasr, Egypt’s lead climate negotiator, told an online media briefing that there was agreement on a road map to establish the fund, at least by COP28, to be held in the United Arab Emirates in November 2023. Nasr was optimistic, stating:
“Will it be created? I hope so and assume so, and this is what we are working towards.”
Nasr further explained that there was a movement forward in the understanding of how to deal with these contentious issues by the next Meeting of the Transitional Committee. Not much to go with but Nasr noted that:
“By the next meeting, there will be another stocktake of what we agreed to do … I hope it will deliver in UAE”
The Transitional Committee should tackle three issues on Loss and Damage funding key before COP28, which include what type of fund, the boundaries of the fund and where the money will come from, experts from the World Resources Institute (WRI) argue in a commentary.
“The fund and funding arrangements need to ensure their ability to help vulnerable countries which are experiencing the brunt of climate impacts,” Preety Bhandari and five other authors in an insight paper on finance.
“They must consider the continuum between loss and damage and adaptation and how funding can also enhance future adaptive capacity,” the experts said, noting that loss and damage was intrinsically linked to adaptation, with increased adaptation leading to less loss and damage.
Asked if the meeting had a clear understanding and achieved what it had set to do, Nasr said:
“I would say it partially happened because the meeting has a lot of different topics for decision. What we want to achieve is already agreed upon among the parties, be it on funding arrangement, be it on complementarity, be it on the resources of the Fund … we moved forward on the understanding of how we are going to deal with them between now and the next Transitional Committee meeting.”
Counting loss and damage
Loss and Damage, according to the climate talks, refers to costs being incurred from climate-fuelled impacts such as droughts, floods, extreme heat, rising sea levels and cyclones.
UN chief António Guterres described loss and damage as a “fundamental question of climate justice, international solidarity and trust” during the 2022 UN General Assembly, stating that “polluters must pay” because “vulnerable countries need meaningful action”.
Scientist and director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), Saleemul Huq, says the agreement to set up the Loss And Damage Fund was a major breakthrough for the vulnerable developing countries who had been demanding it for many years highlighting that Parties to the UNFCCC have now agreed to find ways to provide funding to the victims of human-induced climate change who are suffering losses and damages.
Huq is confident that if all countries proceed in good faith, the Fund – which is based on shared responsibility and voluntary contributions – could become formalized and operational at COP28 in Dubai in November 2023.
“We will need to find innovative sources of funding for Loss and Damage such as making the polluting companies (not countries) pay from the exorbitant profits they are making from their pollution,” Huq said to IPS.
Research by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) shows a big financial gap for adaptation. The 2022 Adaptation Gap Report indicates that international adaptation finance flows to developing countries are five to ten times below estimated needs and will need over USD 300 billion per year by 2030.
“It is important that a Loss and Damage Fund tackles the gaps that current climate finance institutions such as the Green Climate Fund do not fill,” the UNEP notes, highlighting that combined adaptation and mitigation finance flows in 2020 fell at least USD 17 billion short of the US$100 billion pledged to developing countries at COP19 in Copenhagen,
UNEP said for the fund to be effective, the root cause of climate change must be tackled – and that involves reducing emissions and finding more resources for mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage.
While the deliberations continue on the arrangement of loss and damage and, more critically, the financing of a deliberate Fund, communities in vulnerable countries like Malawi do not have tomorrow; they have lost today, and the damage they have suffered is not undoable.
MORONI, Comoros, Apr 13 (IPS) – In February 2023, the Union of Comoros ratified the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Later that month, the country’s President Azali Assoumani took over as Chairperson of the African Union.
In this interview with Africa Renewal’s Kingsley Ighobor, the UN Resident Coordinator in Comoros François Batalingaya explains the UN support for the country during the ratification process and highlights investment opportunities in the country.
These are excerpts from the interview:
Q: Comoros recently ratified the AfCFTA. What kind of support did the UN provide the national authorities in ensuring a successful ratification process?
Two fishermen set out for the days catch off the coast of Comoros in the Indian Ocean.
However, there were some concerns about a potential loss of customs revenue, which represents between 40 per cent and 50 per cent of the total government revenue. Not all the Members of Parliament or senior government officials were convinced that the AfCFTA is a good idea.
Comoros’ main trading partners are in (Asia) and the Middle East, not the African mainland. For example, India and Pakistan. As well as China and Brazil. We import most of our chicken from Brazil.
Q: Now, what did the UN do?
A: First, the UN organized local and national consultations. Under the leadership of the Regional Economic Commission, the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP), there were workshops on the three islands to discuss the AfCFTA’s opportunities.
We had the consultation workshop in the capital Moroni, attended by President Assoumani, the Speaker of Parliament Moustadroine Abdou, governors, cabinet ministers, MPs, the private sector and others.
Kingsley Ighobor. Africa Renewal Second, the UN assisted the country in drafting a national implementation strategy. UNDP and the ECA were able to help the government to identify the prerequisites needed to maximize the benefits of the trade agreement.
Third, high-level advocacy was my role as the UN Resident Coordinator: to encourage the political leadership to ratify the agreement.
Comoros has significant untapped potential or business opportunities. For example, the tourism industry could be further developed. Looking at the tourism industry in the region, Comoros is the only country whose tourism industry is still not well developed. Neighbouring Seychelles and Madagascar receive between 400,000 and 500,000 tourists per year.
Q: How did you allay fears about loss of customs revenues?
A: When you look at what Comoros imports and where it gets customs revenues from, these are not goods that will be affected much by the AfCFTA. Most imported products are from Middle Eastern countries, India and China. But basic foodstuffs come from Tanzania, Mozambique, Kenya, and other African mainland countries. Importation of these foodstuffs will not significantly affect customs revenue.
Francois Xavier Batalingaya. UN Resident Coordinator in ComorosAgain, remember that Comoros will benefit if it increases industrialisation. If we increase the value chain around key products, Comoros will benefit through access to over a billion consumers on the continent.
Q: What are some made-in-Comoros products the country could potentially export to the larger African market?
A: These are essential oils like ylang-ylang of which Comoros is the number one producer in the world; we have spices that are beloved in places like India; we have vanilla and cloves.
We need to create value chains around these products and export to countries like Kenya, Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti and others. Comoros needs to access these markets.
Q: Now that the Agreement is ratified, what next?
A: As I said, Comoros is heavily dependent on imports. Therefore, the AfCFTA must be an engine of economic growth, sustainable development and, importantly, poverty reduction.
We need to mobilize the private sector to take full advantage of new trading opportunities on the continent. We need to support the industrialisation of Comoros—facilitate trade and promote foreign direct investment.
For example, with funding from the European Union, the UN Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and the International Trade Centre (ITC) are implementing a project to support production, industrialisation and free trade in Comoros. That’s a good initiative.
Another initiative is the digitalisation of the customs process, and that’s with the support of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
The AfCFTA is an instrument for strengthening social inclusion; therefore, we must ensure that women and youth are involved in these discussions and can take full advantage of trading opportunities in Africa.
Q: An issue much talked about is a lack of awareness among some African traders regarding how they can benefit from AfCFTA. What is the situation with the private sector in Comoros?
A: What we have done is talk to the leaders of the private sector. We need to continue to engage them and at a lower level. The sensitization has to continue. Having ratified the Agreement, we need to raise awareness so they know how they could benefit from it.
Q: What other key development activities is the UN undertaking in Comoros that are impacting the lives of ordinary citizens?
A: Well, let me tell you this: in July 2021, the UN (21 UN agencies, funds and programmes) and the government signed a new generation Cooperation Framework, a five-year initiative—from 2022 to 2026—divided into four pillars: the planet, prosperity, people and peace.
On the planet, we want to strengthen resilience to climate change, natural disasters and other humanitarian crises. Of course, with sustainable integration and management of marine ecosystems. At the AU Summit, the Head of State said it is a priority for Africa, and it would be a priority for us over the next five years.
The other pillar is prosperity. Basically, we need to create a competitive and inclusive economy and partner with the private sector using a sustainable development approach that focuses on sectors with high potential, such as the blue and the digital economy.
Then we need to invest in people. We need to make better use of opportunities and foster inclusive and equitable, gender-sensitive development, providing high-quality nutrition, education and social protection, and the protection of the survivors of sexual and gender violence.
The last pillar is peace. Social cohesion is a priority for us. Human rights, gender equality and democracy are important. That’s why the elections next year are critical. We need to have public institutions that are more inclusive, efficient and accountable to the citizens.
We are committed to accompanying the government to achieve emerging market status and the SDGs.
These are essential oils like ylang-ylang of which Comoros is the number one producer in the world; we have spices that are beloved in places like India; we have vanilla and cloves. We need to create value chains around these products and export to countries like Kenya, Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti and others. Comoros needs to access these markets
Q: Comoros is an island state, meaning there could be climate change challenges. What are these challenges?
A: A good example is Cyclone Kenneth that hit Comoros four years ago and destroyed schools and hospitals. We are still feeling the impact. In addition to the cyclones, rising waters are also a major concern.
We have a water access problem. We have an active volcano called Karthala, which could erupt any time. That’s why we are always in preparedness and disaster management mode.
Q: There are also great opportunities, I guess. What do you tell anyone intending to explore investment opportunities in Comoros?
A: Comoros has significant untapped potential or business opportunities. For example, the tourism industry could be further developed. Looking at the tourism industry in the region, Comoros is the only country whose tourism industry is still not well developed. Neighbouring Seychelles and Madagascar receive between 400,000 and 500,000 tourists per year.
Comoros, before the pandemic, received only about 45,000 tourists per year, mostly Comorians from the diaspora. If I were to invest in Comoros, I would invest in hotels. We need quality hotels.
Comoros now chairs the AU, and it needs quality infrastructure for high-level conferences.Comoros is a welcoming society. I hope other people can come and enjoy that welcoming culture. And the weather is great. So, please, come over!
Q: What are young Comorians doing in terms of innovation?
A: Young Comorians like to join their brother and sisters in especially Marseille, France. The youth are attracted to migration. The good thing is that the girls in Comoros are going to school at a higher rate than the boys, which is not the same in the African mainland. That’s quite encouraging. Girls are attracted to disciplines such as law and administration and less to vocational training. So, we need to get them interested in vocational training too.
Q: What is being done to address this imbalance?
A: Youth employment is a priority for the government and for us as the UN. We are working with the International Labour Organization to invest in youth employment. Every single one of us has a youth mandate. Again, I will not forget the women.
Finally, let me say that Comoros is one of the countries that needs support, particularly investments.
The GDP per capita in Comoros is approximately $1,500. About 20 per cent of Comorians live in extreme poverty. We have more to do to achieve the SDGs. The country needs the UN and foreign direct investors. Let’s work together to support them.
UN Resident Coordinator in Indonesia Valerie Julliand plants trees in Bogor, West Java. Credit: UN Indonesia
Opinion by Valerie Julliand (jakarta, indonesia)
Inter Press Service
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Apr 12 (IPS) – As Ramadan continues through next week, the world’s 2 billion Muslims will focus on the core values of the holy month: helping the poor and committing oneself to the service of others.
These are values that are at the heart of many religions – and also are core values of the United Nations. The UN, including here in Indonesia, works to serve those less fortunate, under the motto to Leave No One Behind.
Committing oneself to the service of others includes future generations. Taking care of our planet to make sure it remains habitable and can support life on earth as we know it for those who come after us is one of our key responsibilities.
“Future generations” refers to people who will come after us, those who are not yet born. More than 10 billion people are projected to be born before the end of this century alone, predominantly in countries that are currently low- or middle-income.
As the global population is expected to grow, we need to ensure that sufficient resources remain available to them. The lives of the future generations, and their ability to effectively enjoy human rights and meet their needs are strongly determined by today’s actions.
Do we over-exploit the resources of the planet or do we only take as much as we really need and use resources sustainably, bearing in mind the generations to come?
At a time when millions of Indonesians are going to gather for iftar with friends and family evening after evening, let us pause for a moment to think not only about those who have passed away but also about those not yet with us.
As the UN Secretary General’s Our Common Agenda policy brief “To think and act for future generations”, released last week, makes it abundantly clear, stopping climate change and pollution ARE our prime tasks when it comes to serving those not yet born. And the world is failing in these tasks – and needs to do more, much more.
Another UN report, released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just last week, points out that we are currently on track to a global warming of 2.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels. That is much above the Paris Agreement’s goal to keep global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. Countries have made commitments to reduce emissions but are not fulfilling them.
Indonesia is among the few countries that heeded the call to strengthen their Paris Agreement commitments last year. In November, the government announced a new set of targets, with more ambitious climate change mitigation goals than before, including a commitment to generate over a third of the country’s energy from renewables as early as 2030.
The UN in Indonesia supports the government in its plans to meet climate commitments and balance the needs of current and future generations through development that is sustainable. We advise the government on climate financing.
We support PLN in modernizing its Java-Madura-Bali power grid, so that it can take in more electricity from intermittent renewable sources like solar and wind. We support Transjakarta in its plans to convert its 10,000-strong bus fleet to electric buses.
Late last year, the government, the UN and development partners signed the National Blue Agenda Actions Partnership in support of Indonesia’s plans to create a more sustainable ocean-based economy.
Eight UN agencies and several donors work in tandem with the government to ensure that the sea can provide livelihoods to coastal communities not only today but also tomorrow.
A sustainable blue economy is vital for Indonesia as it helps boost revenues from ocean-based activities while conserving marine biodiversity and the health of the ocean through the restoration, sustainable use and protection of marine ecosystems.
The world needs more partnerships like this, so that we can safeguard the planet for those who are not yet born. A UN General Assembly resolution adopted last September calls for a Summit of the Future in 2024, where world leaders are expected to agree on multilateral solutions for a better tomorrow, strengthening global governance for both present and future generations.
May the values embodied by Ramadan—peace, compassion and generosity—prevail during this holy month, and throughout the year, and the years, decades and centuries to come.
Valerie Julliand is UN Resident Coordinator in Indonesia.
This article was originally published as an oped in the Jakarta Post.
Source: DCO
The Development Coordination Office (DCO) manages and oversees the Resident Coordinator system and serves as secretariat of the UN Sustainable Development Group. Its objective is to support the capacity, effectiveness and efficiency of Resident Coordinators and the UN development system as a whole in support of national efforts for sustainable development.
DCO is based in New York, with regional teams in Addis Ababa, Amman, Bangkok, Istanbul and Panama, supporting 130 Resident Coordinators and 132 Resident Coordinator’s offices covering 162 countries and territories.
Shweta S Banerjee, Country Lead for India, and Syed M Hashemi, Country Advisor for India at BRAC Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative, joined members of the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society, including CEO Rahul Kumar, to sign the MoU in Patna, India. Credit: BRAC UPGI
by IPS Correspondent (patna, india)
Inter Press Service
PATNA, India, Apr 10 (IPS) – Under the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society, Bihar’s government announced the development of a new Program for Immersion and Learning Exchange (ILE) to be headquartered in Patna.
The Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society, locally known as JEEVIKA, is the implementing agency of Satat Jeevikoparjan Yojana (SJY), a government-led poverty alleviation program in Bihar that has reached over 150,000 households as of early 2023 and is still expanding.
SJY aims to boost the human capital of people living in extreme poverty and the most excluded households through the Graduation approach, an evidence-based, multifaceted, sequenced set of interventions that includes support of consumption, livelihoods, savings, and training. A rigorous study of Graduation in West Bengal by Nobel Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo demonstrates that Graduation provides people with the resources and skills needed to break the poverty trap.
“This a new beginning,” said Rahul Kumar, CEO of JEEVIKA. “JEEVIKA will function as an Immersion and Learning Centre for delegates outside state and country to understand our Graduation Program.”
Drawing on vast experience in supporting the design, delivery, and evaluation of Graduation programs worldwide for more than 20 years, BRAC International will serve as a technical partner for the ILE.
“BRAC International is honored to partner with the Bihar state government to launch an Immersion and Learning Exchange program at JEEVIKA so many more can learn from the Government of Bihar’s experience building inclusive livelihoods for marginalized women,” said Gregory Chen, Managing Director of BRAC Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative (UPGI), a flagship program of BRAC International.
Rahul Kumar, CEO of Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society, signs an MoU with BRAC International to facilitate South-South knowledge sharing around the Graduation approach through a new Program for Immersion and Learning Exchange.
Since 2002, BRAC’s Graduation program in Bangladesh has reached more than 2.1 million households (approximately 9 million people) and supported the expansion of Graduation in 16 additional countries through direct implementation, technical assistance, and advisory services for implementing partners and governments. BRAC is committed to further advancing the expansion of Graduation by scaling it through governments across Africa and Asia to achieve maximum impact.
Learning and knowledge exchange has played a critical role in supporting adaptation and expansion efforts of the Graduation approach for various poverty contexts since it was pioneered in 2002. To date, more than 100 organizations in nearly 50 countries have adopted Graduation, according to the World Bank’s Partnership for Economic Inclusion.
Through immersion visits and learning exchange facilitated by JEEVIKA’s ILE, insights around the design, implementation, and evaluation of Graduation will be more accessible to other state governments in India and national governments throughout the Global South looking to enhance existing poverty alleviation efforts and enable millions more people around the world to escape the poverty trap.
Afghan Women refugees undergoing sewing and embroidery training in Peshawar, Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
by Ashfaq Yusufzai (peshawar)
Inter Press Service
PESHAWAR, Apr 10 (IPS) – “I had my shop in Afghanistan but came here after the Taliban’s warning against stitching women’s clothes. Now, I am working on daily wages in a shop owned by a local tailor master,” Noor Wali, 32, told IPS.
Wali, a resident of Jalalabad province, said that a new order by the Taliban’s vice and virtue authority, male tailors, have been barred from making garments for women in Kabul.
“The order has landed the majority of the male tailors, who have no other option except to leave the country or stay idle and resort to begging,” Wali, a father of three, said.
Before the Taliban takeover in August 2021, he said it was common practice all over Afghanistan that males stitched women’s garments. The male tailors who used to make only women’s garments are the worst hit as the order has made them virtually jobless.
Sharif Gul’s story is no different from Wali’s. Gul, 41, arrived in Peshawar, located close to the Afghan border, and started work at Rs1,500 (about USD 6) per day with a local tailor. “I used to earn at least Rs6,000 (about USD 21) back home and over Rs15,000 a day (about USD 52) in Ramzan (Ramadan) because the people wear new clothes on Eid al-Fitr,” he said.
Eid al-Fitr is celebrated at the end of Ramzan-one month of fasting, and all people stitch new clothes for the festivity.
“A great loss to us. We have been appealing to the Taliban to take pity on us, but they were not receptive to our requests,” Gul said.
Tailor said the order would have a major impact on them financially as many tailor shops cater only to female customers.
Naseer Shah is another Afghan hit hard by the Taliban’s ban on sewing women’s garments. Shah, 39, who migrated to Peshawar last month along with his wife, three sons, and daughter, works as a daily wager with a Pakistani tailor.
“I earn Rs3,000 (about USD 10) a day. My income used to be around Rs10,000 (about UDS 35) during this month of Ramzan. I have been making women’s garments for more than 15 years,” he explains. Most Kabul-based workers have stopped stitching female dresses and started dealing in men’s clothing, but they receive fewer customers.
So he didn’t have to resort to begging; they moved to Pakistan, he said.
Taliban government has already banned women’s education after coming to power. A week ago, they asked women to stop working in UN offices, likely impacting women’s development, healthcare, and population control in the militia-ruled violence-stricken country.
Hussain Ahmad, 50, an Afghan tailor who migrated to Pakistan 30 years ago, told IPS that the influx of Afghan tailors has been problematic because they don’t find lucrative work here.
“We have hired three tailors who came recently after the Taliban’s ban. We have workload in Ramzan, but after Eid al-Fitr, we wouldn’t need their services, and they will be unemployed,” said Hussain, who owns a shop in Muhajir (refugee) Bazaar, in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, located near the Afghan border.
Hussain said the people feared the Taliban for their harsh punishments. “Those arriving here recall how Taliban’s police warned them if they didn’t stop taking women’s garments,” he said.
Ikramullah Shah, an economics teacher, who taught at Kabul University, told IPS that he quit his job because of the ban on women’s education.
“We are here, and my two daughters are studying in private schools here. I want to educate my daughters at any cost,” Shah said. “I have been teaching in two Afghan schools as a part-timer to earn for my family.”
Most of the women who owned dressmaking shops have stopped working after the Taliban’s instructions, he said. Some women tailors had very big shops where they had recruited male and female tailors, but now all have to close shops and work from home.
Among the refugees is Naseema Shah, an Afghan woman who says she will soon start stitching women’s dresses for women in Peshawar. Naseema, 30, is one of 20 Afghan women nearing completion of month-long training in Peshawar, supported by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ).
Dr Samir Khan, a political analyst, told IPS that the Taliban have been facing tremendous pressure from the international community, including the UN, to change their attitude towards women, but the situation remained unchanged.
“We have been listening to news about the ban of women students, workers, and tailors sewing female dresses, which is unacceptable in a civilized society,” he said.
Taliban should do some soul-searching and try to become part of the global efforts and work for women’s development, he said.
“How can the Taliban put the war-devastated country on the path of progress when they disallow women (half of the country’s population) to work,” he said.
Pakistan is an Islamic country where women enjoy equal rights, he said.
He said that women are neither taking part in social activities nor allowed to go to school and work, which is regrettable. The past 16 months since the Taliban came to power have been tough on women.
Sajida Babi, an Afghan teacher in Peshawar that women have been at the receiving end of the Taliban’s ruthlessness. “There are strict dress codes for women who are required to wear an all-encompassing veil while in the market,” Bibi, 55, said. “In my country, women cannot go to schools or parks for entertainment, and they cannot travel without being accompanied by a man, which reminds one of the Stone Age.”
A nurse walks into a hospital ward in Janakpur in Dhanusha District in southern Nepal. Credit: UNICEF/Rupadhayay
Opinion by Roopa Dhatt, Susannah Schaefer (washington dc / new york)
Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON DC / NEW YORK, Apr 07 (IPS) – As World Health Worker Week draws to a close on April 7, health organizations from around the world have been celebrating women’s vital role in the health workforce and sharing stories about the enormous value they bring to all areas of health and care.
But platitudes are not enough. It’s time for global health leaders to step up and turn these words into action.
Globally, women make up almost 70% of the global health workforce and 90% of the frontline health workforce, contributing over $3 trillion to global health each year. The health systems in which they work play a significant role in remote and marginalized groups’ access to health, especially in times of crisis. Despite this, the challenges faced by community health workers (CHWs) are frequently overlooked.
CHWs play a critical role in providing care to vulnerable populations, but they are undervalued and accorded lower status in the “informal” workforce. Upwards of six million women are estimated to be either unpaid or grossly underpaid despite working in core health systems roles and just 14% of CHWs in Africa are salaried.
It is unjust that global health systems rely on the labor of unpaid women who are creating social and economic value that is uncounted and unrewarded. Unpaid work reduces women’s economic security and increases their lifetime poverty.
It also weakens health systems. The pandemic has demonstrated the need for strong and resilient health systems, but there can be no global health security while health systems are subsidized by some of the world’s poorest women.
Women health workers continue to make huge sacrifices to work on the frontlines. They went door-to-door educating households on the COVID-19 virus, tracing contacts, and delivering vaccines.
At last year’s World Health Assembly, India’s one million women community health workers known as accredited social health activists (ASHAs) were honored for successfully protecting the health of millions of people during the pandemic.
At the start of the pandemic, however, reports were coming out of India about the unacceptable risk faced by ASHA workers who were being sent into communities without lack of infection controls and facing stigma and abuse as perceived vectors of the virus.
In 2020, they launched widespread street protests and strikes to demand better pay, protection, and working conditions. ASHA workers may have been acknowledged as global health leaders, but they continue to be underpaid with small performance-based honorariums. They are still fighting for a fair and regular salary and the benefits that come with formal sector roles.
Pre-pandemic the World Health Organization (WHO) projected a global shortage of 10 million health workers by 2030, which COVID-19 now has deepened. Health workers lost their lives to the virus and significant numbers are unable to work, affected by ‘long-COVID’. There have been increased reports of violence towards women health workers during the pandemic–from colleagues as well as patients and their families.
In a 2018 report on health policy and system support to optimize CHW programs, one of the primary WHO recommendations included fair remuneration for CHWs, but this is still far from the norm. When CHWs are compensated, it often fails to align with WHO recommendations, which call for financial packages that are commensurate with the demands of the job, the level of complexity, the training required, and the hours worked.
This World Health Workers Week, we come together with our partners to call on global health leaders, governments and policy makers to disrupt the status quo. We believe that every person, regardless of gender, should have access to quality health and care and opportunities to thrive.
We know a fairly-compensated health workforce–alongside training, supervision, and safe working environments–leads to improved productivity, wider access to healthcare, and better patient outcomes.
The gender pay gap in health of 24% is one of the largest of any sector. We are calling on leaders to take measures to close that gap. We stand with our partners in calling for and focusing on transformative change, including gender-equal leadership in global health and a new social contract for women health workers centered on the need for fair and equal pay and safe and decent work.
There is increasing urgency in both high-income and low- and-middle income countries to prioritize changes in guidelines, funding, and policies. After three years of COVID-19, women health workers, who have been the majority in patient-facing roles, are burned out and traumatized.
Understandably, women are leaving the health sector at all levels in a ‘Great Resignation,’ which threatens to deepen the global health worker shortage crisis.
Addressing these injustices is a moral obligation and an economic necessity. Investing in health workers is a win-win proposition and will send a message that we recognize and value them as professionals.
Not only can we restore justice to neglected global health systems, but we can improve the working conditions and pay of health workers, unleashing broader economic benefits.
We would like to send a clear message that as heads of global health organizations we are committed to building stronger health systems and a more equitable world. Achieving true health equity includes quality care for all–including health workers.
Dr Roopa Dhatt is Executive Director and Co-Founder Women in Global Health, a fast- growing women-led movement with 47 chapters worldwide.
Susannah (“Susie”) Schaefer is Executive Vice Chair, President, and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Smile Train, the world’s largest cleft-focused organization with a sustainable and local model of supporting surgery and other forms of comprehensive cleft care.
NEW YORK, Apr 06 (IPS) – With schools now reopened around the world, countries are called to take transformative action on education financing to recover and accelerate learning for all children, especially the poorest and most marginalized.
Findings from our recent study, however, reveal that we have yet to overcome hurdles to equitable education financing: in far too many countries, the poorest children often benefit the least from public education funding.
To transform education for every child, governments must address all three aspects of education financing: adequacy, efficiency, and equity. Our analysis covering 102 countries zeroed in on the equity challenge in education.
Many dimensions of equity are important to address, as vulnerable children can face simultaneous disadvantages related to poverty, disability, gender, location and more.
However, our study focuses on the poorest children, often hit the hardest by multiple, compounding barriers to quality education and learning.
Unfortunately, children from the poorest households often benefit the least from public education spending. On average, the poorest learners receive only 16 per cent of public funding for education, while the richest learners receive 28 per cent.
In 1 out of every 10 countries, learners from the richest 20 per cent of households receive four or more times the amount of public education spending than the poorest.
In Guinea, Mali and Chad, the richest learners benefit from over six times the amount of public education spending compared to the poorest learners.
Evidence from 46 countries indicates that public education spending has become more inequitable in 4 out of every 10 countries. The data speaks for itself: the poorest learners are not receiving their fair share of public education funding, and we must intensify efforts to address these inequities.
Equitable education spending is critical and can reverse the effects of the global learning crisis before an entire generation loses its future. Our analysis shows that if public education spending stagnates, a one percentage point increase in the allocation of public education resources to the poorest 20 per cent is associated with a 2.6 to 4.7 percentage point reduction in learning poverty rates – translating to up to 35 million primary school-aged children that could be pulled out of learning poverty.
How can we address the equity challenge and ensure education funding reaches the poorest? One way is to ensure public funding prioritises lower education levels.
This financing principle refers to ‘progressive universalism’, by which resource allocation initially prioritises lower levels of education, where poor and marginalized children tend to be more represented. These first few years of learning lay the groundwork for children to acquire basic foundational skills. Then, when coverage at lower levels is near universal, resource allocation is gradually increased to higher levels, with a continued focus on the poorest and most marginalized.
Finally, it is important to note that inequity issues exist not only in domestic education financing, but also in international aid to education.
For instance, over the past decade, official development assistance (ODA) to education allocated to the least developed countries (LDCs) has never exceeded 30 per cent, far from the 50 per cent benchmark set forth by the Addis Ababa Action Agenda.
Moreover, appeals for education in emergencies often receive just 10 to 30 per cent of the amounts needed, with significant disparities across countries and regions. On average, the education sector receives less than 3 per cent of humanitarian aid.
The global community must come together to ensure that children living in the poorest countries and in emergencies can benefit from equitable education financing.
To respond to the equity challenge in education, we call on governments and key stakeholders to take the following key actions:
Most critically, unlock pro-equity public financing to education through broader coverage and volume of decentralized allocations, resources to schools, resources to students of disadvantaged backgrounds (by education and social protection ministries), and strengthened resource allocation monitoring.
Prioritize public funding to foundational learning by securing funding for all in pre-primary and primary education and targeting the poor and marginalized at higher levels of education.
Monitor and ensure equitable education aid allocation in developmental and humanitarian contexts between and within countries, including sub-sector levels, when applicable.
Invest in innovative ways of delivering education to complement gaps in existing public funding through multiple and flexible pathways, including quality digital learning.
We cannot hope to end the learning crisis if we invest the least in children who need it the most.
We must act now to ensure education resources reach all learners and progress towards achieving the goal of inclusive and quality education for all – allowing every child and young person a fair chance to succeed.
Source: UNICEF Blog
The UNICEF Blog promotes children’s rights and well-being, and ideas about ways to improve their lives and the lives of their families. It brings insights and opinions from the world’s leading child rights experts and accounts from UNICEF’s staff on the ground in more than 190 countries and territories. The opinions expressed on the UNICEF Blog are those of the author(s) and may not necessarily reflect UNICEF’s official position.
Financing is vital for growth. Credit: Unsplash / Towfiqu Barbhuiya
Opinion by Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana (bangkok, thailand)
Inter Press Service
The writer is UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)
BANGKOK, Thailand, Apr 04 (IPS) – The unprecedented fiscal firepower used to protect the vulnerable from the harsh socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic contraction have pushed the average government debt level in the Asia-Pacific region to its highest since 2008.
Public debt distress is expected to worsen amid the global economic slowdown, record high inflation and rising interest rates, and uncertainty induced by the war in Ukraine.
And surging debt service payments are expected to put public debt sustainability of several developing Asia-Pacific economies at risk. Most concerning, debt distress risk is highest for countries with the highest development finance needs, including small island developing States.
Public debt is a powerful development tool in need of a major rethink
Yet, a higher debt level is not necessarily a bad thing, according to this year’s edition of the Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific. Current policy debates on public debt sustainability do not take into account the long-term positive socio-economic and environmental impact of public investments in laying the foundations of inclusive, resilient and sustainable prosperity.
Indeed, left unaddressed, development deficits and climate risks hurt economic prospects and public debt sustainability itself. Our analysis shows that social spending cuts increase poverty and inequality and undermine economic productivity in the long term.
Conversely, investing in healthcare, education, social protection and climate action is good economics.
Multilateral lenders and credit rating agencies focus excessively on keeping debt sustainable in the short term. Such perceived optimal debt levels are too low and lead to suboptimal development outcomes.
Revisiting current debt sustainability norms has also become necessary with the emergence of major non-traditional bilateral creditors and a drastic fall in concessional development lending to Asian and Pacific countries over the past decade.
It is time for a bold shift in thinking about public debt sustainability. We propose an augmented approach that assesses public debt viability that takes into account a country’s SDG investment needs, government structural development policies aiming to boost economic competitiveness, and national SDG financing strategies.
It is time for creditors, international financial institutions and credit rating agencies to consider the positive long-term economic, social and environmental outcomes of investing in the SDGs, while assessing public debt sustainability.
Our research finds that public debt is found to decline over the long term when the socio-economic and environmental benefits of public investments are incorporated.
Rather than penalizing bold fiscal support for people and the environment, international creditors should consider if such spending would boost economic productivity.
Lenders and credit rating agencies should see debt relief as helping support the fiscal outlook, rather than as a sign of an upcoming debt default.
Developing countries should also strive to balance investing in the SDGs with ensuring debt sustainability. Governments should not feel deterred from borrowing for essential, high-impact sustainable development spending; rather, funds should be used efficiently and effectively.
Public coffers should also be boosted by resource mobilization strategies designed to generate social and/or environmental benefits, such as through progressive taxation.
Effective public debt management reduces fiscal risks and borrowing costs, with several examples of good public debt management practices in the Asia-Pacific region. At the same time, countries with high debt distress levels may need pre-emptive, swift and adequate sovereign debt restructuring, while efforts towards common international debt resolution mechanisms and restructuring frameworks needs to be accelerated.
We are in the fourth year of the Decade of Action to accelerate progress towards the SDGs with not much to show in gains. It is time for Asia and the Pacific to rise to the challenge of mobilizing the financial resources to realise the dream of resilient and sustainable prosperity for all.
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 03 (IPS) – As signs of a new Cold War are fast emerging at the United Nations, the US continues its war of words with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The rivalry, which extends from Russia and Taiwan to Iran and Myanmar – where the UN’s two permanent members are on opposite sides of ongoing political or military conflicts– has now triggered a battle on semantics.
Is China, described as the world’s second largest economy ranking next to the US, really a “developing nation”?
The US House of Representative unanimously passed a bill March 27 directing the Secretary of State Antony Blinken to strip the PRC of its “developing country” status in international organizations
Titled “PRC Is Not a Developing Country Act” — the bill cleared the House in an overwhelming 415-0 vote. The legislation reads: “It should be the policy of the United States—
(1) to oppose the labeling or treatment of the People’s Republic of China as a developing country in any treaty or other international agreement to which the United States is a party;
(2) to oppose the labeling or treatment of the People’s Republic of China as a developing country in each international organization of which the United States is a member; and
(3) to pursue the labeling or treatment of the People’s Republic of China as an upper middle-income country, high income country, or developed country in each international organization of which the United States is a member”.
At the United Nations, China is closely allied with the 137-member Group of 77 (G77), the largest single coalition of “developing countries” (a group created in 1964 with 77 members).
Since China is not a formal member of the G77, the group describes itself either as “The G77 and China” or “The G77 plus China.”
Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, a former Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the UN and a former UN Under-Secretary-General, told IPS the defining of a developing country is a complex challenge.
“There is no established framework or charter for defining a “developing country,” he noted
According to well-respected economist Jeffrey Sachs, the current divide between the developed and developing world is largely a phenomenon of the 20th century. Some economists emphasize that the binary labeling of countries is “neither descriptive nor explanatory”.
For the UN system, the G77, which provides the collective negotiating platform of the countries of the South, is in reality synonymous with nations which are identified as “developing countries, least developed countries (LDCs), landlocked developing countries and small island developing states” (SIDS).
“They are all sub-groupings of developing countries and belong to the G-77, he pointed out.
Outlining the group’s history, he said, the G-77 was established in 1964 by seventy-seven developing countries, signatories of the “Joint Declaration” issued at the end of the first session of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva.
Although members of the G-77 have increased to 134 countries, the original name was retained due to its historic significance. Developing countries tend to have some characteristics in common, often due to their histories or geographies, said Ambassador Chowdhury, Chairman of the Administrative and Budgetary Committee (Fifth Committee) of the UN General Assembly in 1997-98 and Chair of the Group of 27, working group of G-77, in 1982-83.
In October 1997, he said, China joined the G-77 while keeping its special identity by proposing the nomenclature as “G-77 and China”. China aligns its positions on the global economic and social issues with G-77 positions for negotiating purposes.
Being the largest negotiating group in the United Nations, and in view of the mutuality of their common concerns, G-77 is not expected to agree to separate China from the current collaborative arrangements.
“And more so, if the pressure comes from the US delegation, in view of the recent resolution of the House of Representatives of the US Congress, to take away the categorization of China as a developing country”, declared Ambassador Chowdhury.
In a World Bank Data Blog, Tariq Khokhar, Global Data Editor & Senior Data Scientist and Umar Serajuddin, Manager, Development Data Group, at the World Bank, point out that the IMF, in the “World Economic Outlook (WEO)” currently classify 37 countries as “Advanced Economies” and all others are considered “Emerging Market and Developing Economies” according to the WEO Statistical Annex.”
The institution notes that “this classification is not based on strict criteria, economic or otherwise” and that it’s done in order to “facilitate analysis by providing a reasonably meaningful method of organizing data.”
The United Nations has no formal definition of developing countries, but still uses the term for monitoring purposes and classifies as many as 159 countries as developing, the authors argue.
The UN maintains a list of “Least Developed Countries” which are defined by accounting for GNI per capita as well as measures of human capital and economic vulnerability.
“While we can’t find the first instance of “developing world” being used, what it colloquially refers to — the group of countries that fare relatively and similarly poorly in social and economic measures — hasn’t been consistently or precisely defined, and this “definition” hasn’t been updated.”
“The World Bank has for many years referred to “low and middle income countries” as “developing countries” for convenience in publications, but even if this definition was reasonable in the past, it’s worth asking if it has remained so and if a more granular definition is warranted.”
In its legislation, the US House of Representatives says “not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of State shall submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a report identifying all current treaty negotiations in which—
(a) Any international organization of which the United States and the People’s Republic of China are both current member states, the Secretary, in coordination with the heads of other Federal agencies and departments as needed, shall pursue—
(1) changing the status of the People’s Republic of China from developing country to upper middle income country, high income country, or developed country if a mechanism exists in such organization to make such a change in status;
(2) proposing the development of a mechanism described in paragraph (1) to change the status of the People’s Republic of China in such organization from developing country to developed country; or
(3) regardless of efforts made pursuant to paragraphs (1) and (2), working to ensure that the People’s Republic of China does not receive preferential treatment or assistance within the organization as a result of it having the status of a developing country.
(b) The President may waive the application of subsection (a) with respect to any international organization if the President notifies the appropriate committees of Congress, not later than 10 days before the date on which the waiver shall take effect, that such a waiver is in the national interests of the United States.
Speaking during the debate, Representative Young Kim (Republican of California) said: “The People’s Republic of China is the world’s second largest economy, accounting for 18.6 percent of the global economy.”
“Their economy is second only to that of the United States. The United States is treated as a developed country, so should PRC,” Kim said. “And is also treated as a high-income country in treaties and international organizations, so China should also be treated as a developed country.”
“However, the PRC is classified as a developing country, and they’re using this status to game the system and hurt countries that are truly in need,” she added.
Elaborating further, Ambassador Chowdhury said the World Bank, as a part of the Bretton Woods institutions, classifies the world’s economies into four groups, based on gross national income per capita: high, upper-middle, lower-middle, and low income countries.
In 2015, the World Bank declared that the “developing/developed world categorization” had become less relevant and that they will phase out the use of that descriptor.
Instead, their reports will present data aggregations for regions and income groups.
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) accepts any country’s claim of itself being “developing”.
He said certain countries that have become “developed” in the last 20 years by almost all economic metrics, still wants to be classified as “developing country”, as it entitles them to a preferential treatment at the WTO – countries such as Brunei, Kuwait, Qatar, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates.
The term “Global South“, used by some as an alternative term to developing countries, began to be mentioned more widely since about 2004.
The Global South refers to these countries’ interconnected histories of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and differential economic and social change through which large inequalities in living standards, life expectancy, and access to resources are maintained.
“Most of humanity resides in the Global South,” declared Ambassador Chowdhury.
