Deodat Maharaj, Managing Director of the United Nations Technology Bank for Least Developed Countries
Opinion by Deodat Maharaj (united nations)
Inter Press Service
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 18 (IPS) – Last month, world leaders gathered at the time of the UN General Assembly in New York and agreed on a pioneering Pact for the Future. This global accord has implications across a broad range of issues that affect every country. It offers much hope for the poorest and most vulnerable countries on the planet, known as Least Developed Countries (LDCs).
The world’s 45 LDCs are home to a billion people who face systemic underdevelopment marked by poverty, inadequate health systems, poor infrastructure and limited access to education and technology.
While some progress has been made during the last decade, less than a fifth of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are on track to be met. For example, only around 60% of children in least developed countries complete primary school despite improving literacy rates across the globe. Healthcare disparities are also stark, with maternal mortality rates averaging 430 deaths per 100,000 live births in low-income countries compared to 13 per 100,000 in wealthier nations.
The Pact for the Future, along with its two annexes, the Global Digital Compact and the Declaration on Future Generations, offers an inclusive roadmap aimed at accelerating progress towards the SDGs. By also leveraging advancements in science, technology and innovation, the framework seeks to dislodge decades of stagnation and inequality.
The Pact for the Future outlines several key commitments: On digital cooperation, the Global Digital Compact presents targeted actions for a safer, more inclusive, more equitable digital world by closing the digital divide and expanding inclusion in the digital economy.
On sustainable development and financing for development, the Pact reaffirms the 2030 Agenda and places the eradication of poverty at the centre of efforts to achieve it. Amongst the proposed actions, it pledges to close the SDG financing gap and strengthen efforts to address climate change, which is disproportionately impacting LDCs.
On financial reform, the Pact seeks an overhaul of global financial systems, including by granting developing countries a greater voice in decision-making. It seeks to mobilize additional financing for the SDGs and generally making finance more readily available. The Pact also addresses the unsustainable debt burdens of many LDCs.
This novel Pact for the Future has the potential to give a push to the development agenda across the developing world, but especially so in LDCs. However, for success, there are some prerequisites. Firstly, there is the matter of financing. It is good to see the welcome emphasis on boosting financing for developing countries and making it more accessible. With finance, the possibilities are unlimited. Without finance, progress will once more be stymied. Therefore, the international community must match words with action.
Secondly, the role of business as an essential partner is key. A government-centric approach on its own cannot and will not work. More specifically, there must be attention to the micro, small and medium-scale enterprises sector, which accounts for the majority of businesses and generates the bulk of employment in most developing countries. Systematic support for digitalisation, innovation and the application of technology to this sector will create jobs and opportunities whilst boosting inclusive growth.
Thirdly, multilateralism is vital. The Pact for the Future has enormous potential, with the power to materially shift the dial for least-developed countries. However, it will require international cooperation, sustained political will and strong accountability mechanisms. If realised, this bold initiative could become the catalyst for new technological investments that can help shape an equally bold future for the world’s poorest.
At its core, the UN’s Pact for the Future is a blueprint for renewed cooperation in a fragmented world and offers much hope. There may not be another such opportunity. Let us seize the moment.
Note: Deodat Maharaj is the Managing Director of the United Nations Technology Bank for Least Developed Countries and can be contacted at: [email protected]
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 16 (IPS) – The next round of the polio vaccination campaign in Gaza, a major undertaking for health partners, began on October 14, as continuous attacks and strains whittle down the healthcare and humanitarian systems.
This Monday, October 14 marked the start of the second round of the polio vaccination campaign in Gaza. This follows the relatively successful first round of vaccinations, which ran from September 1-12 and ended up immunizing over 559,161 children aged ten years or younger. The second round of vaccinations will provide an estimated 591,700 children with a crucial second dose of the nOPV2 vaccine.
The United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have urged Israeli authorities for a humanitarian pause, allowing for immunization efforts to run smoothly. However, continued attacks in the Gaza Strip have threatened to impede relief efforts and have put the lives of aid workers in danger.
“We cannot vaccinate children under a sky full of bombs. All parties to the conflict must respect the agreed-upon humanitarian pauses to allow the roll-out of this campaign”, said the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
On Monday, the UN reported airstrikes on a school-turned-shelter in Nuseirat and a hospital courtyard in Deir Al-Balah, the latter of which set multiple tents on fire. Images and video footage shared by UNRWA showed aid personnel searching through rubble for survivors, as well as retrieving charred bodies from tents. Approximately 20 people were killed in this attack and vaccination efforts at the school were halted.
“We miraculously survived, the fire caught everywhere, even the tent where we were sleeping burnt. This is just one of many incidents that we’ve had overnight in the Gaza Strip. These are people that are just sheltering. They’re just trying to find somewhere to sleep trying to find some safety in the Gaza strip where there absolutely is none”, said Louise Wateridge, a spokesperson for UNRWA.
Repeated evacuation orders issued by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have also put a strain on vaccination efforts. Muhannad Hadi, the UN’s top aid official in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, confirmed that over 50,000 people have been displaced from the Jabaliya camp due to evacuation orders on October 7, 9, and 12.
According to the World Food Programme (WFP), the most difficult areas to vaccinate are the northern regions of Gaza, where food deliveries have been halted since October 1. Additionally, further blockages have occurred in southern Gaza, in which all checkpoints leading north have halted the delivery of essential resources.
Despite these numerous access challenges, the second round of polio vaccinations is off to a promising start. In a statement by UNRWA, it was confirmed that roughly 93,000 children under ten years old have been immunized so far. Approximately 43 percent of children who have been reached received the second dose of nOPV2, along with a vitamin A dose in order to maximize overall immunity. Much like the first round of this campaign, the second round will consist of three phases, targeting the northern, southern, and central regions of Gaza. Each phase is set to consist of three days and an additional catch-up day.
Approximately 1,000 aid workers have been mobilized to assist in vaccination efforts and educational services. Additionally, assessments are being conducted by the UN to determine the scale of needs following Monday’s attacks on the Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir Al-Balah. Tents, bedding, clothing, children’s supplies, hygiene kits, and food are urgently needed.
WFP distributed the last of their food supplies in the north, where the hunger crisis has escalated significantly in the past two weeks. Canned food, high energy biscuits, and nutritional supplements have been distributed to displacement camps, bakeries, medical facilities, and kitchens. It is unknown how long these resources will last as restrictions on aid continue to tighten in northern Gaza.
Opinion by Danielle Nierenberg (baltimore, maryland usa)
Inter Press Service
BALTIMORE, Maryland USA, Oct 14 (IPS) – World Food Day 2024
World Food Day seems like it should be a time to celebrate. A day to eat delicious meals and enjoy the rich traditions and cultures of food around the globe.
But it’s difficult to celebrate when conflict, the climate crisis, and our biodiversity loss crisis leave at least 733 million people hungry around the world. Dr. Evan Fraser from the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph calls these cascading crises. And the results are dire.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in 2023, one in 11 people worldwide faced hunger last year. And one in five people in Africa experience hunger.
If current trends continue, more than 582 million people will be chronically undernourished in 2030, with half of these folks living on the continent of Africa, according to FAO and four additional United Agencies. That’s less than 6 years away, which means we have a lot of work to do.
Fortunately, we already know what works. The theme of this year’s World Food Day is Right to Foods for a Better Life and a Better Future. Everyone deserves healthy, nutrient rich, safe, and delicious food.
And the United Nations says, “A greater diversity of nutritious foods should be available in our fields, in our markets, and on our tables, for the benefit of all.” I would add that we also need a diversity of people, practices and thought to help feed the world.
This year the prestigious World Food Prize will be awarded to the Special Envoy for Food Security, Dr. Cary Fowler, and agricultural scientist Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin. These two individuals, according to the World Food Prize Foundation, are being awarded for “their extraordinary leadership in preserving and protecting the world’s heritage of crop biodiversity and mobilizing this critical resource to defend against threats to global food security.”
And Dr. Fowler is working to encourage farmers and governments to grow “opportunity crops” like cowpea, millet, sorghum, and other ancient and resilient foods. These crops have often been overlooked in favor of maize, rice, and other so-called staples, but they have, again, the opportunity to solve a multitude of problems. They build soil health and if storage and processing can improve in places like sub-Saharan Africa, they can be profitable.
Another solution—and it should be obvious—is empowering women and girls. We are systematically underutilizing at least 50 percent of the world’s population. Equal rights for women are not only an ethical and moral imperative, but can help solve the hunger crisis.
According to FAO, if women had the same access to resources as men—education, access to credit and financial services, extension, and respect—they could lift as many as 100 million people out of hunger. And equal rights are good for the economy. And according to Betty Chinyamunyamu of the National Smallholder Farmers’ Association of Malawi, “gender integration makes good business sense.”
In addition, women are often growing the foods that are actually nutritious—including those opportunity crops, but also fruits and vegetables that contribute to agrobiodiversity. “Women’s empowerment has a positive impact on agricultural production, food security, diets and child nutrition,” states FAO’s Status of Women in Agrifood Systems. Making sure that women are empowered in all aspects of their lives just makes common sense.
Moreover, farmers—small, medium, and large—literally need a seat at the table, from in person input at international dialogues like COP29, the U.N. Climate Change Conference, to co-creating technologies with scientists and entrepreneurs that will actually solve the problems that farmers are experiencing in fields and ranches.
Good Nature Agro in Zambia, for example, is developing with farmers ways to prevent post-harvest losses and more sustainably manage their farmland. And the organization Global Alliance of Latinos in Agriculture aims to create a world where farmers and ranchers thrive globally—and they plan to bring hundreds of producers to COP30 in Belem, Brazil next year.
This World Food Day (October 16), the Arrell Food Institute is bringing together agri-food leaders and experts dive into solutions like diversity, empowering women, and putting farmers in the drivers’ seat to create a more safe and sustainable global food system. A food system that works for everyone.
Hopefully, in the not-so-distant future, World Food Day will actually be a day to celebrate.
Danielle Nierenberg is President and Founder, Food Tank, which describes itself as a global community that inspires, motivates, and activates positive transformation in how we produce and consume food.
Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, at a press conference in which she discusses her findings on prostitution. Credit: Naureen Hossain/IPS
by Naureen Hossain (united nations)
Inter Press Service
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 03 (IPS) – Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, calls prostitution a “system of violence” that does not benefit society at all, especially the women and girls forced into this system.
Alsalem spoke at the Roosevelt Public Policy House in New York on Wednesday, October 2, to discuss her special report in which she posits that prostitution is a form of violence against women and girls. The report was first made public in June 2024, where it was presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. Over 60 member states endorsed the report and its findings, including but not limited to Ghana, South Africa, Egypt, Norway, Sweden, Colombia, France, Bangladesh, India, and Nigeria.
Alsalem received over 300 submissions for the report from multiple stakeholders, including civil society groups, academia, experts, policymakers, and, importantly, women from around the world with lived experience.
Across the world, the exploitation of women and girls through prostitution and sex trafficking is a pervasive issue that threatens their safety and rights. Alsalem remarked that many systems of prostitution are built on patriarchal norms that position the abuse of power at the hands of mostly men, who are largely the ‘buyers’ or the profiteers in the sex trade. Deeper economic inequalities and the complexities of emergency humanitarian situations have only further displaced women and girls from systems that would have protected and empowered them.
Alsalem remarked that efforts to normalize or recognize prostitution as a form of labor, such as referring to it as “sex work,” do more harm by gaslighting the women who have experienced it, and it fails to consider the serious human rights violations that can occur within the system, such as the physical and psychological harm they experience under this umbrella of “labor.”
Pornography should also be classified as a form of prostitution and violence against women at large, according to Alsalem. She noted that its proliferation has only normalized acts of violence and harmful attitudes towards women and girls. Alsalem told IPS that the online platforms that host pornographic material only further incentivize and promote these acts and other forms of coercive and nonconsensual sexual acts.
Regardless of the platform, how it is branded or how one enters the trade, the system of prostitution is based on the commodification of the body to undergo physical activity and under that there cannot be consent, Alsalem argues.
“Trying to pretend that there is somehow consent in prostitution, that women want to do this, is actually meaningless in context like prostitution because the concept of consent is actually not relevant when there are systems of exploitation and violence,” she said. “And when the term of consent is being weaponized while we fully know that whatever notions of agreement that women may have—or at least some of them—is extorted through physical coercion, manipulation, and violence.”
When it comes to the legal frameworks around prostitution, this also reveals the contradictions within countries on the letter of the law versus its regulation in practice. The report indicates that under certain approaches, little is actually done to de-incentivize “buyers” or “organizers” in engaging in prostitution systems.
Criminalizing prostitution is more likely to punish the prostituted persons through persecution and incarceration, social ostracization, and even further abuse at the hands of law enforcement. In fact, under this approach, it is rare that the ‘buyers’ are punished or that the third parties are held accountable. Under the regulation approach, legal prostitution ensures control to the state through commercial establishments and federal or national laws, including tax laws that they profit from, often at the expense of the sex workers. Decriminalizing prostitution allows for all parties to operate without the fear of persecution; however, this has also resulted in an increased demand, and it does not stop exploitative parties from profiting off vulnerable women and girls and leading them into the sex trade.
The report speaks in favor of the abolition approach, otherwise known as the “Equality model” or the “Nordic model.” Under this model, third parties (the ‘organizers’) and the buyers are criminalized for engaging in the buying and promotion of sex, while the sex workers do not face criminal persecution. Instead, more investments are made in exit pathways for sex workers to ensure alternative work, economic stability, housing, and support to address trauma and even substance abuse where needed. In the report, Alsalem notes that the Nordic model maintains the international standard on sexual exploitation and trafficking in persons by criminalizing third parties, and that it recognizes the majority of prostitutes are women and girls.
This approach could have its limitations, however, as one report from the London School of Economics (LSE) notes that sex trade legislation still varies across the different countries that implement this model, the safety of sex workers remains uncertain and they still face the risk of policing. For migrant sex workers, their status prevents them from accessing social protections, and under immigration laws, prostitution can be grounds for deportation.
The issues present in the current legal models for prostitution reflect some of the institutional structures that maintain the status quo where sex workers are exploited and left unprotected. At the same time, they also reflect a wider cultural issue on how prostitution, and more broadly, sex, is discussed and perceived.
“In addition to being a human rights violation that needs legal solutions, what is mentioned very clearly in the report is that we are dealing with a cultural issue,” said Taina Bien-Aimé, Executive Director of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. She added that other acts of violence against women, such as intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and harassment, are now recognized as forms of abuse.
“But for some reason, because money is exchanged in prostitution, somehow it is seen outside of the context of male violence and discrimination, particularly against women and girls.”
In her report, Alsalem offers recommendations to governments on how they can reshape their legislation and policies on prostitution towards a direction that is more conscionable of human rights and that centers the experiences of the women and girls who are forced to participate. Governments also need to take measures to address the root causes behind prostitution and the factors that leave women and girls at a higher risk of it.
“The importance of this report is in its recommendations as well, where the Special Rapporteur is asking jurisdictions and member states around the world to find legislative and policy solutions to this egregious human rights violation,” said Bien-Aimé.
When asked to elaborate on the steps that need to be taken by international actors like the United Nations, Alsalem referred to the recommendation that UN agencies should also adopt a rights-based approach to prostitution. Alsalem commented that she had reached out to several UN agencies. In particular, she is having “continuous conversations” with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO), on her recommendation for these agencies to conduct studies into the wider impacts of prostitution on survivors within their focus of health and labor.
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Frontline Women’s Fund, and local civil society groups play an important role in spotlighting the issue. Alsalem told IPS that they need to come together to listen to the survivors of prostitution, as well as engage with all actors working on the matter.
“We see that in decision-making places, including governments, parliaments, whenever the issue is discussed, the law is being prepared or the policy is being revised, some have privileged access to these decision-making places, and that can be those that are advocating for full legalization of all aspects. Whereas those that are advocating for the abolition model… cannot get the same access, and that includes survivors.”
The panel for the session on “Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Imagining a World without Nuclear Weapons.” Credit: AD McKenzie/IPS
by AD McKenzie (paris)
Inter Press Service
PARIS, Sep 27 (IPS) – In any discussion of world peace and the future of humanity, the issue of nuclear arms must be addressed, and now.
That was the message from a range of delegates at the “Imaginer la Paix / Imagine Peace” conference, held in Paris September 22 to 24, and organized by the Sant’Egidio Community, a Christian organization founded in Rome in 1968 and now based in 70 countries.
Describing its tenets as “Prayer, service to the Poor and work for Peace,” the community has hosted 38 international, multi-faith peace meetings, bringing together activists from around the world. This is the first time the conference has been held in Paris, with hundreds traveling to France, itself a nuclear-weapon state.
Occurring against the backdrop of brutal, on-going conflicts in different regions and a new race by some countries to “upgrade” their arsenal, the gathering had a sense of urgency, with growing fears that nuclear weapons might be used by warlords. Participants highlighted current and past atrocities and called upon world leaders to learn from the past.
“After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have been blessed with many who have said ‘no’—’no’ a million times, creating movements and treaties, (and) awareness… that the only reasonable insight to learn from the conception and use of nuclear weapons is to say ‘no’,” said Andrea Bartoli, president of the Sant’Egidio Foundation for Peace and Dialogue, based in New York.
Participating in a conference forum Monday titled “Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Imagining a World Without Nuclear Weapons,” Bartoli and other speakers drew stark pictures of what living in a world with nuclear weapons entails, and they highlighted developments since World War II.
“After the two bombs were used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, humans built more than 70,000 nuclear weapons and performed more than 2,000 tests. Still today we have more than 12,500, each of them with power greatly superior to the two used in August 1945,” Bartoli said.
Despite awareness of the catastrophic potential of these weapons and despite a UN treaty prohibiting their use, some governments argue that possessing nuclear arms is a deterrent—an argument that is deceptive, according to the forum speakers.
Anna Ikeda, program coordinator for disarmament at the UN Office of Soka Gakkai International. Credit: AD McKenzie/IPS
Jean-Marie Collin, director of ICAN (the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a movement launched in the early 2000s in Australia and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017), said that leaders who cite deterrence “accept the possibility of violating” international human rights.
“Nuclear weapons are designed to destroy cities and kill and maim entire populations, which means that all presidents and heads of government who implement a defense policy based on nuclear deterrence and who are therefore responsible for giving this order, are aware of this,” Collin told the forum.
ICAN campaigned for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that was adopted at the United Nations in 2017, entering into force in 2021. The adoption came nearly five decades after the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which entered into force in 1970.
The terms of the NPT consider five countries to be nuclear weapons states: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China. Four other countries also possess nuclear weapons: India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel.
According to a 2024 ICAN report, these nine states jointly spent €85 billion (USD 94,6 billion) on their atomic weapon arsenals last year, an expenditure ICAN has called “obscene” and “unacceptable.” France, whose president Emmanuel Macron spoke about peace in broad, general terms at the opening of the conference, spent around €5,3 billion (about USD 5,9 billion) in 2023 on its nuclear weapons, said the report.
The policy of “deterrence” and “reciprocity,” which essentially means “we’ll get rid of our weapons if you get rid of yours,” has been slammed by ICAN and fellow disarmament activists.
“With the constant flow of information, we often tend to lose sight of the reality of figures,” Collin said at the peace conference. “I hope this one will hold your attention: it is estimated that more than 38,000 children were killed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Children!”
All those killed—an estimated 210,000 people by the end of 1945—died in horrific ways, as survivors and others have testified. Delegates said that this knowledge should be the real “deterrent.”
At the forum, Anna Ikeda, program coordinator for disarmament at the UN Office of Soka Gakkai International, a global Buddhist movement, described testimony from a Hiroshima a-bomb survivor, Reiko Yamada, as one she would never forget.
“She (Yamada) stated, ‘A good friend of mine in the neighbourhood was waiting for her mother to return home with her four brothers and sisters. Later, she told me that on the second day after the bombing, a moving black lump crawled into the house. They first thought it was a black dog, but they soon realized it was their mother; she collapsed and died when she finally got to her children. They cremated her body in the yard,” Ikeda told the audience with emotion.
“Who deserves to die such a death? Nobody!” she continued. “Yet our world continues to spend billions of dollars to upkeep our nuclear arsenals, and our leaders at times imply readiness to use them. It is utterly unacceptable.”
Ikeda said that survivors, known as the “hibakusha” in Japan, have a fundamental answer to why nuclear weapons must be abolished—it is that “no one else should ever suffer what we did.”
Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.
Dr. Tshilidzi Marwala, USG and Rector of the United Nations University, and Ms. Kaoru Nemeto, Director of the United Nations Information Centre during a discussion ‘Building the Future: Synergetic Collaboration on Nuclear and Climate Crises.’ Credit: Naureen Hossain/IPS
by Naureen Hossain (united nations)
Inter Press Service
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 23 (IPS) – Driving the Summit of the Future’s core messages of international solidarity and decisive action are young people who are determined to address the intersecting issues that the world contends with today.
During the Summit’s Action Days (20-21 September), it was young people who led the conversations of increasing and defining meaningful engagement, both on- and off-site from the United Nations Headquarters.
Not only are they driving the conversation, but in the Pact for the Future adopted by world leaders at the United Nations on Sunday (September 22), youth and future generations are at the forefront of global leaders’ concerns, and their role was clearly defined with the first ever Declaration on Future Generations, with concrete steps to take account of future generations in our decision-making, including a possible envoy for future generations.
This includes a commitment to more “meaningful opportunities for young people to participate in the decisions that shape their lives, especially at the global level.”
Building the Future: Synergetic Collaboration on Nuclear and Climate Crises, a side event whose co-organizers included Soka Gakkai International (SGI) and the Future Action Festival Organizing Committee, with the support of the United Nations University (UNU) and the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC), brought together young activists to discuss the intersection between two different crises and what will define meaningful youth engagement.
Kaoru Nemoto, the Director General of UNIC in Tokyo, observed that it was “ground-breaking” to see the agenda of the Summit’s Action Days largely led and organized by youth participants, as signified by the majority of seats in the General Assembly Hall being filled by young activists.
“There is an undercurrent, a common message, that the youth can make this world a better place to live,” said Nemoto. “No matter what agenda you are working on, be it climate change, nuclear disarmament, fighting inequality… youth issues are cross-cutting, very strong cross-cutting issues across the board.”
Nemoto further added that the United Nations needs to do much more to engage youth for meaningful participation. This would mean allowing youth to consult in decision-making and to be in positions of leadership. Youth presence cannot be reduced to tokenism.
The climate and nuclear crises are existential threats that are deeply connected, said Dr. Tshilidzi Marwala, the rector of the United Nations University. Climate instability fuels the factors that lead to conflict and displacement. Conflict, such as what is happening in Sudan, Israel, Palestine, and Ukraine, increases the risk of nuclear escalation. As leaders in the present day tackle the issues, Marwala called on the youth to continue raising their voices and to hold those powers accountable.
Marwala noted that the United Nations University would be committed to “realizing meaningful participation” in all parties. For young people, while they are motivated and demonstrate a care for deeper social issues, they face challenges in having their voices heard or in feeling galvanized to take action. Marwala noted that it was important to reach out to those young people who are either not involved or feel discouraged from getting involved in political work and activism.
Chief among the Summit of the Future’s agenda is increasing youth participation in decision-making processes. It has long been acknowledged that young activists and civil society actors drive greater societal change and are motivated to act towards complex issues. Yet they frequently face challenges in participating in policymaking that would shape their countries’ positions.
Among these challenges are representation in political spaces. Within the context of Japan, young people are underrepresented in local and national politics. As Luna Serigano, an advocate from the Japan Youth Council, shared during the event, there is a wider belief among young voters in Japan that their voices will go unheard by authorities.
This is indicated in voter turnout, which shows that only 37 percent of voters are in their 20s, and only 54 percent of voters believe that their votes matter. By contrast, 71 percent of people in their 70s voted in elections. People in their 30s or younger account for just 1 percent of professionals serving in government councils and forums. The Japan Youth Council is currently advocating for active youth participation in the country’s climate change policy by calling for young people to be directly involved as committee members to work on a new energy plan for the coming year.
Yuuki Tokuda, a co-founder of GeNuine, a Japan-based NGO that explores nuclear issues through a gender perspective, shared that young people are out of decision-making spaces. Although their voices may be heard, it is not enough. As she told IPS, the climate and nuclear crises are on the minds of young people in Japan. And while they have ideas on what could be done, they are not informed on how to act.
There is some hope for increasing participation. Tokuda shared within policymakers on nuclear issues, of which 30 percent include women, have begun to engage with young people in these discussions.
“It is time to reconstruct systems so that youth can meaningfully participate in these processes,” said Tokuda. “We need more intergenerational participation in order to work towards the ban of nuclear weapons and the climate crisis.”
During the event, what meaningful youth engagement should look like was discussed. It was acknowledged that efforts have gone towards giving a space to the perspectives of young people. Including young people in the discussions is a critical step. It was suggested that direction should shift towards ensuring that young people have the authority to take the action needed to resolve intersecting, complex issues. Otherwise, the inclusion is meaningless.
“The future-oriented youth is more needed than ever to tackle the challenges in building and maintaining peace,” said Mitsuo Nishikata of SGI.
“As a youth-driven initiative such as what the Future Action Festival demonstrates, youth solidarity can stand as a starting point for resolving and passing issues.”
Next year (2025) will mark 80 years since the end of World War II and the Hiroshima-Nagasaki atomic bombings. Nishikata pointed out that this will be a time for crucial opportunities to advance the discussions on nuclear disarmament and climate action, ahead of the Third Meeting of State Parties on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the 30th UN Climate Conference (COP30).
“We will continue to unite in our desire for peace, sharing the responsibility for future generations and expanding grassroots actions in Japan and globally.
Other commitments for the Pact for the Future included the first multilateral recommitment to nuclear disarmament in more than a decade, with a clear commitment to the goal of totally eliminating nuclear weapons.
It also pledged reform of the United Nations Security Council since the 1960s, with plans to improve the effectiveness and representativeness of the Council, including by redressing the historical underrepresentation of Africa as a priority.
The pact has at its core a commitment to “turbo-charge” implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including the reform of the international financial architecture so that it better represents and serves developing countries.
“We cannot build a future that is suitable for our grandchildren with a system that our grandparents created,” as the Secretary-General António Guterres stated.
This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.
Students interact with ECW’s Executive Director, Yasmine Sherif, as they participate in an art therapy session at an ECW-supported school in Kyiv, Ukraine. In partnership with UNICEF Ukraine and Caritas Ukraine, the school offers vital mental health and psychosocial support. Credit: ECW
by IPS Correspondent (united nations)
Inter Press Service
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 17 (IPS) – Education Cannot Wait (ECW) has delivered quality education to children in crisis “against all odds,” ECW Executive Director Yasmine Sherif said at the United Nations today. “And you can imagine the odds. We are seeing more armed conflict, a growth of climate-induced disasters and the biggest refugee movement since World War 2.”
Education Cannot Wait’s ‘Results Against All Odds: 2023 Annual Results Report‘ launched today (September 17, 2024) gives details of the dire need for additional funding because, while the number of children in urgent need of education support has nearly tripled since 2016, for the first time in a decade funding for funding for education in emergencies and protracted crises dropped.
The global community is falling behind on its promise to ensure ‘quality education for all‘ by 2030, the report says, as armed conflicts, forced displacement, climate change, and other emergencies and protracted crises have left more than 224 million crisis-affected children in urgent need of education support, a sharp rise from 75 million in 2016.
Overall humanitarian funding for education decreased by 3% last year, from US$1.2 billion in 2022 to US$1.17 billion in 2023, according to the report.
Despite this, Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises within the United Nations, and its strategic partners continue to deliver life-saving, life-sustaining and multi-year investments in education to the world’s most vulnerable children and adolescents.
Sherif thanked ECW’s partners and the global community that supports education for children in crisis.
“Mostofall,wehavetothankthechildrenwhoareclingingontohopedespitethedarknessandtheoddsagainstthem,stillwantingtogotoschool,wantingtolearnandwantingtochangetheirlives.Now,despiteallthesealarmingtrendsandrealities,educationcannotwait,” Sherif said, noting that this report gave details of many children that had been reached sinceECWbecameoperationalin2017.
“That’ssixyears,11millionwithaholisticqualityeducation,aneducationthatischild-centeredandthatentitlestheentirespectrumofschoolmeansacademictraining,artsandmentalhealthandpsychosocialservices,protection,teachertrainingandteachersupport,amongstsomanyotherthings.” In 2023 alone, 5.6 million girls and boys were reached, she noted.
More Funding Needed to Meet 2026 Goal
To date, the fund has mobilized more than US$1.6 billion from public and private donors. However, US$600 million is urgently needed in donor contributions for ECW and its strategic partners to reach a total of 20 million children and adolescents with inclusive, quality education by the end of its 2023-2026 strategic plan period.
“For our 25 strategic donor partners, these transformative investments deliver a quality child-centered and holistic education, and thus represent a commitment to sustainable development, human rights, economic resilience and global security,” said Gordon Brown, UN Special Envoy for Global Education and Chair of ECW’s High-Level Steering Group.
“Education is the most powerful tool to restore hope in a world marred by brutal conflicts, human rights violations and inequality. It is our investment in a new generation of leaders.”
From Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gaza, the West Bank, to Haiti, the Sahel, Sudan, Ukraine and other hotspots around the globe, ECW’s report highlights the profound impact of education in crisis settings.
Funding Education: A Moral Choice
“Girls and boys in crises are enduring the worst impacts of brutal man-made conflicts, forced displacement, climate change and other disasters. Our new report proves that despite these challenges, it is possible to provide them with the protection, hope and life-changing opportunity of a quality holistic education. To do this, we urgently call for US$600 million to meet our strategic plan targets and ensure a better future for 20 million girls and boys by the end of 2026,” said ECW Executive Director Yasmine Sherif. “This is the time to make a moral choice that is aligned with political action.”
The new report shows ECW’s strong focus on the world’s most vulnerable and at-risk children: of the children reached in 2023, more than half were girls (51%), 17% were internally displaced and 22% were refugees.
The quality and impact of the education delivered—even in the most difficult of circumstances—are also improving. In all, 9 out of 10 programmes reported improved school enrollment and 72% showed gender-equitable progress. ECW reported that, among programmes able to monitor learning outcomes, 80% of its investments demonstrated academic improvements and 72% showed improvements in children’s social and emotional learning and well-being.
ECW investments also improved the continuity of learning, with notable increases in the number of girls and boys reached through the Fund’s investments in early childhood education and secondary school, disability inclusion, gender-transformative approaches, mental health support, and agile, holistic solutions that address whole-child needs.
The climate crisis is an education crisis. The number of children reached through First Emergency Responses resulting from climate-induced hazards nearly doubled from 14% in 2022 to 27% in 2023.
The report lays out ECW’s distinct approach and results in improving coordination at the humanitarian-development nexus, joint programming, increasing localization and community engagement, and building stronger data and evidence systems.
It demonstrates ECW’s efforts with partners to deliver on key United Nations initiatives and reforms, including the Grand Bargain agreement, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Secretary-General UN reform. The report shows that the systems are in place and that Education Cannot Wait has brought a revival through bold support to make the systems work at its best. But funding is required to achieve the goals.
“Education is a public good and a fundamental right. To achieve our goals, global leaders must align policies, funding and humanitarian principles. Multilateral aid funding must immediately be increased to reverse the current downward trend, and partnerships and collaboration must be strengthened across humanitarian, development and peace efforts. Education Cannot Wait has shown us that the seemingly ‘impossible’ is indeed possible—provided that the funding is made available,” said Brown.
A student participates in an art therapy session at an ECW-supported school in Kyiv, Ukraine. In partnership with UNICEF Ukraine and Caritas Ukraine, the school offers vital mental health and psychosocial support, alongside essential learning materials, helping children recover from trauma and promoting social cohesion between host communities and displaced children and families. Credit: ECW
by Joyce Chimbi (kyiv kyiv & nairobi)
Inter Press Service
KYIV Kyiv & NAIROBI, Sep 13 (IPS) – In a major escalation of a conflict that started in 2014 and which is the largest in Europe since World War II, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, thousands of Ukrainian civilians—many of them women and children—have lost their lives. Countless others have been displaced from their homes, clinging to what remains of the education system as their communities disintegrate.
On a high-level UN mission to Ukraine this week, Education Cannot Wait (ECW)—the global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises within the United Nations—met with children affected by the war and local partners. The mission took stock of the impact of the conflict on approximately 4 million children across Ukraine whose schooling has been severely disrupted.
“We visited a school in Kyiv, where classes continue despite the constant threat of attack. Alarms frequently signal imminent danger. The school has a bomb shelter for 500 children, but there are over 1,000 students enrolled. To ensure everyone has access to the shelter when needed, primary school children attend in the morning, and secondary school children attend in the afternoon,” Yasmine Sherif, ECW’s Executive Director, told IPS.
“We also spoke with psychologists and parents, including single mothers displaced from the east, north, and south of the country. They’ve come to Kyiv, leaving behind the fathers and grandparents of their children. We were able to see how a strong focus on mental health and social services is helping children and families cope with these challenges, with excellent collaboration between teachers, psychologists, parents, and the broader community. The Ministry of Education is working tirelessly to ensure safe learning environments for all children,” Sherif added.
Yasmine Sherif, Education Cannot Wait Executive Director and children participate in an art therapy session at an ECW-supported school in Kyiv, Ukraine. In partnership with UNICEF Ukraine and Caritas Ukraine, the school offers vital mental health and psychosocial support, alongside essential learning materials, helping children recover from trauma and promoting social cohesion between host communities and displaced children and families. Credit: ECW
According to Sherif, children in Ukraine continue their education in core subjects like reading and mathematics, alongside arts education, even under these difficult circumstances. ECW was among the first to invest in education in Ukraine, starting in 2017, with an initial emergency response supporting children along the front lines in eastern Ukraine.
Since then, ECW has provided USD 27 million in funding to support quality, holistic education programmes in Ukraine since 2017. As conflict continues to escalate and education needs multiply, ECW has received much-needed donations from additional donors, including Germany and Japan, to support education in Ukraine.
At last year’s Education Cannot Wait High-Level Financing Conference, the Global Business Coalition for Education pledged to mobilize USD 50 million from the business community to support ECW’s four-year strategic plan. In partnership with GBCE, TheirWorld, HP and Microsoft, USD 39 million in partnership and device donation for ECW has already been mobilized, and over 70,000 laptops have been shared with schools, teachers and other people in need, both inside Ukraine and in neighboring countries.
This is a huge investment in expanding educational opportunities for children who are unable to access in-person learning. Delivered by a consortium of partners including Finn Church Aid, the Kyiv School of Economics, Save the Children and UNICEF—in coordination with Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science—ECW’s education programmes have thus far reached more than 360,000 children, about 65 percent of whom are girls.
Yasmine Sherif, Education Cannot Wait (ECW) Executive Director, mission delegation, school staff, children and their parents during a visit to an ECW-supported school in Kyiv, Ukraine. Credit: ECW
Against this backdrop, Munir Mammadzade, UNICEF Representative to Ukraine, emphasized that the “support from Education Cannot Wait is critical for children, their parents and teachers who are doing everything they can to keep classrooms open and to continue in-person learning despite the impact of the war across the country.”
However, more funding is urgently needed. Over 1,300 educational facilities have been damaged or destroyed, and nearly 600,000 children remain unable to access in-person learning since the start of the school year in early September, due to ongoing deadly and destructive fighting, attacks and displacement.
“This atrocious war must stop now! For as long as the children, adolescents and teachers in Ukraine suffer this unfathomable horror, schools must be protected from attacks. As a global community, we must rise to the challenge before us to ensure that every girl and every boy in Ukraine impacted by this brutal war and the refugees have access to the safety, hope and opportunity that only a quality education can provide,” Sherif said.
ECW and its strategic partners are calling for USD 600 million in additional funding from private and public donors to deliver on the global targets outlined in the Fund’s 2023-2026 Strategic Plan. This funding would provide 20 million children in crisis-impacted countries around the globe with safe, inclusive, and quality education, and the hope for a better tomorrow.
A young learner at an ECW-supported school in Kyiv, Ukraine, welcomes Education Cannot Wait’s high-level mission delegation. Credit: ECW
According to Sherif, ECW’s investment in education is an investment in recovery, peace, security, and justice for Ukraine and beyond. It is an investment in the vast potential of future generations. Earlier this year, ECW announced an USD 18 million allocation to roll out a Multi-Year Resilience Programme in Ukraine. The investment aims to raise an additional USD 17 million to reach over 150,000 children across 10 of the country’s most affected areas.
The programme aims to improve learning outcomes in safer, more accessible environments while expanding digital learning options as an alternative. There is also a strong emphasis on mental health, psychosocial support, and targeted assistance for girls and children with disabilities.
The UN high-level mission concluded at the Fourth Summit of First Ladies and Gentlemen, where ECW called on world leaders to commit to protecting education from attack and to scale up funding to provide life-saving access to safe education, both in-person and through remote learning opportunities, when necessary, as well as catch-up classes for children who have fallen behind.
All six African sub-regions have experienced an increase in the temperature trends over the past six decades, leading to severe water stresses, not enough food and deepening poverty. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
Inter Press Service
NAIROBI, Sep 05 (IPS) – With fewer than 100 days to go to COP29, the highest decision-making body on climate issues under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is getting shorter and the need for creative and innovative solutions to protect lives and livelihoods is extremely urgent.
The State of the Climate in Africa 2023 report shows all six African sub-regions have experienced an increase in the temperature trends over the past six decades. In Africa, 2023 was one of the three warmest years in 124 years, leading to unprecedented climatic carnage. The consequences are such that there is not enough food, deepening poverty, damage, displacement and loss of life.
But where many see challenges, there are also opportunities.
Speaking to the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, today, Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change, said “climate action is the single greatest economic opportunity of this century. It can and should be the single greatest opportunity for Africa to lift up people, communities, and economies after centuries of exploitation and neglect.”
“The opportunity is immense. But so too are the costs for African nations of unchecked global heating. The continent has been warming at a faster rate than the global average. From Algeria to Zambia, climate-driven disasters are getting worse, inflicting the most suffering on those who did least to cause them.”
Jointly launched by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the African Union Commission on September 2, 2024, at the 12th Climate Change and Development in Africa (CCDA12) Conference, the climate report shows Africa is disproportionately affected by the climate crises as the continent is warming at a rate that is slightly faster than the global average.
The year 2023 was the warmest on record in many countries, including Mali, Morocco, the United Republic of Tanzania, and Uganda. The warming has been most rapid in North Africa, with Morocco experiencing the highest temperature anomaly.
The report indicates that parts of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Zambia, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo experienced severe drought in 2023. Following severe droughts in the Greater Horn of Africa, three countries, including Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, experienced extensive and severe flooding, with at least 352 deaths and 2.4 million displaced people reported.
Amidst the far-reaching devastating loss and damage, the UN Climate Chief emphasised that in Africa, as in all regions, the climate crisis is an economic sinkhole, sucking the momentum out of economic growth and that in fact, many African nations are losing up to 5 percent of GDP as a result of climate impacts. It is African nations and people who pay the heaviest price.
Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), says COP29 in Baku must signal that the climate crisis is core business for every government, with financial solutions to match. UN Photo/Loey Felipe
Placing additional burden on poverty alleviation efforts, which could in turn significantly hamper growth, the report shows many countries are diverting “up to 9 percent of their budgets into unplanned expenditures to respond to extreme weather events. By 2030, it is estimated that up to 118 million extremely poor people—or those living on less than USD 1.90 per day—will be exposed to drought, floods and extreme heat in Africa if adequate response measures are not put in place.”
Putting it into perspective, Stiell said, “Consider food production being hit hard, contributing to the re-emergence of famine, while also pushing up global prices, and with them inflation and the cost of living. Desertification and habitat destruction are driving forced movements of people. Supply chains are already being hit hard by spiralling climate impacts,” he said.
Further cautioning that “it would be entirely incorrect for any world leader—especially in the G20—to think: although incredibly sad, ultimately it is not my problem. The economic and political reality—in an interdependent world—is we are all in this crisis together. We rise together, or we fall together. But if the climate and economic crises are globally interlinked. So too are the solutions.”
In sub-Saharan Africa alone, it is estimated that climate adaptation will cost USD 30 billion to USD 50 billion, which translates to two to three percent of the regional GDP per year over the next decade. With COP28 having concluded the first-ever stocktake of global climate action—a mid-term review of progress towards the 2015 Paris Agreement—COP29 has been dubbed the ‘finance COP’—an opportunity to align climate finance contributions with estimated global needs.
COP29 will also be an opportunity to build on previous success, especially in the heels of a most successful COP28, whose ambitious commitments include: to transition away from all fossil fuels quickly but fairly; to triple renewable energy and double energy efficiency; and to go from responding to climate impacts to truly transformative adaptation.
While recognizing these big commitments, Stiell said delivering on them will unlock a goldmine of human and economic benefits that includes cleaner, more reliable and affordable energy across Africa. More jobs, stronger local economies, underpinning more stability and opportunity, especially for women. That electrification and lighting at night in the home means children can do homework, boosting education outcomes, with major flow-on productivity gains driving stronger economic growth.
“Cooking with traditional fuels emits greenhouse gases roughly equivalent to global aviation or shipping. It also contributes to 3 million premature deaths per year. It would cost 4 billion US dollars annually to fix this in Africa—an outstanding investment on any accounting,” he said.
Further stressing the need to link nature-based climate solutions with biodiversity protection and land restoration, as this will drive progress right across the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, he reiterated, African nations’ vast potential to drive forward climate solutions is being thwarted by an epidemic of underinvestment.
“Of the more than USD400 billion spent on clean energy last year, only USD2.6 billion went to African nations. Renewable energy investment in Africa needs to grow at least fivefold by 2030. COP29 in Baku must signal that the climate crisis is core business for every government, with finance solutions to match,” Stiell emphasized.
“It is time to flip the script. From potential climate tipping points to exponential changes in business, investment, and growth. Changes that will further strengthen African nations’ climate leadership and vital role in global climate solutions, on all fronts. Your role at COP29—and your voices in the lead-up—are more important than ever, to help guide our process to the highest-ambition outcomes the whole world needs.”
Secretary-General António Guterres (second from right) visits Tonga, where he attended the Pacific Islands Forum.
Credit: UN Photo/Kiara Worth
by Catherine Wilson (sydney & nuku’alofa)
Inter Press Service
SYDNEY & NUKU’ALOFA, Aug 30 (IPS) – Three months ahead of the COP29 United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference, the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, has called for an emergency response from the international community as new data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reveals a critical deterioration in the state of the climate.
Scientists have called for limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to prevent overheating of the atmosphere and a damaging rise in sea levels. But, due to inaction on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, there is an 80 percent chance that the 1.5 degree threshold will be breached within the next five years, reports the WMO.
“This is a crazy situation: rising seas are a crisis entirely of humanity’s making. A crisis that will soon swell to an almost unimaginable scale with no lifeboat to take us back to safety,” the UN Secretary-General declared in Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga, a Polynesian nation of about 106,000 people located southeast of Fiji, on Monday. He has been on the ground in the Pacific Islands, witnessing firsthand how people’s lives are hanging in the balance as they suffer a relentless battering of climate extremes, such as cyclones, floods, rising seas and hotter temperatures.
“Today’s reports confirm that relative sea levels in the southwestern Pacific have risen even more than the global average, in some locations by more than double the global increase in the past 30 years,” Guterres said. “If we save the Pacific, we also save ourselves. The world must act and answer the SOS before it is too late.”
According to a newly released UN report, Surging Seas in a Warming World, the increase in the global mean sea level was 9.4 cm, but in the southwest Pacific it was more than 15 cm between 1993 and 2023. Expanding oceans, due to melting Arctic and Antarctic ice, are projected “to cause a large increase in the frequency and severity of episodic flooding in almost all locations in the Pacific Small Island Developing States in the coming decades.” Ninety percent of Pacific Islanders live within 5 kilometres of coastlines, leaving them highly exposed to encroaching seas. Climate change impacts pose a serious threat to human life, livelihoods and food security, and the implications for increasing poverty and loss and damage are ‘profound and far-reaching,’ the report claims.
For years, Pacific Island leaders have led the way in calling for world leaders and industrialized nations to take rigorous action to halt the increasing carbon dioxide emissions destroying earth’s atmosphere. In Tonga, the Secretary-General joined many of them at the 53rd Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ summit on the 26-27 August, including the summit’s host and Prime Minister of Tonga, Hon. Siaosi Sovaleni, Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister, James Marape, Samoa’s leader, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa and Tuvalu’s PM, Feleti Teo. And he took the opportunity to amplify their voices and their climate leadership. ‘Greenhouse gases are causing ocean heating, acidification and rising seas. But the Pacific Islands are showing the way to protect our climate, our planet and our ocean,’ he said.
The UN chief took time to listen to the voices of local communities and youth, gaining valuable insights into how the people of Tonga are responding to climate extremes and disasters.
In January 2022, a tsunami, triggered by the eruption of an undersea volcano known as Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, descended on Tonga. It reached the main island of Tongatapu and others, affecting 80 percent of the country’s population, destroying livestock and agricultural land and causing damage of more than USD 125 million. Guterres met with people in the coastal villages of Kanokupolu and Ha’atafu, which were devastated when the tsunami swept through and surveyed the ruins of beach resorts and coastal infrastructure while witnessing the resilience and determination of those who have rebuilt their homes and lives.
Two years ago, the UN also launched ‘Early Warnings for All’, a project aimed at installing early warning systems in every country by 2027 in order to save lives and prevent damage.
“With the increase in the intensity of tropical cyclones and flooding , simple weather forecasting is not enough for people to prepare for these natural disasters,” Arti Pratap, an expert on tropical cyclones who lectures in Geospatial Science at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, told IPS. She said it was important to “focus on building the capacity of communities to make use of the information provided by national meteorological services in the Pacific on an hourly, daily and monthly basis for decision-making.”
UN Secretary-General António Guterres visits a house in Lalomanu that has been abandoned due to storm damage and flooding as a result of climate change during his trip to Samoa. Credit: UN Photo/Kiara Worth
Many farmers, for instance, “tend to rely on readily available traditional knowledge on weather and climate and its interaction with the environment around them, which they are familiar with. However, traditional knowledge may not be sufficient in the background of global warming,” Pratap said.
The UN initiative involves the setting up of meteorological observation stations, ocean sensors and radars to better predict extreme weather and disaster events. According to the UN, providing 24 hours’ notice of an approaching disaster can reduce damage by 30 percent. As part of the project, Guterres launched a new weather radar at Tonga’s International Airport.
His week-long tour of the Pacific Islands, which also included time in Samoa, New Zealand and East Timor, was an opportune moment for Guterres to open conversations about the goals that will be on the table at COP29, to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, on 11-22 November.
The key priorities of this year’s climate summit will be, among others, limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius and achieving broad agreement on the scale and provision of climate finance. ‘The one thing that is very clear in my presence here is to be able to say loud and clear from the Pacific Islands to the big emitters that it is totally unacceptable, with devastating impacts of climate change, to go on increasing emissions,’ Guterres declared in Nuku’alofa on August 26, 2024.
And, for many Pacific Islanders, gaining better access to climate finance is vital. The development organization, Pacific Community, reports that the region will require at least USD 2 billion per year to implement climate resilience and adaptation projects and transition to renewable energy. This far exceeds what the Pacific is currently receiving in climate finance, which is about USD 220 million per annum.
“Despite the commendable pledges from the United Nations and world leaders, such as the Paris Agreement, the existing global finance mechanisms still hinder community-based and youth organizations from accessing critical support,” Mahoney Mori, Chairman of the Pacific Youth Council, told local media during a meeting between the UN Chief and Pacific youth leaders in Tonga’s capital.
‘As a first step, all developed countries must honor their commitment to double adaptation finance to at least USD 40 billion per year by 2025,’ the UN Secretary General said on World Environment Day on June 24.
Tonga’s Prime Minister summed up the views of many in the Pacific as world attention focused on his island nation with the visit of the UN Secretary-General: “We need a lot more action than just words,’ he said at the Pacific leaders meeting. Referring to a minor earthquake that shook the islands as leaders converged on Tonga, he added, “We put on a show with the rain and a bit of flooding and also shook you guys up a little bit by that earthquake, just to wake you up to the reality of what we have to face here in the Pacific.”
ROME, Aug 15 (IPS) – Corinne Fleischer, WFP’s regional director for the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe, describes Gaza as “a terrible situation getting worse.” Over the past two weeks, 21 United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) food distribution points have been closed under evacuation orders.
“UNRWA says that 86% of the Strip is under an evacuation order,” she says on a video call from her office in Cairo. Fleischer visited the enclave in July.” 2 million people are crammed into 14% of the territory.”
Despite Immense Challenges, WFP Continues to Assist Gazans
With continuous evacuation orders forcing WFP to uproot food distribution sites, precise targeting of the most vulnerable groups becomes challenging. We provide ready-to-eat food, hot meals and nutrition support to breastfeeding women and small children.
Mohammed was severely injured in the conflict but all efforts to evacuate him for medical treatment failed. His family fully depends on food from WFP to survive.
“We support partners in almost 80 kitchens, where they cook meals, pack and distribute them to people in camps,” Fleischer explains. She previously visited Gaza last December. “Then, it was really about how do we bring food in – that’s still very much the case,” she says. “Now, at least we have a dedicated WFP operation on the ground.” Our main accomplishment? “We have helped prevent full-scale famine from happening,” she says.
There are currently nearly 500,000 people at IPC5/Catastrophe, the highest grade of food insecurity on the global standard for measuring food insecurity – down from 1.1 million people earlier this year.
Fleischer is keen to highlight the positive impacts of humanitarian supplies making it through.”Right now, we don’t bring enough food into Gaza,” she says. “We don’t bring in what we plan for the month because we don’t have enough crossing points open. We need all the crossings open and at full capacity.”
“Operations are super complicated,” Fleischer says. “We work in a war zone. Roads are destroyed. We are waiting hours at checkpoints for green lights to move.”
WFP, she stresses, also works to support the wider humanitarian community. “We are leading the Logistics Cluster (the interagency coordination mechanism) and supporting partners to bring in their goods through the Jordan corridor. We are receiving their goods in the north at the Zikim crossing point. We’re helping them in Kerem Shalom. So, of course, we’re helping with fuel supplies too.”
Nowhere Is Safe in Gaza
“Gazans cannot get out, and they’re asking to get out,” Fleischer says. “They’re beyond exhausted. There is no space – one makeshift tent after the other up to the sea. Streets are teeming with people.” Meanwhile, the breakdown of sewage systems, lack of water and waste management means diseases, such as Hepatitis A which is spreading among children, are allowed to fester.
Children eat fortified biscuits from WFP at a makeshift camp in southern Gaza.
“We are lucky that nothing has happened to our amazing staff – more than 200 UNRWA staff have been killed,” she says. “That is not acceptable.” She adds: “We have amazing security officers who advise management on which risks to avoid, so that we can stay and do our work safely and families can access our assistance safely. But the risks are high. Very high. We have bullets close to our convoys. We’re there repairing roads. We’re there moving with our trucks. We’re there reaching people. And it’s very dangerous.”
On the path to recovery, the private sector has a role to play, says Fleischer – take the reopening of shops. “If you think of a lifeline, of hope, or a sense of normalcy, it’s surely when the staple bread is back in the market,” she says of bakeries that have reopened with WFP support. “Bakeries need wheat flour, they need yeast, and diesel too – and that’s where we come in.”
High Prices Keep Basic Foods Out of Reach for Most Gazans
In the south of Gaza, “basic food items are slowly re-emerging in food markets. You can actually find vegetables, fruits in the markets but because prices are high, they remain out of reach for most,” she says “And in any case, people don’t have cash. There are no jobs. Even our own staff tell us, ‘We have a salary, but we can’t access cash’.”
Fleischer is keen for humanitarian efforts to reach a stage where people “stop eating things they have been eating for the past nine months” – to diversify diets heavily dependent on canned food (provided by WFP) and whatever people can get their hands on.
“This level of destruction I’ve never seen.”
Fleischer’s biggest fear for Gaza is “that there is no end to this . That we continue with ever less space for the people who already have nowhere to go back to. Even if they moved back to the north, where could they go?”
“Everything is flattened. There are no homes, it’s all destroyed. We need a long ceasefire that leads to peace so we can operate.”
After the Rafah incursion, many people returned to Khan Younis but there’s no means of living in the area. There are no homes left. Credit: WFP
Fleischer, who has served with WFP in Syria and Sudan’s Darfur Region, adds: “This level of destruction I’ve never seen. Hospitals and clinics are destroyed, food processing plants are destroyed. Everything is destroyed.”
Yet, “There is this never-give-up attitude from the people, from the families we serve,” she says. “I can’t believe children still run to you and laugh with you. They probably see in us hope that there will be an end to all this – a sign they are not forgotten.”
This story originally appeared on WFP’s Stories on August 8, 2024 and was written by the WFP Editorial Team.
Opinion by Witada Anukoonwattaka, Preety Bhogal (bangkok, thailand)
Inter Press Service
BANGKOK, Thailand, Aug 12 (IPS) – The rapid growth of digitalization has fundamentally altered commerce, impacting production and facilitating the movement of goods. The 2023 Asia-Pacific Trade and Investment Report (APTIR), has pointed out that although digital trade revenues of Asia and the Pacific account for a significant share of global trade, this growth is uneven, with trade concentrated in a few areas, leading to disparities across the region.
Different policy measures to establish an inclusive digital trade and e-commerce landscape have been used across the region. For example, research on internet courts in China showed how such public and digitized judicial systems benefit smaller and medium-sized firms compared to private dispute resolution mechanisms, which are highly costly.
Indonesia’s introduction of single submission for freight transport applications and its impact on sustainability in supply chains was another case study. This policy instrument has had significant impacts across multiple domains, such as increasing time effectiveness, reducing costs, and increasing transparency in shipping and port clearances.
Lessons learned and the way forward
There is a need to understand the specific digital trade policy instruments that promote sustainable development. It is critical to acknowledge key differences and similarities between trade and digital trade policy to strategically leverage their interlinkage to achieve the SDGs. Social development works in tandem with economic progress.
A key concern is the lack of data on cross-border e-commerce in the Asia-Pacific and Latin America regions, which hinders the implementation and evaluation of programs designed to promote the participation and productivity of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
More concerted efforts to improve data measurement through private-public partnerships could be a possible policy intervention to address this issue. States should establish effective monitoring systems by improving the availability of economic statistics and third-party evaluations for measuring the progress and impact of SME support programs.
However, given the diversity in operations of SMEs across sectors, it is essential to devise and tailor policies that cater to their specific needs and realities.
There is also a need for sharing real-world examples of successful government initiatives and SME support programs so neighboring countries can draw lessons from them. There are doubts about the long-term usefulness of stand-alone Digital Economy Agreements (DEAs) due to the lack of stringent legal provisions for possible breaches, unlike market-access free trade agreements (FTAs).
Lastly, the United States, which has played a pivotal role in advocating for an open global trade environment, gradually step back from its position, it is time to rethink the leadership that would guide the establishment of digital trade provisions in the future.
This involves showcasing how digital trade rules will be established and enforced moving forward. Who will provide such public goods for digital trade is a major question facing the global economy.
Given its rapid digital-economy growth, significant market size, and increasing influence in global digital trade, should that leadership come from the Asia-Pacific region?
Witada Anukoonwattaka is Economic Affairs Officer, Trade Investment and Innovation Division, ESCAP; Preety Bhogal is Consultant, Trade Investment and Innovation Division, ESCAP.
Activists protest during the 25th International AIDS Conference (AIDS2024) in Munich over a affordable pricing for a drug currently sold by pharmaceutical firm Gilead. Credit: Ed Holt/IPS
by Ed Holt (munich)
Inter Press Service
MUNICH, Aug 02 (IPS) – Campaigners and experts have demanded a breakthrough HIV intervention hailed as “the closest thing to an HIV vaccine” must be made available as soon and as cheaply as possible to all who need it as its manufacturer faces protests over its pricing.
Activists led a massive protest during the 25th International AIDS Conference (AIDS2024) in Munich last week as a study was presented showing lenacapavir—a drug currently sold by pharmaceutical firm Gilead for more than USD 40,000 per year as an HIV treatment—could be sold for USD 40 per year as a form of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to help prevent HIV infection.
Community groups working in prevention, as well as experts and senior figures at international organizations fighting HIV, called on the company to ensure it will be priced so it is affordable for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), which account for 95 percent of HIV infections.
“It is no exaggeration to call lenacapavir a game changer. It could be life-changing for some populations. We need to see it produced generically and supplied to all low- and middle-income countries to the people who need it,” said Dr. Helen Bygrave, chronic disease advisor at Medecins sans Frontiere’s (MSF) Access Campaign.
During the event, data from a trial of lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injectable, were presented. The results of the trial were announced by pharmaceutical firm Gilead last month and showed the drug offered 100% protection to more than 5,000 women in South Africa and Uganda.
Many experts and community leaders helping deliver HIV interventions who spoke to IPS described the drug as a real “game changer,” offering not just spectacular efficacy but relative ease and discretion in delivery—the latter key in combating stigma connected with HIV prevention intervention in some societies—compared to other interventions, such as oral PrEP.
But they warned there were likely to be challenges to access, with cost expected to be the main barrier.
Lenacapavir is currently approved only as a form of HIV treatment at a price of USD 42,000 per person per year.
While as a PrEP intervention it would be expected to be sold at a much lower price, an abstract presented at the conference showed that it could cost just USD 40 a year for every patient.
In a statement put out following the protests, Gilead said it was developing “a strategy to enable broad, sustainable access globally” but that it was too early to give details on pricing.
Critics claimed Gilead was not being transparent in its statement—the company talked of being committed to access pricing for high-incidence, resource-limited countries rather than specifically low- and middle-income countries—and there are fears that the price at which it is eventually made available as PrEP will be so high as to put it out of reach of the countries that are struggling most with the HIV epidemic.
“Cabotegravir, a two-month injectable form of PrEP, is currently being procured by MSF for low-income countries for USD 210 per person per year. We would not expect to be higher than that, and we would hope it would be more ‘in the ballpark’ of USD 100 per person per year,” said Bygrave.
She added that “questions have been asked of Gilead about its pricing for lenacapavir, and the company has been pretty vague in its answers.”
“Civil society needs to put continued pressure on Gilead about this issue because, without that pressure, I do not trust Gilead to do the right thing,” Bygrave, who took part in protests at the conference against Gilead’s pricing, said.
Some speakers at the conference set out a series of demands for the firm.
Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS, called on Gilead to license generic manufacturers to produce it more affordably through mechanisms such as the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP), a UN-backed programme negotiating generics agreements between originators and generic pharmaceutical companies.
Others, such as keynote speaker Helen Clark, Chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, said such interventions must be seen as “common global goods, and ways must be found to make them accessible to all.”
“The pharmaceutical industry has been the beneficiary of much public research investment. With respect to HIV/AIDS, it has benefited from the mobilization of scientists and engaged communities who have advocated for investment in R&D and treatments. Prima facie, the notion that the companies can then make great profits from and not share the intellectual property created is wrong,” she said.
Others went even further, accusing some pharmaceutical firms of being parties to the creation of a de facto global two-tier system for medicine supply.
“Companies must share their medicines. We cannot accept an apartheid in access to medicine in which the lives of those living in the Global South are not regarded as having the same value as the lives in the North,” Archbishop Dr Thabo Makgoba, Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Cape Town and HIV advocate, said at a UNAIDS press event during the conference.
Some of those who work with key populations stressed the need to push through all necessary approvals and set lenacapavir’s price at an accessible level as quickly as possible to save lives.
“It’s great to have innovation and get important new tools in the fight against HIV. But the question is: how long will it take to get them to the people who need them? Until then, they are just a great announcement—like a beautiful picture hanging up there that you can see but cannot actually touch. We need to give communities the funding and the tools they need to do their vital work,” Anton Basenko, Chair of the Board of the International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD), told IPS.
The calls came as campaigners stressed the exceptional potential of lenacapavir. It is not only its astonishing efficacy, but also its relative ease and discretion of delivery, which experts are excited about.
Stigma around HIV prevention, such as oral PrEP, which involves taking daily tablets, has been identified as a major barrier to the uptake of HIV interventions in some regions.
Some HIV healthcare specialists at the conference told IPS they had seen cases of women leaving clinics with bottles of tablets and, as soon as they heard them rattling in the bottle, threw them into the bin outside the clinic because the noise would tell others they were taking the tablets and leave them open to potential discrimination, or even gender-based violence.
“The lack of oral PrEP uptake and adherence among women and girls is due to a number of factors, such as stigma and worries about being seen with a huge bottle of pills. What about if you are in a relationship and your partner sees the bottle and starts asking whether you are cheating on them or something?
“A woman could go and get a lenacapavir injection a couple of times a year and no one would have to even know and she wouldn’t have to think about taking pills every day and just get on with her life. This drug could change lives completely. I would definitely take it if it was available,” Sinetlantla Gogela, an HIV prevention advocate from Cape Town, South Africa, told IPS.
The concerns around access to lenacapavir at an affordable price for low and middle income countries come against a background of record debt levels among poor countries, which experts say could have a severe negative impact on the HIV epidemic.
A recent report from the campaign group Debt Relief International showed that more than 100 countries are struggling to service their debts, resulting in them cutting back on investment in health, education, social protection and climate change measures.
Speakers at the conference repeatedly warned these debts had to be addressed to ensure HIV programmes, whether they include lenacapavir or not, continue. Many called for immediate debt relief in countries.
“African debt needs to be restructured to let countries get hold of the medicines they need,” said Byanyima.
“Drop the debt; it is choking global south countries, denying us what we need for health. Please let us breathe,” said Makgoba.
Erico Platt looks at the disarmament exhibition that she staged, “Three Quarters of a Century After Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Hibakusha—Brave Survivors Working for a Nuclear-Free World.” Credit: UNODA/Diane Barnes
by Thalif Deen (united nations)
Inter Press Service
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 01 (IPS) – The upcoming 79th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took place on August 6 and 9, 1945, remains a grim reminder of the destructive consequences of nuclear weapons.
The US bombings killed an estimated 90,000 to 210,000, with roughly half of the deaths occurring on the first day in Hiroshima.
But despite an intense global campaign for nuclear disarmament, the world has witnessed an increase in the number of nuclear powers from five—the US, UK, France, China and Russia—to nine, including India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.
Is the continued worldwide anti-nuclear campaign an exercise in futility? And will the rising trend continue—with countries such as Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and South Korea—as potential nuclear powers of the future?
South Africa is the only country that has voluntarily given up nuclear weapons after developing them. In the 1980s, South Africa produced six nuclear weapons, but dismantled them between 1989 and 1993. A number of factors may have influenced South Africa’s decision, including national security, international relations, and a desire to avoid becoming a pariah state.
But there is an equally valid argument that there have been no nuclear wars—only threats—largely because of the success of the world-wide anti-nuclear campaign, the role of the United Nations and the collective action by most of the 193 member states in adopting several anti-nuclear treaties.
According to the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), the United Nations has sought to eliminate weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) ever since the establishment of the world body. The first resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1946 established a commission to deal with problems related to the discovery of atomic energy, among others.
The commission was to make proposals for, inter alia, the control of atomic energy to the extent necessary to ensure its use only for peaceful purposes.
Several multilateral treaties have since been established with the aim of preventing nuclear proliferation and testing, while promoting progress in nuclear disarmament.
Jackie Cabasso, Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation in Oakland, California, which monitors and analyzes US nuclear weapons programs and policies, told IPS: “As we approach the 79th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world is facing a greater danger of nuclear war than at any time since 1945.”
“The terrifying doctrine of “nuclear deterrence,” which should long ago have been delegitimized and relegated to the dustbin of history and replaced with multilateral, non-militarized common security, has metastasized into a pathological ideology brandished by nuclear-armed states and their allies to justify the perpetual possession and threatened use—including first use—of nuclear weapons,” she pointed out.
“It is more important than ever that we heed the warnings of the aging hibakusha (A-bomb survivors): What happened to us must never be allowed to happen to anyone again; nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist; no more Hiroshimas, no more Nagasakis!”
This demands an irreversible process of nuclear disarmament. But to the contrary, all nuclear armed states are qualitatively and, in some cases, quantitatively upgrading their nuclear arsenals and a new multipolar arms race is underway, she noted.
“To achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons and a global society that is more fair, peaceful, and ecologically sustainable, we will need to move from the irrational fear-based ideology of deterrence to the rational fear of an eventual nuclear weapon use, whether by accident, miscalculation, or design.”
“We will also need to stimulate a rational hope that security can be redefined in humanitarian and ecologically sustainable terms that will lead to the elimination of nuclear weapons and dramatic demilitarization, freeing up tremendous resources desperately needed to address universal human needs and protect the environment.”
In this time of multiple global crises, “our work for the elimination of nuclear weapons must take place in a much broader framework, taking into account the interface between nuclear and conventional weapons and militarism in general, the humanitarian and long-term environmental consequences of nuclear war, and the fundamental incompatibility of nuclear weapons with democracy, the rule of law, and human wellbeing,” declared Cabasso.
Dr. M.V. Ramana, Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and Graduate Program Director, MPPGA at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, told IPS, “The glass is half-full or half-empty depending on how one looks at it.”
“The fact that we have avoided nuclear war since 1945 is also partly due to the persistence of the anti-nuclear movement. Historians like Lawrence Wittner have pointed to the many instances when governments have chosen nuclear restraint instead of unrestrained expansion.”
While South Africa is the only country that dismantled its entire nuclear weapons program, many countries—Sweden, for example—have chosen not to develop nuclear weapons even though they had the technical capacity to do so. They did so in part because of strong public opposition to nuclear weapons, which in turn is due to social movements supporting nuclear disarmament, he pointed out.
Thus, organizing for nuclear disarmament is not futile. Especially as we move into another era of conflicts between major powers, such movements will be critical to our survival, declared Ramana.
According to the UN, a group of elderly hibakusha, called Nihon Hidankyo, have dedicated their lives to achieving a non-proliferation treaty, which they hope will ultimately lead to a total ban on nuclear weapons.
“On an overcrowded train on the Hakushima line, I fainted for a while, holding in my arms my eldest daughter of one year and six months. I regained my senses at her cries and found no one else was on the train,” a 34-year-old woman testifies in the booklet. She was located just two kilometres from the Hiroshima epicenter.
Fleeing to her relatives in Hesaka, at age 24, another woman remembers that “people, with the skin dangling down, were stumbling along. They fell down with a thud and died one after another,” adding, “still now I often have nightmares about this, and people say, ‘it’s neurosis’.”
One man who entered Hiroshima after the bomb recalled in the exhibition “that dreadful scene—I cannot forget even after many decades.”
At a disarmament exhibition in UN Headquarters in New York, a visitor reads text about a young boy bringing his little brother to a cremation site in Nagasaki, Japan. Credit: UNODA/Erico Platt
A woman who was 25 years old at the time said, “When I went outside, it was dark as night. Then it got brighter and brighter, and I could see burnt people crying and running about in utter confusion. It was hell…I found my neighbor trapped under a fallen concrete wall… Only half of his face was showing. He was burned alive”.
The steadfast conviction of the Hidankyo remains: “Nuclear weapons are absolute evil that cannot coexist with humans. There is no choice but to abolish them.”
Addressing the UN Security Council last March, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that with geopolitical tensions escalating the risk of nuclear warfare to its highest point in decades, reducing and abolishing nuclear weapons is the only viable path to saving humanity.
“There is one path—and one path only—that will vanquish this senseless and suicidal shadow once and for all. We need disarmament now,” he said, urging nuclear-weapon States to re-engage to prevent any use of a nuclear weapon, re-affirm moratoria on nuclear testing and “urgently agree that none of them will be the first to use nuclear weapons.”
He called for reductions in the number of nuclear weapons led by the holders of the largest arsenals—the United States and the Russian Federation—to “find a way back to the negotiating table” to fully implement the New Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, or START Treaty, and agree on its successor.
“When each country pursues its own security without regard for others, we create global insecurity that threatens us all,” he observed. Almost eight decades after the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons still represent a clear danger to global peace and security, growing in power, range and stealth.”
“States possessing them are absent from the negotiating table, and some statements have raised the prospect of unleashing nuclear hell—threats that we must all denounce with clarity and force,” he said. Moreover, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and cyber and outer space domains have created new risks.”
From Pope Francis, who calls the possession of nuclear arms “immoral”, to the hibakusha, the brave survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to Hollywood, where Oppenheimer brought the harsh reality of nuclear doomsday to vivid life for millions around the world, people are calling for an end to the nuclear madness. “Humanity cannot survive a sequel to Oppenheimer,” he warned.
When Nagasaki marked the 78th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of the city last year, the mayor Shiro Suzuki, urged world powers to abolish nuclear weapons, saying nuclear deterrence also increases risks of nuclear war, according to an Associated Press (AP) report.
He called on the Group of Seven (G7) industrial powers to adopt a separate document on nuclear disarmament that called for using nuclear weapons as deterrence.
“Now is the time to show courage and make the decision to break free from dependence on nuclear deterrence,” Suzuki said in his peace declaration. “As long as states are dependent on nuclear deterrence, we cannot realize a world without nuclear weapons.”
Russia’s nuclear threat has encouraged other nuclear states to accelerate their dependence on nuclear weapons or enhance capabilities, further increasing the risk of nuclear war, and that Russia is not the only one representing the risk of nuclear deterrence, Suzuki said.
Suzuki, whose parents were hibakusha, or survivors of the Nagasaki attack, said knowing the reality of the atomic bombings is the starting point for achieving a world without nuclear weapons. He said the survivors’ testimonies are a true deterrent against nuclear weapons use, the AP report said.
This article is brought to you by IPS Noram, in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International, in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.
Girls at Dabaso Girls School in Malindi, Kenya, pose with a ball during break time. Universal secondary education could virtually end child marriage and reduce early childbearing by up to three-fourths, according to an African Union and UNESCO report. Credit: Courtesy of Stafford Ondego for the EDT PROJECT
by Maina Waruru (nairobi & addis ababa)
Inter Press Service
NAIROBI & ADDIS ABABA, Jul 04 (IPS) – Investing in teachers and school leaders in Africa is the most important factor in promoting educational opportunities for girls, keeping them in school and ending child marriage, ultimately reducing gender inequality through education.
Having more female teachers in schools and having more of them lead the institutions is even more important for keeping the girls in school beyond the primary level and providing them with role models to motivate them to continue learning.
While low educational attainment for girls and child marriage are profoundly detrimental for the girls, their families, communities, and societies, investments in teachers and school leaders are also key in ending lack of learning, identified as the single biggest cause of school dropout for girls, besides traditional factors including social and cultural ones.
Despite data showing that less than a fifth of teachers at the secondary level for example, are women in many African countries, and the proportion of female school leaders is even lower, the teachers have been proven to improve student learning and girls’ retention beyond primary and lower secondary school.
As a result, better opportunities must be given to women teachers and school leaders in order to bring additional benefits to girls’ education, as women often remain in teaching for a longer time, a report by the United Nations and the African Union says.
The absence of the above has led to high drop-outs, resulting in low educational attainment, a higher prevalence of child marriage, and higher risks of early childbearing for girls across Africa, according to the report, Educating Girls and Ending Child Marriage in Africa: Investment Case and the Role of Teachers and School Leaders.
“Increasing investments in girls’ education yields large economic benefits, apart from being the right thing to do. This requires interventions for adolescent girls, but it should also start with enhancing foundational learning through better teaching and school leadership,” the document tabled at the 1st Pan-African Conference on Girls and Women’s Education taking place July 2–5 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The lack of foundational learning is a key cause leading to drop-out in primary and lower-secondary schools, it finds, further noting that while teachers and school leaders are key to it, new approaches are also needed for pedagogy and for training teachers and school heads.
“Targeted interventions for adolescent girls are needed, but they often reach only a small share of girls still in school at that age; by contrast, improving foundational learning would benefit a larger share of girls (and boys) and could also make sense from a cost-benefit point of view,” it adds.
Parents in 10 francophone countries who responded to household surveys cited the lack of learning in school—the absence of teaching despite children attending classes—for their children dropping out, accounting for over 40 percent of both girls and boys dropping out of primary school, it further reveals.
The lack of learning, blamed on teacher absence, accounts for more than a third of students dropping out at the lower secondary level, meaning that improving learning could automatically lead to significantly increased educational attainment for girls and boys alike.
“To improve learning, reviews from impact evaluations and analysis of student assessment data suggest that teachers and school leaders are key. Yet new approaches are needed for professional development, including through structured pedagogy and training emphasizing practice. Teachers must also be better educated; household surveys for 10 francophone countries suggest that only one-third of teachers in primary schools have a post-secondary diploma,” the survey carried out in 2023 laments.
It calls for “better opportunities” for female teachers and school principals, noting that this would bring additional benefits as women also tend to remain in teaching for a longer time compared to men.
Better professional standards and competency frameworks are also needed for teachers to make the profession more attractive and gender-sensitive, it finds, revealing that countries have not yet “treated teaching as a career” and lack a clear definition of competencies needed at different levels of the profession.
Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, just over two-thirds of girls complete their primary education and four in ten complete lower secondary education explains the study authored by Quentin Wodon, Chata Male, and Adenike Onagoruwa for the African Union’s International Centre for the Education of Girls and Women in Africa (AU/CIEFFA) and the UN agency for education, culture and science, UNESCO.
Quoting the latest data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, it reveals that while nine in ten girls complete their primary education and over three in four complete their lower secondary education globally, the proportions are much lower in Sub-Saharan Africa, where slightly over two-thirds of the girls—69 percent compared to 73 percent boys—complete their primary education, and four out of ten girls—43 percent compared to 46 percent boys—complete lower secondary education.
Providing girls and women with adequate opportunities for education could have large positive impacts on many development outcomes, including higher earnings and standards of living for families, ending child marriage and early childbearing, reducing fertility, on health and nutrition, and on well-being, among others.
It observes that gains made in earnings are substantial, especially with a secondary education, noting that women with primary education earn more than those with no education, “but women with secondary education earn more than twice as much, but gains with tertiary education are even larger.”
Each additional year of secondary education for a girl could reduce their risk of marrying as a child and having a child before the age of 18.
“Universal secondary education could virtually end child marriage and reduce early childbearing by up to three-fourths. By contrast, primary education in most countries does not lead to large reductions in child marriage and early childbearing,” it declares.
The organizations make a strong case for the importance of secondary education for girls, explaining that universal secondary education would also have health benefits, including increasing women’s knowledge of HIV/AIDS by one-tenth, increasing women’s decision-making for their own healthcare by a fourth, helping reduce under-five mortality by one-third, and potentially lowering under-five stunting in infants by up to 20 percent.
In addition, secondary education while ending child marriage could reduce fertility—the number of children women have over their lifetime nationally by a third on average—slowing population growth and enabling countries to benefit from the “demographic dividend.”
Other benefits include a reduction in “intimate partner” violence, an increase in women’s decision-making in the household by a fifth and the likelihood of registering children at birth by over 25 percent.
To remedy the crisis, there was a need to improve the attractiveness of the teaching profession as one way of getting more females heading schools, Wodon, Director of UNESCO’s International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa (IICBA), said during the report’s launch at the conference.
“Virtually all teachers are dissatisfied with their job, meaning that there is a need to improve job satisfaction in the profession besides improving salaries,” he noted.
While retaining girls in school lowered fertility rates by up to a third in some countries, the study’s aim for advocating for more education for girls had nothing to do with the need for lower fertility but was in the interest of empowering girls and women in decision-making.
Empowering girls through education places them in a better position in society in terms of power relations between them and males, observed Lorato Modongo, an AU-CIEFFA official.
“It is a fact that we cannot educate girls without challenging power dynamics in patriarchal settings, where men make decisions for everyone,” she noted.
Overall, the report regrets that gender imbalances in education and beyond, including in occupational choices, result from deep-seated biases and discrimination against women, which percolate into education. It is therefore essential to reduce inequality both in and through education, acknowledging that education has a key role to play in reducing broader gender inequalities in societies.
“While educating girls and ending child marriage is the right thing to do, it is also a smart economic investment.”
Andiswa Mlisa, Principal Advisor – Business Development, PIRMO at SPC giving a demo at the Digital Earth Pacific launch. Credit: SPC
by Catherine Wilson
Inter Press Service
Apr 15 (IPS) – Winning a battle for survival requires understanding the opponent. And, for the peoples of 22 island nations and territories scattered across more than 155 million square kilometres of Pacific Ocean, the volatility and wrath of the climate are their greatest threats.
The region harbours three of the world’s most disaster-prone countries, while eight are among those that suffer the highest disaster-related losses to Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
But decision-makers at all levels across the region are grappling with a lack of reliable, detailed information about the connections between climate extremes and changes occurring on their islands. In a bid to bridge the deficit of data, the regional scientific and principal organisation, the Pacific Community (SPC), is spearheading a new project, called Digital Earth Pacific, to capture extensive satellite information about climate change and natural disasters in the region.
“This is a real first for the Pacific and will bring incredible value to the region, which is so vast, but managed and stewarded by a small number of overstretched people in our member governments,” Dr Stuart Minchin, Director-General of the Pacific Community in Noumea, New Caledonia, told IPS.
Mary Nipisina cultivating her peanut garden in Tanna, Vanuatu. Farmers will be able to access the DEP for easy access to up-to-date satellite derived information. Credit: SPC Pacific Island communities cannot afford escalating economic consequences of climate disasters. Credit: SPC
“Digital Earth Pacific provides a solution to the tyranny of distance that our Pacific people have to live with every day, allowing operational earth observation satellites to assist in monitoring and management of the vast Blue Pacific Continent,” he continued.
Satellites provide an invaluable timeline of pictures, past and present, of the ways climate change and natural disasters are affecting coastlines, forest cover, population centres, and food production.
The Pacific Islands are home to about 12.7 million people and natural disasters are leading to annual average losses in the region of USD 1.07 billion, reports the Australian Aid Agency.
Digital Earth Pacific, launched by the Pacific Community in October last year, aims to halt that trend. To do this, it will set up far-reaching digital public infrastructure that gives national leaders, decision-makers, policymakers, and citizens, including farmers and local communities, easy access to up-to-date satellite-derived information. It will equip islanders to make better decisions about everything from building climate-resilient infrastructure to planting crops.
The project will draw on the wealth of scientific information from Microsoft’s Planetary Computer and treat it as ‘public goods’ to be used by those who need it. It is now in the last stages of the first phase of development, with significant progress already made in establishing the digital infrastructure and designing products and applications. Minchin said that they had captured “coastline change, mangroves, and surface water resources, and each of these products is available for every island atoll and rock across the entire Blue Pacific Continent.”
This is only “the beginning, though, with a significant pipeline of other products in development, bringing the region not just a historical view of how these issues have impacted local areas but an ongoing operational monitoring tool that will be updated regularly with new satellite observations,” Minchin explained.
The development of products and services has been informed by extensive consultations with Pacific Island countries. “The insights from the consultations gave the project a very good indication of what kind of baseline data is missing and where earth observations can fit in for sound decision-making,” Sachindra Singh, the Geoinformatics Team Leader in the Pacific Community’s Geoscience Division in Suva, Fiji, told IPS.
There is no Pacific Island nation that has not suffered the blow of devastating cyclones, the merciless corrosion of land by the sea or human hardships when the necessities of food and water perilously decline in the face of droughts or saltwater contamination.
This century, the Pacific faces a forecast of relentless temperature increases, extreme rainfall, and floods that risk the perishing of crops and rises in human illness and disease, such as heat stress and dengue fever, reports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). More destructive cyclones and rising sea levels will lead to continued loss and damage to towns, villages, and basic services, for instance, water, sanitation, power, and roads.
In recent years, the region has been burdened with exorbitant loss and damage bills from cyclones. In 2015, Cyclone Pam cost Vanuatu USD 449.4 million, while Cyclone Winston, which descended on Fiji in 2016, caused damages to the value of US$600 million.
SPC Director General Stuart Minchin at the DEP Launch in Noumea last year. It is hoped that the project will assist in the containment of the impacts of climate disasters in terms of lives and livelihoods. Credit: SPC Destruction from the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha?apai eruption and tsunami in 2022. Natural disasters are leading to annual average losses in the region of USD 1.07 billion. Credit: SPC
Pacific Island nations cannot afford the escalating economic consequences of climate disasters. Especially because ‘countries in the Pacific region commonly face low GDP growth, high reliance on grants and external loans and under-development in disaster-resilient infrastructure, the economic impact of natural disasters tends to be larger than for other comparable low-income and emerging economies,’ reports the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The new digital project is, therefore, an essential tool for prevention, ensuring that islanders can act effectively before the next disaster hits and build lives that are resilient to climate excesses in the decades ahead.
At this stage, the project will have operational products ready to use by 2024.
“All this information is made easily accessible through the Digital Earth Pacific website in a user-friendly viewer,” Singh said.
Users can then “identify how their shorelines have changed over time, what areas of their islands are floodprone or have historically faced droughts. They will be able to identify how the health of their mangroves recovers after a severe tropical cyclone and monitor the progress of replanting efforts over the years,” he continued.
A major beneficiary will be the Cook Islands, a self-governing group of 15 islands, including low-lying coral atolls, located between Tonga and French Polynesia. It has a population of about 17,500 people who live on a total island landmass of 240 square kilometres. Here, people contend with limited land for food production, an expanding population, and constrained water resources. And, from November to April each year, the country is exposed to tropical cyclones.
John Strickland, Director of Emergency Management in the Cook Islands, told IPS that the country was particularly prone to cyclones, flooding, sea surges, and drought.
“With 30 years of satellite data collected through Digital Earth Pacific… has provided images of how the Cook Islands’ coastal area has been affected by climate change, also indicating water observations during floods,” Strickland said.
“With the data captured, this will assist the Cook Islands in future planning on ensuring that affected coastal and low-lying areas affected by floods are captured and monitored. It will provide us the ability to report on affected areas and forecast, in future, zones that are vulnerable during a disaster.”
The Pacific Community also believes that access to the data will aid economic growth by informing better investment and planning by local industries and businesses.
Bringing such a massive infrastructure scheme to fruition will take an equally sizeable investment. And the Pacific Community is currently seeking donors and partners who will help the vision become reality.
“We have already received strong support from the National Oceans and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United Kingdom and New Zealand governments and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, allowing us to develop the Digital Earth Pacific capability for the first year or two of operation and we are very grateful for this support to date,” Minchin said. But he emphasised that ongoing financial and technical support is vital in the coming years.
Ultimately, the Pacific Community’s goal is to give islanders the power to forge sustainable lives, limit climate-related poverty, reduce fiscal exposure, and retain their sovereignty.
According to the UN, renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, emit little to no greenhouse gases, are readily available and in most cases cheaper than coal, oil or gas. Credit: UN
Opinion by Erik Solheim (oslo, norway)
Inter Press Service
OSLO, Norway, Apr 06 (IPS) – In the deserts of Gujarat, something remarkable is happening. On my recent visit i saw hundreds of trucks moving under the warm Indian sun. Thousands of hardworking young people from all corners of Bharat, as Indians now often call their nation, are turning around the previously empty and harsh landscape.
This is where the world’s largest combined solar and wind plant is coming up.
When completed, it will produce 30 gigawatt of wonderful clean and green energy. That is as much as the total hydropower production of my home country Norway. We are 100% fueled by hydro in our net, a rich nation in a cold climate, consuming far too much energy.
The Gujarat miracle is the work of the Adani Group. Gautam Adani told me his moving personal story. They were eight siblings living with parents in one room in Ahmedabad. There was no electricity so if he wished to study after dark he had to go outdoors, reading under the street lamps. At the age of 14, he left home and started business. Now he is one of the richest in India and very high on the global list also.
Erik Solheim
Gautam Adani made a lot of money in coal. Now he has enormous ambitions for renewables, supporting the policies of his friend prime minister Narendra Modi, turning the world’s largest nation – from grey to green. Adani is about delivery, not just talk.
Move on to Indonesia.
Last year, the second largest rain forest nation saw close to zero deforestation, an enormous service to Mother Earth. It happened because the Indonesian government put in place all the right policies for forest conservation and because Indonesian big business realized they can do fine without deforestation.
Take for example, RGE (Royal Golden Eagle) Group, one of the world’s biggest paper and pulp companies. RGE has decided they will have no deforestation in their value chains. They can make their paper tissues, packaging materials, viscose clothes and the palm oil business without cutting virgin trees. RGE even protects a vast intact rain forest in the island of Sumatra. It does it well with fire brigades and helicopters on standby in case of any challenge.
And of course – it’s China. China last year invested mindboggling 890 billion dollars in renewables. That’s as much as the total economy of Turkey or Switzerland. China last year added more solar energy in one year than the second biggest solar nation, the US, has done in its entire history.
Chinese companies produced solar panels ten times the size of Norwegian hydropower and added well over half of all global wind or hydro energy. China accounts for 60% of the world’s metro lines, electric batteries and cars, 70 % of the high speed rail. More than 95% of all electric buses are running on Chinese roads. China is the indispensable nation for global climate action. No one can go green at an acceptable cost without China.
What do India, Indonesia and China have in common?
They are the three largest developing nations.
At the climate talks in Glasgow and Dubai, and for sure also later this year in Baku, intellectually lazy negotiators and commentators speak as if the West is leading the world on the environment.
They get it dead wrong. Europe was leading, ten years ago. Now it’s time the West starts learning. Asia is leading.
India, Indonesia and China do not focus on climate only as a problem. Their leaders Modi, Xi and Prabowo see climate as an opportunity. Taking climate action make economic, not only ecological, sense. They can create jobs and prosperity, leave poverty behind, by going green.
Ola, the Uber of India, captures this in a fun slogan “Tesla for the West, Ola for the rest”. They believe they can make high quality, low cost, electric scooters and later cars, capturing global markets.
China had few stocks in the old automobile industry. When Western car makers were sleeping or even cheating on their emission records, China built the world’s dominant electric car ecosystem. BYD recently overtook Tesla as the largest electric car brand. CATL is the lead electric battery maker. Last year China passed Japan as the number one exporter of cars. Going electric makes perfect business as well as environment sense for China.
For the first time in human history there is a green pathway to prosperity.
The price for solar has fallen by 90% in a decade, mainly thanks to China. The price of wind energy nearly as much. For two hundred years after the Industrial revolution in the 1780s any nation which wanted to develop, could only do it through fossils. Now solar is cheaper than coal. Everywhere. A nation moving from coal to solar saves money. Going green is not a cost.
In January, prime minister Modi launched an innovative program for ten million Indian homes installing roof top solar. The owner of the house register the interest digitally. The utility company, the state and the banks cover the risk, not the owner. The size is astonishing.
The divide between these realities and the climate talks could hardly be wider. Last year in Dubai the focus was on loss and reparatioins. This is a completely fair demand, American emissions per capita up to today are 25 times Indian, 8 times the Chinese and the divide is even greater if we compare to Africa or small islands development states.
No one should ever blame developing nations for the climate calamities.
The weakness of this approach is however not that It’s not fair, but that it will not lead to the promised land. The money allotted by the West will be much below expectations, not even in the proximity of what is needed. Worse, the money distributed through global institutions will be slow, bureaucratic and often inadequate.
There is much talk of reforms of the global financial institutions. There has been a lot of ideas about reform of the UN also. Not one meaningful reform has happened over the last decade. The world’s largest nation, soon to become the world’s third largest economy, India, is not even on the UN security council. Anyone looking for Indonesians in the UN or global institutions need to mobilize the CIA to find them !
Reforms need support, but they will be slow, if at all they happen.
I was minister of International Development of Norway for nearly seven years. We brought Norwegian aid to 1%, the highest in the world. But if development assistance was what created prosperity some African nations would be the most developed countries on earth. India, Indonesia and China, add Korea, Singapore or Vietnam, have received very limited aid. They have got access to markets and developed strong domestic states and industries. What would Korea be without Hyundai and Samsung? This is also how the green transformation will happen this century.
The fast way to green developments run through private investment and the carbon markets, voluntary or not. This money is much larger and a lot more flexible and fast than aid. Any developing nation is best advised to build on domestic strengths and to tap into these capital flows.
Admitted the Asian giants have a few advantages. They have strong states with development-oriented leaders dedicated to the green transformation. They have huge home markets. The populations of India, China and the African continent are largely the same.
But India is one market from Tamil Nadu to Arunachal Pradesh and China one market from Guangdong to Heilongjiang. Africa comprises 54 separate states. When you succeed in the large and price conscious Indian or Chinese markets, the price is normally low and the quality high. That makes you globally competitive.
Asia also has higher level of education and China a large highly educated working class.
But still the green transformation is a huge opportunity more than a problem for developing nations. Going green now saves money. It makes it possible to leap frog into the renewable future without building the fossil infrastructure first. Even the poorest nations can develop a digital economy without putting up phone lines.
The (limited) money which will flow from Western donors and from International institutions should resolutely be used to leverage private investment in solar, wind, hydropower and green industries. The anticipated risk investing in renewables in Congo is higher than in Vietnam. That difference must be covered by donor money.
Only for climate adaptation purposes where there is no business model, we should turn to grants.
I am looking forward to going to Baku. Maybe, it can be the watershed moment when the world realizes that in the 21st century Asian developing nations are providing the global green leadership? They have showed the world going green is an opportunity.
Millions of children are suffering from malnutrition in Afghanistan. Credit: Learning Together
kabul
Inter Press Service
The author is an Afghanistan-based female journalist, trained with Finnish support before the Taliban take-over. Her identity is withheld for security reasons
KABUL, Mar 22 (IPS) – Malnutrition in Afghanistan has reached an unprecedented level, according to United Nations humanitarian organizations. It is estimated that half of the country’s population grapples with severe hunger year-round, placing Afghanistan among the top ten nations globally with the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality due to malnutrition.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is experiencing a budget shortfall, and without additional funding support thousands of Afghan children may die from acute malnutrition, the organization sounded out in a recent tweet.
The World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that between May and October 2023, 15.5 million people faced severe food insecurity, with 2.8 million in emergency situations.
According to WFP, four million people, including 3.2 million children under five years are suffering from acute malnutrition in Afghanistan.
It largely stems from the worsening economic situation that has gripped the war-torn country within the last few years. Pregnant women do not have adequate access to proper nutrition both before and after birth, which cascades down to affect their infants.
The widespread hunger and malnutrition among the most vulnerable population groups in the country is also exacerbated by the rule of Taliban who returned to power in 2021.
The hard-line Islamists have banned women from engaging in salaried employment, which in turn has decreased the level of humanitarian assistance reaching women most in need.
For instance, Soheila, the mother of a malnourished child, gave a moving narrative of how the death of her husband has deepened poverty in the family. She became the sole breadwinner of the family, even though her earnings from working in a hairdressing salon could barely meet their needs, all of which dried up when the Taliban assumed power and she was no longer allowed to work.
Soheila and her two small children no longer have enough food and have resorted to begging in front of bakeries and around neighbours’ houses just to eat once a day.
Even though the Taliban Ministry of Health does not provide any statistics on the deaths of mothers and children due to malnutrition, international organizations and doctors working in the country provide a grim picture facing women and children in the country.
Last year, the United Nations Population Fund reported that Afghanistan is one of the countries with the highest maternal mortality rate in Asia and the Pacific, with 638 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.
Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, recently raised concerns about the worsening situation of malnutrition in Afghanistan. According to him, a significant number of children and women in 25 of Afghanistan’s 36 provinces are suffering from malnutrition.
Dr. Hamidullah Ahmadi, physician at the nutrition department of Kabul Children’s Health Hospital, says that the number of malnourished patients has increased compared to previous years due to poverty and the economic crisis.
He added that dozens of malnourished children are registered every day, in serious need of medical attention. Some of them suffer from moderate to acute malnutrition with imminent risk of severe health complications and death.
Dr. Soraya (pseudonym), an official of the nutrition department at the Children’s Health Hospital in Kabul, says the number of malnourished patients attending the facility has increased threefold in the last year, far below the medicines and material they receive from international organizations to treat them.
Soraya requests that aid organizations and the World Food Program address the issue of famine and hunger among Afghan children as soon as possible to avoid the occurrence mass starvation of children.
Yasmine Sherif, Education Cannot Wait Executive Director, speaks with students at the
ECW-supported Pompomary Primary School in Maiduguri, North-East Nigeria.
Credit: ECW
by Joyce Chimbi (maiduguri, nigeria & nairobi)
Inter Press Service
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria & NAIROBI, Feb 23 (IPS) – Nigeria is home to 15 percent of the world’s out-of-school children. More than 7.6 million girls are not in school, and only nine percent of the poorest girls in the country are in secondary school. The Boko Haram insurgency and other armed groups fuel the out-of-school crisis in northeast Nigeria, disrupting the education of nearly two million school-age children.
Grave violations of children’s rights prevail in northeastern areas, including the abduction of thousands of children and young people; girls are enslaved and sexually exploited, and boys forced to become child soldiers. Education Cannot Wait (ECW) Executive Director Yasmine Sherif visited communities affected by the conflict and interconnected crises, witnessing first-hand the positive impact of ECW’s initial Multi-Year Resilience Programme (2021-2024).
“We visited a primary school, a transitional center for boys that fled Boko Haram areas, and one non-formal education center that provides vocational skills training. We have seen the power of holistic education to rehabilitate and reintegrate boys who have fled from Boko Haram areas back into society. ECW and partners, the national Ministry of Education, the Federal State Government, local organizations, teachers, students, and psychologists are all working hand-in-hand, leveraging education to heal children from traumatic experiences—providing them with better life prospects,” Sherif told IPS.
Yasmine Sherif, Education Cannot Wait Executive Director, speaks with students at the ECW-supported Pompomary Primary School in Maiduguri, North-East Nigeria. Credit: ECW
Sherif met with senior government officials, including the Minister of Education, Dr. Tahir Mamman, and Borno State Governor, Prof. Babagana Umara Zulum, and aid partners, all working to ensure the right to education for boys and girls. She stressed that ECW’s expanded funding for crisis-affected girls and boys in north-east Nigeria is “an investment in a more stable, prosperous, and peaceful future for the whole region. ECW’s plans to continue providing safe, quality holistic education and learning opportunities towards protecting children and youth from exploitation—empowering them to achieve their dreams of touching humanity.”
Sherif was also accompanied by a high-level delegation from UNICEF and the governments of Germany and Norway. Germany is ECW’s leading donor with USD 366 million in total contributions, and Norway is the Fund’s fifth largest donor with total contributions of USD 131 million. Building resilient education systems is both critical and urgent for Nigeria’s crisis-impacted children.
ECW’s initial Multi-Year Resilience Programme, delivered by the Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children, and UNICEF, has consistently achieved its targets, and has so far reached nearly 500,000 children and adolescents with quality, holistic education in areas affected by the crisis in north-east Nigeria.
The school provides girls, boys, and adolescents with holistic education support, including the provision of learning materials, teacher training, and classroom rehabilitation. Credit: ECW Education Cannot Wait (ECW) mission delegation and strategic partners on the ground during a visit to Pompomary Primary School in Maiduguri, North-East Nigeria. The ECW-funded school provides girls, boys, and adolescents with holistic education support, including the provision of learning materials, teacher training, and classroom rehabilitation. Credit: ECW
“We need additional funding to reach all two million children in north-east Nigeria and end the out-of-school crisis. Meanwhile, the rest of the world cannot wait—we have dire needs in the Middle East, the refugees in Latin America , across the Sahel region, and in the Sub-Saharan Africa region, where nine in 10 children cannot read simple sentences,” Sherif emphasizes.
“ECW appeals for additional strategic donor partners—governments, the private sector, philanthropic foundations, and high-net-worth individuals—to join our efforts in mobilizing an additional US$600 million to reach our target of US$1.5 billion for ECW, allowing our partners to reach, by 2026, a total of 20 million girls and boys in crises-affected areas of the world quality education.”
Dr. Heike Kuhn, Co-Chair of the ECW Executive Committee and Head of Education Division at Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, agrees, saying that building “resilient education systems for increased access to inclusive, quality, and lifelong learning is crucial for Nigeria, as half of its population are children and youth. Educating children means changing their lives and letting them participate in building peaceful, sustainable societies.”
Merete Lundemo, Co-Chair of the ECW Executive Committee and Special Envoy for Education in Crisis and Conflict for Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also emphasized that education is a lifeline for crisis-impacted children and that education projects bring much needed relief and normalcy to children in affected areas. Welcoming strengthened cooperation with ECW to ensure that no child is left behind and that this is part of Norway’s wider engagement for children living in armed conflict.
“This joint program and the education needs and dreams of Nigeria’s crisis-impacted children align with the African Union’s call on all governments to ensure that all children access quality education, officially declaring 2024 as the ‘Year of Education.’ We must all come together with urgency and commitment to make this a reality for the poor, vulnerable children in Africa living on the margins of abject poverty, fleeing from the traumas of violent conflict and interconnected crises,” Sherif observed.
The delegation also met with survivors of conflict-related sexual violence who are co-creating a new innovative project launched by the Global Survivors Fund with funding support from ECW. The initiative provides formal and non-formal education as a form of reparation for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence and their children.The expanded funding for the planned Multi-Year Resilience Programme shall build on ECW’s USD 23.6 million investments in the north-east of Nigeria since 2018. The investments are delivered in partnership with the Ministry of Education, UN agencies, and international and local civil society partners.
With a focus on building lasting solutions applying the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, ECW investments in the north-east of Nigeria have provided children with learning materials, supported teacher training and incentives, school feeding, provided essential mental health and psychosocial support for girls and boys impacted by the conflict, and worked with national authorities to get children back to school through permanent community-based programmes.
A view of part of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s second most populated city and main port, which is now dominated by violence as a hub for shipping drugs out of the country to the United States and Europe. CREDIT: Carolina Loza León / IPS
by Carolina Loza (guayaquil, ecuador)
Inter Press Service
GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador, Feb 12 2024 (IPS) – “For a couple of years now we’ve been seeing the violence growing so fast,” said José, who asked not to give his last name for fear of reprisals he may face in Monte Sinai, a low-income neighborhood in Ecuador’s most populous city, Guayaquil.
José, a 45-year-old Venezuelan, came here looking for a better life in 2019. “You could scrape by, barely, but you could make a living,” he said.
For José, Ecuador offered an opportunity for a peaceful life that allowed him to cover his expenses and raise his three children, something he could no longer do in his native Venezuela. He first moved to a shantytown in this part of western Guayaquil, which is also the country’s main port and one of its two economic hubs, along with Quito, the capital.
José paused before telling IPS: “In the last two years, the violence has accelerated, it’s impossible to live.”
This South American country has recently become one of the most violent in Latin America and the world. And José’s anxious observations coincide with the analysis of different organizations and experts.
Ecuador’s geographic position between two cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru, make it a strategic location for drug distribution across the Pacific Ocean.
The demand for drug trafficking, the gradual economic devastation and the weakening of the country’s political system exacerbated in 2023 with the dissolution of the legislature and a call for early elections, helped strengthen criminal gangs, which began to take root in Ecuador as part of the chain of trafficking of cocaine and other drugs.
Growing institutional corruption enabled the gangs to infiltrate the police and the prison system, making it easier for imprisoned criminal leaders to turn prison facilities, intended for rehabilitation, into their centers of operations and expansion.
In the gangs’ struggle to gain control, in 2021, the first large-scale massacre inside a prison in Ecuador occurred, something that became routine as the violence escalated.
For years in Ecuador, criminal organizations have been coordinating their actions against the State, according to Renato Rivera-Rhon, an organized crime and security analyst. “Prisons are an environment of opportunity for organized crime in Ecuador,” he said in an interview with InSightCrime, an organization that focuses on criminal activities.
Rivera-Rhon mentioned that networks within prisons facilitate dialogue, and gang leaders have lawyers within the network, indicating the existence of a web of a certain level of agreements between organized crime gangs.
Police officers prepare to patrol the streets in Guayaquil, on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, days after the declaration of a state of emergency as the government tries to combat the drug gangs that have turned Ecuador into one of the world’s most violent countries. CREDIT: Carolina Loza León / IPS
José told IPS how he went from being a street vendor outside schools in Guayaquil without any complications to becoming a victim of extortion, forced to make “protection payments” known locally as “vacunas” or vaccines.
Monte Sinai was one of the first areas in Guayaquil where residents and business owners became the victims of criminal gangs who began demanding “vacunas”, although none of the residents consulted by IPS would identify the group that controls the area, and they never refer to it by name.
The extortion method varies depending on the business and the payment can be demanded weekly, monthly or, as in José’s case, daily. “One of them (a gang member) would hang around when I was selling outside the schools, and would keep track of how much I sold and charge me a third of what I earned that day,” José said.
“You can’t live like this. They don’t let you do anything, you can’t survive,” he complained.
One of José’s three sons was also a victim of extortion when he set up a fast food business selling mainly hamburgers.
Friends of José told him that when they rode on public transportation buses, people would get on and ask for “a little donation,” which was actually another form of extortion. The charge was one dollar, which they had to plan for on top of the 0.35 cent fare.
“You prefer not to ride the bus, because you don’t have the money to pay a dollar for each trip,” said a friend of José’s who preferred not to be identified.
Monte Sinai is a rapidly growing neighborhood, a city within a city as some demographers call it, where a large number of people make a living in the informal economy.
The growth of gangs in Ecuador took hold gradually, in poor areas such as Monte Sinai, and their presence and control boomed during the last two years. Bomb threats, sporadic detonations, leaflets in which gangs threaten individuals or groups such as immigrants, and an increase in robberies are reflections of the violent control exercised by these groups.
The activity of the gangs has spread throughout the country, in an escalation that has reached the point of total chaos at times, such as on Jan. 9.
That day, a television station was taken over by a gang in Guayaquil, there were bomb threats in several cities and shootings near judicial entities, which led the government to declare a state of emergency.
The state of emergency allowed for joint military and police action in the streets and prisons, under the premise that the State is in conflict with armed criminal groups.
Lorenzo and his teenage son Carlos are photographed on one of the unpaved streets of Monte Sinai, a low-income neighborhood in northwest Guayaquil, which they had to flee because of threats and extortion by criminal gangs in the area. CREDIT: Carolina Loza León / IPS
Rivera-Rhon stressed that on Jan. 9, the alliances and ties between criminal gangs were demonstrated by the scope and coordination of the chaos in the country and the fear provoked among the public.
He said that “if you look at things from the point of view of someone in the capital, law enforcement has a monopoly of force, but this is not the case in rural areas, where there is total abandonment by the State.”
The expert on crime mentioned how in localities on the border with Colombia, there was already a social order imposed by armed groups that “generated a contagion to other areas of the country” and wondered whether the State had control over the exercise of force in other parts of the country and neighborhoods in cities such as Guayaquil.
Carlos Carrión, secretary of the Fundación Desaparecidos en Ecuador (Foundation for Missing People), said abandonment by the State has been going on for decades. A resident of Jaramijó, a fishing village near the port city of Manta, for years he has led petitions for the repatriation of fishermen imprisoned in the United States for transporting drugs.
Carrión pointed to the lack of response at the State level and the growing control of drug trafficking networks that recruit fishermen, without any control by the armed forces. “Nobody seems to have cared for years, and look where we’ve ended up,” Carrión told IPS by telephone from Jaramijó, some 190 kilometers north of Guayaquil.
Lorenzo, 46, said the Jan. 9 violence was nothing new. In 2023 he had to move from Guayaquil to the port of Posorja, after he became the victim of robberies and closed down his small business.
“Outside the store there were four guys on a motorcycle. From far away, one of them pulled a gun on me and I didn’t know how to get away. I had a backpack, where I carried my phone. I also had my watch and money that I always carry, about 20 or 40 dollars. They took everything,” said Lorenzo, who had worked hard to open a small store selling food and other products in Monte Sinai.
He told IPS that “they said to me: ‘get out of here.’ They left quickly, after going around the same street twice.” It was the last episode of violence and extortion he put up with in Guayaquil and the one that led him to decide to close his shop and look for work in Posorja, a small fishing port 113 kilometers away.
“I used to live here, but now we’re doing better. I had my monthly income from the store, but I had to leave the house in Monte Sinai to rent in Posorja,” he said during one of his last Sunday visits to the neighborhood to see friends and check on his now empty house.
One of his sons, teenager Carlos, was with him on the Sunday he was interviewed by IPS in Monte Sinai. His two older sons have also moved out of the neighborhood.
Businesses are closed in a small shopping center on Delta Avenue, near the main university in the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil, due to people’s fear of going out in certain areas of the port city. CREDIT: Carolina Loza León / IPS
Lorenzo’s biggest fear before leaving Monte Sinai was that something would happen to his children. He even considered emigrating in 2022, crossing the Darien Gap, after hearing about people who had made it through that dangerous stretch of Panamanian jungle to the United States.
Both José and Lorenzo lived in fear of the impact that the violence and increased insecurity could have on their families.
According to José, violence during 2023 in the area “increased by 70 percent.” And so far, according to his former neighbors, the armed forces have not yet arrived in Monte Sinaí, despite the fact that a state of emergency has been declared and that the area is notorious for the violence suffered by local residents.
José stays in contact with his former neighbors, a community that welcomed him with solidarity and to which he will always be grateful.
“I love Ecuador, I was welcomed here, but the situation had become unlivable,” he said from Quito, the capital, where he now sells candy at stop lights. At the end of January, José decided to move to Quito and check out the possibility of settling in this city, where he feels safer.
With most of Monte Sinai’s schools closed due to the violence, José had no alternative when he was left without a source of income and became subject to constant threats, he told IPS during a second meeting in Quito, 430 kilometers from his old life.
His eldest son sold the supplies for his fast food business and returned to Venezuela, while his two teenagers are still in Guayaquil, waiting for their father to get everything ready in Quito.
Lorenzo is no longer returning to Monte Sinai, he told IPS by telephone from Pasorj a few days after the interview there, because both he and his son Carlos received new threats. He is looking for alternatives to move to the coastal province of Manabí, which is also affected by violence, although to a lesser degree than Guayas province, of which Guayaquil is the capital.
José finds some consolation in living in Quito and being able to go out on the street with a little more peace of mind. He quotes a friend who stayed in Guayaquil: “Back there, the only thing they don’t charge us for is breathing.”
