South Sudanese Police Cadets taking oath during their graduation ceremony at the Juba Football Stadium. September 17, 2012. Credit: UN Photo/Isaac Billy Gideon Lu'b

By Beatrice Paez
SAINT JOHN, New Brunswick, Canada, Jun 18 2015 (IPS)

For the second year in a row, South Sudan has been designated as the most fragile nation in the world, plagued by intensifying internal conflict that has displaced more than two million of its people.

Headline-making events of the past year have spurred much of the movement of countries’ rankings – for better or worse – in the Fragile States Index (FSI), a joint annual report by Foreign Policy magazine and think-tank Fund for Peace (FFP) released on Jun. 17.“For me, Nigeria was one of the most interesting stories of the year. All indicators showed intensive pressures on all fronts...and yet people were able to really rally at the local, national level.” -- Nate Haken

Sub-Saharan Africa found itself leading the pack, with seven out of the top 10 countries ranked as the most fragile. As far as regional trends go, the Islamic State’s encroaching influence pulled states such as Yemen, Libya, Syria and Iraq into the top 10 most-worsened countries of 2015.

Cuba stood out as the most-improved country this past decade, owing its designation to the thawing of relations with the United States and the gradual opening of its economy to foreign investment. Though trends suggest the nation is on track to improving conditions, there remains the challenge of access to public services and upholding human rights.

In an effort to measure a state’s fragility, the index accounts for event-driven factors and makes use of data to illuminate patterns and trends that could contribute to instability. The report analysed the progress of 178 countries around the world.

“At the top of the index, countries do tend to move minimally, but at the centre of the index, you tend to see a lot more movement,” said Nate Haken, senior associate of FFP. “That’s partly because fragility begets fragility and stability begets stability.”

And yet, the report highlighted, there are outliers like Nigeria that defy easy categorisation even as pressures on all fronts – political, social, economic – would indicate a country on the brink of descending into conflict.

“For me, Nigeria was one of the most interesting stories of the year. All indicators showed intensive pressures on all fronts,” Haken told IPS. “Oil prices were down, there was more killing this past year.”

But in an unexpected turn, Haken noted, the political opposition led by Muhammadu Buhari emerged as a credible threat to incumbent Goodluck Jonathan of the People’s Democratic Party. He added that many expected a polarising outcome that would pit the north and south against each other, whatever the outcome.

“I think most observers looking at these trends thought this was bound to be a disaster,” said Haken. “Every empirical measure shows a high degree of risk and yet, people were able to really rally at the local, national level.”

Meanwhile, Portugal and Georgia joined the ranks of Cuba for the most improved, with strides being made in the economy.

Whereas some countries’ progress or decline has held steady, a closer look can reveal an emerging narrative, said Haken. The United States’ year-over-year score (ranked at 89) has remained flat, but group grievances – tensions among groups – has been increasing since 2007, with respect to the immigration of children fleeing Central America and protest against the police over racial relations.

Far from being a predictive tool, the index functions as a diagnostic tool for policy makers working in human rights and economic development to identify high-priority areas, he noted. As well, it serves to turn the spotlight on countries that seemingly have marginal bearing for the international community.

In the case of the Ebola crisis in West Africa, countries like Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone may not have figured large in headlines, but the “ripple effects across the region” also had far-reaching consequences for the international community as the world scrambled to contain the outbreak, Haken noted.

Demographic pressures – massive rural-urban migration – coupled with lack of proper road infrastructure gave way to the spread of Ebola.

“One thing that came out of the index is how critical infrastructure is for sustainable human security,” he said. “… Once it began to spread, it was difficult for medical personnel and supplies to reach the rural areas.”

This regional crisis, in particular, served as a reminder that “post-conflict” nations “on path to recovery” still face vulnerabilities, the report noted.

The index relies on 12 indicators (plus other variables) to make its assessment. They account for state legitimacy; demographic pressures; economic performance; intervention of state or non-state actors; provision of public services; and population flight, among others. Each indicator is given equal weight, and countries take a numerical score, with one for the best performance and 10 for the worst.

On this basis, policy makers are encouraged to use the index to frame research questions and to help determine the allocation of humanitarian aid.

Since 2014, FSI moved away from the use of the term “failed” in favour of “fragile,” as a way of acknowledging that in some instances, the pressures a state faces can be beyond its control, said Haken.

For instance, he cited refugee crises in which governments – ill-equipped or not – take on a large number of refugees.

“Failure connotes culpability somewhere, whereas that’s not what this index was ever trying to do,” he said. “It was looking at factors – some of which governments have influence over, some of which they don’t.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The International Summit brought together close to 2,800 delegates from 91 countries to celebrate the power of cooperatives. Photo Courtesy of Desjardins

By Beatrice Paez
QUEBEC CITY, Canada, Oct 12 2012 (IPS)

The migratory seeds of cooperatives were sown and first thrived in Europe, but have since adapted to the climate of nations worldwide.

Faces from as far as Kenya and the Philippines and as close as the Canadian Arctic and Cuba flocked to Quebec for the opportunity to claim ownership of today’s fledging and diverse movement.

At the International Summit of Cooperatives, held in celebration of the U.N. International Year of Cooperatives, cooperators swapped stories, best practices and cards with the future in mind.

The hope is that this international year will turn into an international decade honouring cooperatives, Dame Pauline Green, the president of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), told IPS.

Summit participants gathered to publicise the efforts of the movement and to gain insight into the business challenges for cooperatives ahead.

“The summit was a great opportunity to exchange ideas and innovative practices,” said Monique Leroux, the CEO of Desjardins and the co-host, in a statement.

Going forward, a declaration was adopted by the co-hosts of the conference, Desjardins, ICA and St. Mary’s University to make a stronger case for cooperatives to the public and authorities of governance.

As for their goals in improving the cooperative enterprise, they pledged to harness new tools for communicating their goals to the public and to develop new ways of enhancing communication and consultation with members and management.

For Quebec, the summit was also a chance to pay tribute to Alphonse Desjardins, who initiated the first step to making credit unions an option for French Canadians who would otherwise have been forced to leave the province in pursuit of income opportunities.

The stories that emerged from the global gathering underscored the role that cooperatives have played in making it possible for people to remain rooted in their communities, keeping much needed talent from fleeing.

Mary Nirlungayuk, the corporate services vice president of the Arctic Cooperatives Limited, shared with IPS the story of how cooperatives in the north have created a channel of income for artist collectives and have popped up where others have not always tread – providing cable and construction services to partnering with airline and shipping companies to reduce the cost of transporting the annual inventory of goods.

The grassroots orientation of cooperatives made it viable model of enterprise for First Nations communities, striving to reconcile past traditions with present realities.

“They were created because it was very similar to the Aboriginal, First Nations concept that they would help each other,” Nirlungayuk told IPS. “And if it can work in these remote communities, why can’t it be more successful in other places.”

In Cuba, where the groundwork for a cooperative future is being laid, its delegation of 10 was there to learn from others as well as to demonstrate the weight of the movement within the country.

“We wanted to let the rest of the world see what is going on,” said Wendy Holm, who heads the delegation. “Socialist and capitalist co-ops are slightly different in form… One of the challenges is going to be to give them as much autonomy, while at the same time recognising that you’re (for instance) a farm co-op tasked to produce food for the wider population.”

The versatile construct of cooperatives has made it a blueprint for enterprises in the agriculture, insurance, housing, and retail sectors and among others. In the socialist economy of Cuba, Holm said cooperatives make the most sense in the shift to convert trouble-ridden enterprises away from state management.

The Cuban delegation was “interested in looking at as many cooperative endeavours as they can,” and had even met with a taxi co-op to learn how it could be adapted in Havana, Holm told IPS.

Though smaller than the Cuban delegation, the Philippines, with its modest contingent of four, also sought to make an imprint at the summit.

Youth delegate and speaker, Marie Antoinette Roxas, from the Philippines, was there to share her university, Iligan Institute of Technology’s cooperative initiatives. She told IPS that other youth head programmes that introduce financial literacy to children in elementary schools, as an effort to instill smart financial practices at a young age.

The student-run cooperative is also involved in designing income-generating activities; one project that has taken off has been its partnership with local tailors to make eco-friendly bags that are then sold with interest to its mother co-op, the university’s Multi-Purpose Cooperative.

While there were many opportunities to hear about different initiatives, Simel Esim, the chief of the ILO’s cooperative branch told IPS she wished there had been more opportunity to connect with the people behind them – and had hoped for more dialogue between delegates.

Amidst the challenges of staying relevant and competitive, the biggest one ahead, said Esim, is going to be connecting with and preaching to people beyond the converted.

At the summit closing, Leroux announced Desjardins’ hopes of setting up another international gathering. Perhaps that will be on the agenda at the next summit in 2014.

The Maguey Women's cooperative was the first in Mexico to use solar energy in food production. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Beatrice Paez
QUEBEC CITY, Canada, Oct 10 2012 (IPS)

Cooperatives may face an immense challenge in garnering broader public recognition among consumers, but when it comes to chasing growth, they haven’t held back.

They are growing a rate comparable to their corporate competitors, and are outpacing them in the food and agricultural sector, a study released by McKinsey & Company reveals.

Cooperatives are developing at annual rate of 7.9 percent versus free market participants, who lead at 8.7 percent. While food and agricultural co-ops lead as an example, the study revealed that the insurance sector confronts obstacles in gaining access to capital and the right type of legislative environment that responds directly to the model.

The survey of 47 co-ops based in Asia, Europe, North America and the emerging markets upheld the cooperative movement’s self-perceptions about its ability to prioritise the interests of members over short-term financial gains. The results were matched with their analysis of 54 publicly listed companies.

Growth for small companies turned big can mean a break in their resolve to live up to their original standards. But cooperatives occupy a different territory of business, where the window for the measurement of growth is wider than the quarterly report structure that corporations are beholden to, said Juan Buchenau a senior financial sector specialist at the World Bank, at a panel during the Oct. 8-11 International Summit of Cooperatives here.

In the pursuit of a greater share of the market, cooperatives remain rooted in addressing their members’ needs, said Andrew Grant, the managing partner of McKinsey & Co. “If you’re better serving your members, you’re by definition meeting your market share.”

For 96 percent of the co-ops under review, growth was seen as essential to maintaining a diversified range of services. The findings illustrated differences in sources of growth, with co-ops propelled more by acquiring a greater market share, rather than by their entrance into rapidly rising markets with high growth potential.

“They are less nimble at placing their resources into the fastest growing part of their marketplace,” noted Grant at a press briefing. “They are less good at developing new products and services.”

Cooperatives are not unwilling to jump into the new markets, but rather are unable to swiftly release the capital to place their bidding, the McKinsey report stated. The principle of consensus that governs the cooperative model and puts the immediate interests of members first makes it difficult to cross the threshold.

The challenge and concern for cooperatives going forward is how to grow, without succumbing to the same type of responses exercised by other enterprises. For corporations, the pressure of a quarterly timetable means that “projects are thrown off the table” before they have been given a chance to fly, said Buchenau.

There needs to be more long-term patient capital within the free market, said Martin Sabia, the president and CEO of the Caisse in Quebec, at the panel on the economic order.

In identifying the weakness of cooperatives in penetrating emergent markets, the report stressed that cooperatives must play on their “natural strengths,” and build a following through the promotion of members’ needs.

But while this study demonstrates the economic power of cooperatives, Simel Esim, the chief of the International Labour Organisation’s Cooperative Branch, told IPS that it does not provide an accurate picture of how growth is understood within the movement.

“The McKinsey report is looking at traditional growth indicators, it’s not really addressing the co-op model in its uniqueness,” she told IPS. “For instance, co-ops have a longer life span, they employ workers, they have less worker turnover, move less from a local economy, they respond to local problems faster – these are the growth indicators that should be used.”

Instead of looking at the annual growth, she suggested assessing growth within a span of 10 to 20 years.

“We’re more interested in qualitative growth, rather than just numbers,” agreed Gianluca Salvatori, the CEO of Euricse, a research centre focused on cooperatives.

For Salvatori, growth in the qualitative sense means innovation, extending the cooperative experience in new sectors to respond to emerging needs, not merely responding to market indicators.

“The world they are trying to analyse and understand is far more complex,” Salvatori told IPS. “I don’t think growth in size is the main driver we have to implement as a strategy.”

By Beatrice Paez
QUEBEC CITY, Canada, Oct 9 2012 (IPS)

The international rally to take the global cooperative movement to the next level is in full swing at the International Summit of Cooperatives here, which kicked off on Monday.

Dame Pauline Green. Credit: Beatrice Paez

Under the banner “The Amazing Power of Cooperatives”, the summit seeks to demonstrate its contributions in proffering alternative, human-centred solutions for economic development across the world.

The summit marks the first occasion to bring nearly 2,800 cooperative participants from 91 countries into dialogue with one another.

To make their case, the summit’s organisers, Desjardins, Canada’s financial cooperative, and the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) are letting the numbers do the talking, speaking to the fact that cooperatives sprout where there is a vacuum in services and opportunities in the community.

“With one million organisations, 100 million employees and one billion members we already have a global voice, now we need to make it resonate across the world,” said Monique Leroux, the CEO of Desjardins.

Addressing the crowd gathered at the opening ceremony, Dame Pauline Green, the president of ICA, fondly recalled one of her worldwide tours of cooperatives.

“There were desks squeezed into every corner of the room and the place was buzzing with members waiting to deposit or withdraw money,” says Green about her trip to a credit union on the outskirts of Manila. “Coffee and biscuits were being shared, and they showed me with such pride a seven-story building that they had built with credit union money.”

The building was purposed as a school for 650 local students, funds were also used to create a preschool, where mothers can drop off their children to supplement their family’s income, and a chapel, where members can seek a measure of comfort in times of distress.

This is a portrait of the movement at work, said Green.

But Green noted that while there are many success stories of cooperatives filling in areas neglected by other parts of the economy, cooperatives continue to be sidelined and discriminated in their efforts to reconfigure the direction of global economic policy.

She pointed to the fact that neither the World Bank nor the B20, which advises the G20 group of the world’s biggest economies, has a cooperative economist on their boards.

In his opening remarks, Riccardo Petrella, an Italian economist and political scientist, also discussed of the unwillingness of governments to strive for global economic policies that balance the needs of people with profit.

He went on to speak of the gross inequality that punctuates society and the misplaced values that put accumulation ahead of the equitable distribution of wealth.

Green has been bringing the case of cooperatives to various international and governmental bodies and stakeholders around the world, from Beijing to Washington.

“Our argument has been that cooperative businesses want to see a more diversified global economy,” said Green. “The world needs a global economy that puts people at the heart of decision-making and not just the red-blooded pursuit of economic development at any cost.”

With over eight years of experience on the ICA board, Green has made it her ambition to make the cooperative model the blueprint to guide global institutions in their policy decision-making.

IPS spoke with Green to discuss the challenges the cooperatives face in today’s economic climate.

Q: Cooperatives are active in all corners of the globe, but in what regions does the movement need to gain a firm grounding?

A: There’s a huge raft of energy that needs to go into countries involved in the Arab Spring. What we want to do is to engage through social media. We want to attract them at the grassroots level, on things like cooperative housing, things like professional cooperatives. Those people, when they came out on the streets in the Arab Spring, weren’t just looking for political freedom, they were looking for economic fairness.

By 2050, we won’t have enough productive land in the world to feed the estimated nine billion population. (Of) the remaining land that is available to increase production, 73 percent or 80 percent of it is in Africa. The issue becomes how do we energise African small holders, how do we make it in a way that the benefits are given back to peasant farmers.

Our fear is that nothing will happen and we’ll just see the multinationals buying up the small holders and they’ll get a tiny shot in the arm, which will last for a short while.

Q: What are the key priorities of the ICA?

A: The key thing for us is that the global economy does not recognise our sort of business. Our serious initiative for this year is try to impact the global economy. A billion people around the world are not starry-eyed idealists, they’re realists.

We believe we can open some of the doors for our businesses big and small, and demonstrate their worth to governments.

Q: Not all enterprises are immune to corruption. Do cooperatives have a unique approach to dealing with or mitigating corruption?

A: The strength of the cooperative movement is its accountability to its members. Its ordinary members are on the board of cooperatives, driving the direction and holding management accountable. More than often, these things are discovered through the process of an ordinary person who will ask the awkward questions. You have a totally diverse set of people with different skills.

Excerpt:

Emmanuel Kargbo, a 26-year-old farmer, pushes a motorised soil tiller recently given to his farming cooperative. Before he was trained to use it, it would take him more than twice as long to do it by hand. Credit: Damon Van der Linde/IPS

By Beatrice Paez
TORONTO, Canada, Oct 8 2012 (IPS)

Youth worldwide are facing limited job prospects in the traditional channels of employment, and in the midst of the job crunch, cooperatives are seeking ways to connect with this untapped pool of talent.

It begins with reserving a seat for young, future cooperative leaders this Oct. 8 to 12 at the International Summit of Cooperatives in Quebec City. About 150 youth from across the globe have been invited to represent their respective cooperative organisations.

It’s an opportunity for them to network with their peers and learn from their cooperative elders, said Stephanie Guico, the coordinator of the Future Leaders programe at the conference. While there will be special panels and events designed around them, the young leaders, from the ages 20-35, will be expected to bring their own contributions.

“I hope they’re going to bring a youth voice, innovative ideas, new perspectives. I hope they won’t censor themselves,” Guico told IPS. “There’s a lot to be gained from listening to youth who are more in touch with integration into the virtual area and ways of collaborating and communicating that are new.”

“I think there’s a generation now that has grown up with a certain type of cooperation through social media,” said Charles Gould, executive director of the International Cooperative Association, a non-governmental organisation that strives to shape global policy on behalf of cooperatives.

“It ought to make them more receptive to the cooperative model but they haven’t heard about it as a business model,” he told IPS.

No one knows more about creating connections through social media to answer a need than social entrepreneur Dev Aujla, who will be addressing the young leaders.

Aujla, founder of DreamNow, a charitable organisation in the business of turning ideas into social goods, collaborated with Rolling Stone Magazine’s “climate hero” Billy Parrish, a climate change activist, to write a book.

Parrish and Aujla’s paths crossed online, as Facebook friends who had never met but who shared similar principles, and dedicated their lives to mobilising youth to address their community’s issues. Their book “Making Good” serves as a game plan for youth interested in pursuing careers as social entrepreneurs.

The non-linear career path often comes with the territory if you become a social entrepreneur, and while it can be daunting, it is becoming an attractive option for those wanting a job that pays well enough and is rooted in serving the community, said Aujla.

And for those interested, the cooperative model can provide a base of support, because it doesn’t require a lot of a capital, and he said, with cooperatives “you can take any industry you can imagine and reinvent in a way that does good.”

The cooperative model speaks in the language that today’s generation has been reared on, through exposure to the dialogue on climate change and other environmental issues, “this whole generation knows they want to do something good and are just being turned on the idea,” adds Aujla.

But while youth have more access to information to educate themselves on the issues of today, the cooperative model isn’t all that familiar because it’s not always included in academic curriculum, said Guico, who completed a Bachelor’s Degree in International Development.

Social media can aid the cooperative movement in its efforts to connect with youth, but more education about how they can offer an alternative route for employment is needed.

“Realistically, it’s going to take a different presentation of the model and a better explanation of it,” said Gould.

It took doing her own research and meeting the right people for Guico to find her way into the cooperative movement. The same goes for others around her. “Most people stumbled upon the movement, which said something about how good the cooperative movement is doing at promoting itself and communicating its identity.”

Part of the issue Guico finds is that cooperatives operate in a more discreet manner than corporations. “We would have to impose ourselves before there’s a perception of our importance,” she said.

Another reason cooperatives are not on the minds of many youth is that schools do not delve deeply, if at all into what the model offers, Guico notes. “Most educational institutions are geared towards the capitalist model, anything that it is too complex, they tend to simplify or minimise it.”

Without the decision to explore cooperatives on her own, Guico might have continued to presume that cooperatives are only in the trade of making crafts and operating as small-scale agricultural enterprises, as she was led to believe.

In Canada, St. Mary’s University in Halifax offers a Master’s programme designed around the cooperative enterprise. The university is sponsoring Imagine 2012, a joint event of the summit, on cooperative economics that precedes it.

But the online programme, which gathers people from around the world, is targeted at cooperators entrenched in the movement. Most students have been working in the industry for 15 to 20 years and are seeking to learn new management tools and connect with other industry leaders.

“If people were only learning about it in the ways that are more typical to how (we’re) learning, I think our sector would be much further ahead,” said Karen Miner, the managing director of the Cooperative and Credit Union Management programme at St. Mary’s.

“We would be much better educated about the sector and even on ourselves. We have a large number of managers of co-ops that come from the traditional business background, myself included,” Miner told IPS.

Laure Waridel, an ecosociologist who will also be speaking to youth at the summit, also finds that not enough value is given to the social economy in university courses, particularly in management.

Waridel, who taught a course at McGill University in Montreal, sought to incorporate some lessons on social entrepreneurship in her lectures by inviting guest speakers working in the social economy to her lectures.

The cooperative model, which prides itself in embracing democratic and participatory values, where youth can help influence and shape the future of cooperatives, has a lot of room for growth and new members, Waridel said.

“The message to future leaders is that we need to prepare a transition for another economy,” she told IPS. “It’s very clear that the dominant model in which we are now is unsustainable.”

Cooperative members at the APROHFI wholesale centre in Honduras select the best potatoes to sell to supermarkets. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Beatrice Paez
TORONTO, Canada, Oct 5 2012 (IPS)

The banner year for the global cooperative movement is winding down into its last months, but its leaders have echoed a resounding message: cooperatives, a values-based business model, can usher a transition to a more socially responsible economy.

This message will be at core of the International Summit of Cooperatives, a gathering of more than 2,000 participants active in the cooperative movement, to take place in Québec City from Oct. 8 to 12.

With 2012 designated by the U.N. as the International Year of Cooperatives, Monique Leroux, the CEO of Desjardins, the largest cooperative financial group in Canada, thought it was time to bring her dream of launching a summit into action.

“We want to use the summit as an opportunity to make sure the world in general, and governments have a better understanding of the cooperative movement,” said Leroux. “We need to do a better job in promoting who we are.”

Desjardins partnered with the International Alliance of Cooperatives, a non-governmental organisation that advocates on behalf cooperatives, to create a venue where new networks and solutions to propel the movement forward can be forged.

The shift to a new paradigm for the economy is now underway, and the time is ripe for cooperatives to demonstrate their value because there is an upswell of disenchantment with the economy as it stands, said Charles Gould, the executive director of IAC.

Cooperatives tend to arise in response to an unaddressed need in the community. The core values that underpin the cooperative model – self-help, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity – guide the way decisions are reached, Gould added.

The values bear the implication that the interests of the communities served will be factored into any business calculation. In the face of the financial crisis, the cooperative model proved its resilience, because by design the board is accountable to all its members, said Leroux. The one-member, one vote rule means that the interests of the largest shareholders do not trump the rest.

“It’s a more sustainable model, it doesn’t take unknown risks because it’s not trying to maximise profit,” said Gould.

“We believe that by 2020, by the end of this decade, it’s conceivable that the cooperative can be the fastest growing form of enterprise in the world,” he told IPS. “We’ve been asking cooperatives and our members what would have to change for that to happen.”

Gould identified several areas that will help build momentum for the movement, and bolster its profile as a viable alternative to the classic setup of a corporation.

For one, cooperatives need new forms of capital to grow that are aligned with their values and design. The summit marks an opportunity for Desjardins and its partners to share their innovations in creating new financial products, credit services designed to reflect the context of the community served, said France Michaud, the communications supervisor at Developpement International Desjardins (DID).

Aside from raising capital, cooperatives also have to do a better job at promoting and invoking their identity, making the model and the values it stands for known to the public, Gould noted. Brands like Ocean Spray and Sunkist are household names but are not always tagged as examples of cooperatives.

There are several misleading perceptions about cooperatives that downplay their importance in the economy, said Stephanie Guico, the programme coordinator of the Future Leaders Program at the summit. One is the view that they belong to the past, another that they are mainly poor people’s organisations.

Poverty alleviation is central to the mandate of many cooperatives, but people often don’t realise they are businesses concerned about their sustainability, Guico added.

For the cooperative model to thrive, the legislative and regulatory landscape has to adjust itself. “There are many countries where the general business regime is designed around the corporate construct, because it has been such a dominant model,” Gould told IPS. “We have to make sure we’re not subject to restrictions that were imposed to prevent problems other business forms are subject to.”

Gould noted that the governments of China and Iran are expressing interest in the cooperative model, and that these countries are on his list to watch for growth. “Some of these countries recognise the need to diversify from state-owned enterprises and see how the global economy has changed,” he said. “But don’t want to move to capitalist models…and are intrigued that the cooperative model could be a way of getting people to step up in a self-help way.”

In Quebec, the groundwork for an alternative economy is being sown through a collection of seemingly small efforts led by members of the global cooperative movement, said Laure Waridel, an eco-sociologist, who has been invited to speak at the summit.

She cited one local organic farm as an example, because it has opted to subsist with the help of its customers, who are willing to pay an advance for its share of the harvest.

Waridel, also recognised as a pioneer who helped bring the fair trade movement to Canada, has been studying the efforts of people in the countryside of Québec to create a sustainable livelihood.

“What I’m interested in is to find the connecting dots between many initiatives in Québec that are seen as marginal,” she told IPS. “You put them together, you see that there is a proposal for another economy.”

By Beatrice Paez
TORONTO, Canada, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

The often heroic struggles of some of the world’s human rights victims and advocates are on full view at the Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which runs through Friday at the TIFF Bell Lightbox theatre.

The 10-day festival, now in its ninth year, features films that are not for the fainthearted, with subjects that include abuse, trauma and violence.

However, “although they deal with difficult subject matter, the subjects of these films are inspiring…in how they overcome human rights abuses in the past or how they’ve been defending the people who’ve had their human rights violated,” Alex Rogalski, the festival’s programmer told IPS. “They’re (going to) make you look at the headlines in a different way.”

The festival takes off with “Special Flight”, a documentary propelled by portraits of asylum seekers and illegal migrants stranded at the Frambois detention centre in Switzerland.

Stuck in limbo, the residents face three possible fates: amnesty, deportation via “special flight”, or the option to leave the country voluntarily. The verdict seals the fate of the residents, with no recourse for an appeal.

The film is a follow-up to Fernard Melgar’s documentary series, which will lead into a string of web-based films that trace those deported back to their next destination.

“This is My Land…Hebron,” directed by Stephen Natanson and Giulia Amati, weaves the testimonies of Israeli settlers and Palestinians as well as interviews with those caught in the middle of the long- standing conflict.

Among the brave souls captured on film was a former Israeli soldier, who traded sides to work as a tour guide, offering visitors an intimate and unbridled view of life inside the divided streets of Hebron.

“There are many things that we’re not getting news of and I think some of the Israeli interviews are wonderful because they very clearly explain what the situation is in Hebron,” Natanson told IPS.

An ancient city fabled to house the tomb of Abraham, Hebron is home to 160,000 Palestinians and roughly 600 to 800 Israeli settlers, flanked by a contingent of 2,000 Israeli soldiers tasked with protecting the settlers.

The daily grind of taunts, threats and stone throwing has become a routine experience for Palestinians who sometimes find themselves the target of children who have been drawn into the conflict by their parents.

Once a vital trading post, the city, which holds special significance to monotheistic believers, has been transformed by the conflict into a veritable ghost town with boarded shops and deserted streets.

Directors Natanson and Amati set out to capture the widening rift that alienates residents from one another and the rest of the country.

“We could only observe the situation and ask the questions. These are the questions we asked and the answers we got,” Natanson told IPS. “It’s difficult to see the situation in Hebron and imagine that it’s going to get better.”

Lee Hirsch reels us into the lives of Tyler, Alex, Kelby and Jameya – teenagers who have become a target of bullying.

“The Bully Project” not only captures the emotional and physical abuse that confronts them, it also exposes the flawed and startling reactions of school administrators who brush off the incidents as a part of childhood experience – “kids will be kids”.

The festival will close with “The Island President”, a film that trailed the former president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed. Acting as Nasheed’s shadow, director John Shenk taps into the challenges of mending the country’s economy and cultivating democracy, along with the pressing fight against climate change.

Given access into the political underworld during Nasheed’s first year in office, Shenk’s documentary, which screened at the Toronto Film Festival in 2011, offers an inside look into political brokering.

Other festival highlights include Pamela Yates’ “Granito: How to Nail a Dictator,” which covers the genocide campaign in Guatemala through to the search for justice, and “The Price of Sex”, an investigative piece on international sex trafficking that led Mimi Chakarova to the streets of Moldova, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece and Dubai.

“I think these movies are the opposite of escapism, these films are engaging you in someone’s reality…a reality you may not be familiar with,” said Rogalski.

Excerpt:

By Beatrice Paez
MONTREAL, Canada, Sep 23 2010 (IPS)

A diverse group of more than 4,500 professionals from the water industry gathered here to send a resounding message: a sharp break from past practices of water distribution and wastewater management is needed to cope with the burgeoning population growth in cities and impending water scarcity.

However, the unanimity in their vision for cities of the future ends there.

With Asian cities in the midst of a water crisis, a corporate outlook is needed to salvage wasted water resources, said the World Water Congress’s keynote speaker, Arjun Thapan of the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

In developing countries, an estimated 90 percent of wastewater is leached directly into bodies of open water. Lack of resources directed toward water and environmental sanitation has cost governments in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam about two percent of their GDP, equivalent to approximately $9 billion, according to the ADB.

The path to a more efficient management of water resources lies in the formation of more public-private partnerships to significantly increase the role of the private sector in the delivery and treatment of water, Thapan argued at the conference, convened by the International Water Association (IWA).

This calls for attaching an economic value to water to encourage industry, agriculture and energy to shrink their usage. Allocation of water to each sector should be based on efficiency, said Thapan. “Groundwater has been seen as a birthright, and over withdrawals are the norm. This dependence must be reduced to maintain the ecological balance,” he said.

IWA has pioneered its own initiative, the Cities of the Future programme, to help cities adopt new models – from reconfiguring the design of cities to changing the mode of water delivery to enable them to deal with climate change and resource constraints.

Whether the forces behind a shift towards better management practices come from the private or public sector is irrelevant, Steve Moddemeyer, manager of the Cities of the Future programme, told IPS. “We’re really agnostic on that issue. I think both can work in a lot of different scenarios,” he said. “We take a step back from all that and ask, who’s doing really good stuff?”

The issue is convincing regulators and political leaders to adopt new approaches. They “need to recognise that what we’re doing is riskier now than what we’re proposing,” said Moddemeyer.

He stressed greater collaboration with city planners, noting that, “Land use can make a difference, it was determined that how a neighbourhood is designed can reduce water usage by 30 percent.”

The problems of unplanned urban sprawl in Asian cities threaten to reverse and jeopardise economic gains, said Thapan. “Asia’s urbanisation is inexorable. Managed properly it will result in equitable prosperity, but if left to its current ways it will cripple socio-economic growth.”

Among Asian nations, Singapore stands out as a model in overcoming water scarcity despite its lack of natural water resources. It is promoting itself as a global platform for water solutions. Services such as the collection, production, distribution and reclamation of water remain under the umbrella of PUB, a national water agency.

PUB emphasises the need for the involvement of communities, arguing that their participation in the planning process helps instill a sense of ownership and responsibility for the city’s resources.

Michael Toh, organiser of Singapore’s International Water Week, told IPS that Singapore has sought to harmonise relations between the community, the private and public sectors, and requires a multifaceted approach that engages every stakeholder.

On Monday, a group of protesters from the Council of Canadians, an organisation that identifies itself as a social justice group, staged a demonstration against the IWA. They accused conference organisers of propagating a corporatist agenda, charging that its sponsors are private multinational water companies such as Veolia Water and Suez Environment.

The president of IWA, David Garman, insists that the programme has participants from across the spectrum. He said funds received from the sponsorships were used to help delegates from developing countries with their traveling costs.

The protesters, who convened outside the conference venue, said they wanted to make delegates aware that the conference advocates for private solutions to address water scarcity. Garman said that this was the IWA’s first encounter with demonstrators.

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By Beatrice Paez
MONTREAL, Canada, Aug 25 2010 (IPS)

A mother accused of backing insurgents in the Philippines and her newborn son are awaiting their release from prison, in a case that has gained international attention.

Amaryllis Enriquez, the head of Karapatan, an alliance of individuals and organisations that investigate human rights cases, told IPS a new motion was filed Monday by the lawyers of Judilyn Oliveros, who gave birth in July and was brought back to prison last week after the court denied an appeal to extend her temporary release for six months to nurse her baby.

Oliveros is among a group of 43 people – two doctors, one registered nurse, two midwives and 38 volunteer health workers – who were arrested on Feb. 6 for the illegal possession of explosives and firearms. Five have allegedly admitted to being members of the New People’s Army (NPA) but Karapatan stands behind all 43, insisting that they were tortured into confessing.

The NPA is the armed wing of the Communist Party in the Philippines, which has been waging an insurgency since 1969.

The police and military operative responsible for the arrest claim to have seized three grenades, improvised landmines, a pistol with seven bullets and C4 explosives from the residence of Dr. Melecia Velmonte, an infectious disease specialist who is one of the detained.

The military charge that the so-called Morong 43 serve as medical assistants to the guerilla platoons of the NPA. “The government forces were able to prevent a possible major attack to be perpetrated by the NPA bandits during its anniversary,” says the press release issued by the Philippine army.

The Morong 43 counter that they had gathered for a health training session and that the warrant issued was defective because it did not contain any of the names of those who were arrested.

The prisoners deny allegations of ties to the NPA, and instead claim membership to a joint initiative led by two NGOs, the Community Medicine Development Foundation (COMMED) and the Council for Health and Development (CHD). These community health workers administer services otherwise unavailable when a natural disaster strikes or where medical services are unaffordable to the community.

Enriquez explained to IPS that the police were searching for someone by the name of Mario Condes, and that the warrant did not specify an address but in effect covered the entire neighbourhood.

“When they rounded up the Morong 43, there was no Mario Condes. The commissioner asked the arresting officer – so you haven’t got Condes but are you still looking for him? ‘No sir’, was his response,” said Enriquez.

The police and the army dismiss accusations that the warrant was invalid, arguing that they had undertaken extensive intelligence and surveillance work and that the search had occurred in the presence of a caretaker and two local government officials.

Given the presence of explosives and other devices, their work must not be limited to attending to the health concerns of the NPA, said Lt. Col. Marcelo Burgos Jr., the Army spokesman.

This is not the first time the military has targeted health workers. Enriquez says the arrest is linked to a larger operation at stake for the government – its counterinsurgency initiative to eliminate armed revolutionary movements. Known as Operation Freedom Watch, the previous administration of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has committed the military to a 2010 deadline to eliminate communist insurgency in the country.

Karapatan documents that the crackdown has resulted in 1,206 extrajudicial killings, 205 people disappeared, and many more subjected to torture.

A habeas corpus petition was filed but dismissed by the Court of Appeals, which ruled that it could not release the detainees under the presumption of an illegal detention because they had been charged with a criminal offence in the local court.

The Free the 43 campaign, which calls for the immediate and unconditional release of the Morong 43, has been taking its message to the international stage, where Enriquez and the husband of one of the prisoners brought the case to the attention of the U.N. Human Rights Council last June.

Enriquez also helped launch a campaign at this year’s CIVICUS World Assembly, which took place from Aug. 20-23, a platform where civil society organisations can build partnerships to solve global issues and address human rights abuses.

“We are partners in a project at CIVICUS called the Early Warning system, which acts as an urgent alert to sound out a situation in our country and enables civil society organisations across the world to respond to the threats against civil society,” Enriquez told IPS. “We would like to pressure CIVICUS to do more. We also hope that the new president, [Benigno] ‘Noynoy’ Aquino, will respond to increased pressure from our international supporters.”

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By Beatrice Paez
MONTREAL, Canada, Aug 23 2010 (IPS)

Six hundred delegates from more than 80 countries flocked to Montreal Aug. 20-23 for the CIVICUS World Assembly in search of innovative ways to approach global challenges like poverty and climate change.

An international alliance of about 1,000 civil society organisations, CIVICUS concentrates its efforts on strengthening citizen action and civil society, especially where citizens’ right to freedom of association are threatened.

This is an opportunity for civil society to grow together, said Anabel Cruz, the chair of the board of CIVICUS. “The world assembly is always a very interactive platform for sharing experience, learning from each other and discussing solutions. I hope people can come back to their countries with more knowledge and joint projects,” Cruz told IPS. “This is the start of a process, not the end.”

The conference took on three broad issues – economic justice, development effectiveness and climate change, with economic justice topping the agenda. Among the headliners of the discussion was Sanjeev Khagram, the lead author of “Voices of the Vulnerable”, a U.N. report on the impacts of the economic crisis on the poor.

Khagram stressed the need for civil society to shift where it channels its efforts. He told IPS that relative to the U.N., the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the real forces in setting the rules for the global financial system are the Basel institutions and the Financial Stability Board (FSB).

“Ordinary citizens have no engagement there but the real power is there because they are the ones that coordinated the bailouts and set new regulations for the future,” he said.

He argued that as these institutions attract a host of actors – bringing together private bankers, central bankers and ministers of finance – this is the place where civil society should be lodging its appeals.

Civil society has the responsibility to develop, promote and hold these financial institutions accountable to norms and principles that reflect human rights, said Khagram.

Taking stock of how civil society organisations can improve and where potential lies also underpin the spirit of the conference.

Ingrid Srinath, the secretary-general of CIVICUS, noted the importance of overcoming internal divisions, which manifests itself in the competition for funding. “If we are actually going to achieve the synergistic benefits of both development funding and climate funding…the climate folks and development folks need start working together a lot more closely,” she said.

“I think we have to begin to say the struggles to end global poverty and to avert catastrophic climate change are two sides of the same coin,” said Kumi Naidoo, the executive director of Greenpeace International.

Tomas Brundin of the Swedish Foreign Ministry addressed the need for governments to recognise that civil society is the real agent of social change. “We need to move from rhetoric to action and change our deep-seated behaviours,” he said.

“One of the problems that we face is that we tend to talk to our equals and to focus on the executive branch but not where the real ownership should be – with parliament and civil society,” he added.

While not on the agenda this year, civil society organisations continue to envision and pursue ways of demonstrating accountability.

Cruz said the best self-defence for civil society organisations is self-regulation, which means setting out to collectively agree on certain principles and standards that are then presented to the public. Naidoo suggests that on top of self-regulation, NGOs can also be subject to the Accountability Charter.

Cruz and Naidoo cautioned against the process of certification, a service offered by an external party – an NGO or from the private sector. The process evaluates the quality of the organisation to assess whether it is representative and accountable to the people.

Naidoo argues the Charter is a more authoritative measure because while major civil society leaders brought it about, it consists of an independent panel that makes judgments and includes a sanctions component.

“There were some organisations that approached me and I felt that they had no empathy with the sector, they were just trying to develop some income-generating profit,” he said.

He also cites diversity as an important consideration, given the differences in resources and the scope of its focus – civil society organisations cannot be subject to one standard.

“I’m not sure that an external party can assess the real value of civil society,” said Cruz.

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By Beatrice Paez
MONTREAL, Canada, Aug 23 2010 (IPS)

Three scenarios were laid before the delegates here attending the CIVICUS World Assembly, a venue that attracts civil society, donors, government and business leaders from every region of the world.

Ingrid Srinath Credit: Beatrice Paez/IPS

Guided by the stated theme of the search for economic justice, David Bonbright, the moderator of the Aug. 20-23 assembly, first sketched a portrait of a static world, one he aptly described as “business as usual”. The next illustration brought into focus a world of reform but with insufficient improvements. He then drew the crowd into an image of transformation, where new concerted efforts take hold.

For Ingrid Srinath, the secretary-general of CIVICUS, reality falls somewhere along this spectrum of possibilities. Srinath told IPS that while there are emergent tools and avenues accessible to civil society to mount pressure on governments, multilateral institutions and business, much remains unchanged in the area of governance.

Q: With a conference each year and a different theme at play, how does CIVICUS keep previous goals in sight? A: There is a continuing theme that links all world assemblies – “Acting together for a just world.” What most often happens is that ideas, collaborations and initiatives that emerge from the world assembly will take the form of a programme or a task team, which then institutionalises that work. Everything from accountability to participatory governance and gender equality were themes that became programmes at CIVICUS with their own networks and partnerships.

We also ask, what is the burning issue in civil society? This year it was clearly economic justice and we try to look at that broad theme of acting together for a just world through the lens of economic justice. Similarly, there will be initiatives that will either result in new programmes or add on to existing CIVICUS programmes.

Q: Could you offer an illustration of some existing programmes that have evolved over the years through the alliances forged at the assembly? A: A few years ago accountability was the big theme in civil society, because civil society was being challenged to demonstrate that it was accountable. That then became a programme at CIVICUS – the Legitimacy, Transparency and Accountability programme.

It also resulted in our network of international NGOs coming together to build an accountability charter, which became a standard for reporting for those NGOs. Thirteen large NGOs signed up to this and worked with the global reporting initiative to develop the NGO GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) sector supplement, which is now aspiring to become a global standard for NGO accountability.

Q: So in the search for economic justice, where should civil society focus its efforts? Are there new pressure points that civil society has yet to capitalise on? A: It seems to me that regardless of what issue we’re dealing with, aid or trade or climate or MDGs, the fundamental roots of the problem lie in governance.

The problem is intense right now because the global institutions are the least democratically governed, whether it is the U.N., the Bretton Woods institutions and big global institutions that are essentially controlled by a small clique of nations.

There is a whole range of problems that require global solutions. This democratic deficit is the single biggest obstacle to achieving any resolution to these problems.

Q: So how does CIVICUS perceive itself in relation to the U.N.? A: The U.N. for many in civil society still remains the best multilateral forum that we have. It has a lot of flaws – there are plenty of reasons to criticise it. But it still remains the only forum where 192 countries get to say their piece and where civil society has fought long and hard to be included as a legitimate stakeholder.

Civil society still enjoys greater access into U.N. processes. It is much less easy for civil society to penetrate the G8 or G20. It still remains our best hope. Civil society continues to advocate [that] a little bit of the decision making stay within the U.N. rather than being hijacked by these other forums that are impenetrable.

Q: What message will you be bringing to the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Summit in September? A: In one line – put human rights back into the heart of the MDGs. The evidence is clear that where MDGs are being achieved, they’ve taken a more holistic approach to it – better governance, more participation of civil society and parliamentarians.

Where MDGs are not being achieved, it’s not so much about funding but poor governance. Really ensuring that you take a more human rights approach to the MDGs is a singular theme we are taking to New York.

There’s this huge gap between what the Millennium Declaration set out to do and the more watered down targets of the MDGs themselves and in that process already the human rights element got lost.

Q: How has the ascendance of the Internet as a new political arena for civil society affected the responsiveness of governments? A: Certainly it allows for a higher degree of participation or feedback to their leaders, but also it is not just about governments. Social networks have been useful at getting corporations to be more accountable. It has essentially provided access and voice to large numbers of people. Still, it completely leaves out large chunks of people that don’t have Internet or computers.

Facebook has the third most populous entity – it has a population larger than any country except China and India, which in itself gives it humongous clout and incredible reach. It seems to me if I were to label it, Facebook may be the largest civil society organisation of our time. Maybe all of us in civil society need to rethink what we do and how we do it, to revisit the old paradigms of how we view civil society.

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By Beatrice Paez
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 19 2010 (IPS)

The spirit of international negotiations in Montreal on a draft protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) of natural resources were marred by Canada’s insistence on a decentralised approach to ABS, Peigi Wilson, a Métis lawyer present at the meeting in support of the Quebec Native Women, told IPS.

“I got the distinct sense that Canada was throwing objections to slow the negotiations,” Wilson, a former U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) official, added.

The Working Group on ABS met last week to finalise negotiations in time for an October summit in Nagoya, Japan, where a protocol on biodiversity will be open for signature. The meeting concluded with negotiations suspended until mid-September.

As one of the objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), ABS works to ensure that the benefits derived from genetic resources are distributed in a proportionate manner to reflect the contribution and rights of indigenous people and local communities.

Canada is pushing for any ABS protocol to be based on contractual mutually agreed terms (MAT) – individual agreements reached between users and providers of a genetic resource on how benefits should be shared. Canada is avoiding instituting national ABS requirements, instead opting to allow different jurisdictions and companies to develop their own frameworks.

According to Environment Canada’s official website, the federal government does not want to impose a uniform national model – it wants to allow for flexibility and adaptation in each context. It also notes that while laws have not yet been developed on ABS, there are legal measures in place dealing with the collection of biological resources in the country’s national parks.

In Montreal, an alliance of indigenous groups from across the world appealed for an amendment to the draft protocol. They argued that the draft undermined their right to self-determination and failed to reflect and invoke the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

At odds with Canada and other developed countries, the regional representative of Africa supported the indigenous peoples’ challenge of MAT on a contractual basis.

Industrialised countries, including Canada have been criticised by developing countries and local communities for catering to the needs of private companies, which leads to the misappropriation of the earth’s resources and traditional knowledge. This misappropriation could involve the unlicensed and uncompensated collection of indigenous plants, animals, microorganisms, genes or traditional knowledge for patenting by corporations and researchers.

Groups such as Québec Native Women, Indigenous Law Institute, and Indigenous World Association are seeking to change the nature of the negotiation process, which requires a consensus among the states.

Wilson told IPS that negotiations kicked off on an uneven playing field for indigenous groups – the chair prevented indigenous representatives from actively participating in dialogue with the delegations.

It was recommended that the consensus be extended to include the indigenous groups to correct any power imbalance. The recommendation also included the need for financial assistance and other resources, to facilitate indigenous participation.

The U.N. has dubbed 2010 as the year of biodiversity. In observation of this thematic issue, the CBD has initiated a 2010 Biodiversity Target, imploring countries to substantially reduce the current rate of biodiversity loss across all levels.

The lack of action on biodiversity can be attributed to the lack of mainstreaming on what genetic resources mean for our livelihood, Leslie Adams, the General Management of Protect Our Water and Environmental Resources (POWER), told IPS.

All 193 parties to the CBD are obliged to work towards this goal, yet without the development of a baseline to measure against global trends, Wilson pointed out that Canada does not have the means to report on whether improvements have been made.

Since 2008 Canada has worked at developing an Ecosystem Status and Trends Assessment, which intends to assess the status of Canada’s ecosystems.

POWER, which operates as a not-for profit organisation has been at the forefront of ensuring water security and promoting education on biodiversity at the community level.

“I don’t think people are aware within the federal government what the convention represents and means,” Adams said. “I think the only way we can get more participation is if the government focuses on educating not only communities, but parliamentarians and bureaucrats as well.”

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By Beatrice Paez
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 14 2010 (IPS)

Despite the creation of a High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing (AGF), a group of hard-hit Pacific islands is expressing doubt that aid will be delivered in a timely manner.

“The Pacific SIDS (Small Island Developing States) bear almost no responsibility for the onset of climate change, yet we are suffering the consequences today…Climate change is a man-made disaster and redress for the damage being done to our islands is long overdue,” said Ambassador Marlene Moses of Nauru.

The advisory group has been tasked with the responsibility of designing innovative ways to mobilise new and additional financial resources from private and public sources to bring into force commitments made at the climate conference in Copenhagen last year.

World leaders pledged 100 billion dollars per year by 2020, in addition to 30 billion dollars up to 2012. The funds, which have yet to be raised, will be delivered to developing countries for mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change.

Known as one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to climate change, the Pacific SIDS face threats to food security, water security and territorial integrity.

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg of Norway, co-chair of the AGF, expressed optimism at a briefing Tuesday that there were enough potential sources waiting to be tapped into. “It’s possible to say today that the discussion, the deliberations has shown that there are many, different possible sources of finance…The problem is whether they are politically viable,” he said.

His co-chair, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, explained to reporters that incentives for the private sector to invest in green technologies would be one of the mechanisms used to build binding commitments from these sources. The group will also be taking cues from the practices employed by multilateral development banks, he added.

The Pacific SIDS, which includes countries such as Nauru, Palau, Samoa, and Tonga, claim that due to the bureaucratic red tape and without direct access to the AGF, their region might not receive proportionate funding.

They also charge that the funding promised alone would not be enough to contain and reduce the effects, citing the World Bank’s report that it would cost 75 to 100 billion dollars per year for the period 2010 to 2050 for initiatives directed at adaptation.

Ambassador Stuart Beck of Palau told IPS that it was unlikely the private sector would be responsive and that the funds would be received in a timely manner. “We’re not really sanguine about the delivery here. They’re nice words, but when you get on the ground it’s difficult to build business models that make a whole lot of sense,” he said.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon emphasised that a top priority of the group would be to enhance confidence and trust between the developed and developing countries in the delivery of aid. “Climate change is not going away. The risks – and costs – of inaction grow each year. The more we delay, the more we will have to pay, in lost opportunities, resources and lives,” he said.

While a majority of the urban population of the Pacific SIDS is dependent on foreign imports for their daily supply of food, staples such as yams, taro, sweet potatoes and bananas are still cultivated locally. Aside from the threat of rising sea levels, climate change is projected to have a devastating impact on the production of these crops, due to prolonged variations in the arrival of rainfall.

Central to the livelihood of Fiji’s population are its coral reefs, marine systems and fisheries, which provide income, employment and foreign exchange.

Initiatives have been launched to prevent and adapt to the changing landscape. But without sustained financing from external sources, these states would not be able to effectively address the threat of food security, said Ambassador Moses, the Permanent Representative of Nauru to the U.N.

The AGF, formed in February this year, will submit its final recommendations to the secretary-general in October, a few weeks before the next U.N. climate summit in November to be held in Cancun, Mexico.

It has also come under fire for its gender breakdown – 19 of the 20 members are male.

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By Beatrice Paez
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 13 2010 (IPS)

Six months after Haiti’s devastating earthquake, U.N. aid agencies say they are entering the challenging phase of replacing the tents that are home to the estimated 1.5 million people who remain displaced.

Nigel Fisher, the deputy representative of the secretary- general in Haiti, told the press at a briefing Monday that by August 2011, about 120,000 temporary, transitional shelters will be ready. Experts have also been testing new ways to repair homes that have not been structurally destroyed.

“They will be in tented camps for months and maybe years to come,” Fisher told reporters. “This is the biggest urban disaster that the world has seen in living memory.”

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake killed 230,000 people and affected another 2.3 million. According to Fisher, only about 100,000 people have returned to their neighbourhoods so far.

Critics charge the progress has been slow, but Fisher disputed this, citing issues of land claims and tenure that need to be ironed out before settlements can be inhabited across the affected areas.

He added that after the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan, which claimed 6,000 lives, it took a nation with abundant resources seven years to make a full recovery.

The bigger picture is less bleak, he said. Safe water has been delivered to 1.2 million people, millions are being fed daily and the temporary schools are on their way to restoring some sense of a normal routine to the lives of children.

Outside the capital, farming families have also been provided with seeds, roots and tubers and tools for agriculture. “Crops are starting to grow again,” said Fisher.

Over-urbanisation and the rise of informal settlements place cities like Port-au-Prince, which are already prone to natural disasters, at even higher risk, said Margareta Wahlström, the special representative for the U.N. secretary-general for disaster risk reduction.

Since May, mayors from 58 cities, including Port-au-Prince, have taken the lead in joining the “Making Cities Resilient” campaign.

A pledge that engages local governments and its citizens to build safer cities able to withstand and recover from natural disasters, the campaign puts forth a 10-point checklist of essentials for local governments and citizens to take action on.

Among the items on the agenda are targeted efforts at improving urban planning, creating early warning systems, conducting public preparedness drills and investing in risk- reducing infrastructure. By the end of 2015, the campaign hopes to hit a record of 1,000 cities.

Makati, Philippines, a city at high risk for floods, typhoons and earthquakes, will conduct an assessment of the infrastructure of its schools. As the campaign’s most recent signatory, Makati has pledged to use five percent of its annual budget for initiatives such as disaster preparedness, risk reduction, and post recovery.

Each signatory is also obliged to share their experience and export their expertise to stir action in cities that are not yet members.

Wahlström explained to IPS that a lack of political will and impatience toward the delivery of results were reasons for the absence of more cities on the list. “Often people say there is no reward in risk reduction…there’s always pressure for immediate results,” she said.

Studies have also advanced the idea of a link between disasters and the spurring of innovation and growth, citing the experience of the Sichuan Province in China, which was rocked by a major earthquake in 2008. Wahlström noted that China is hardly typical, however, since its provinces were able to mobilise the resources required for a quick response.

But for a country as a fragile and poor as Haiti was even before the earthquake, Wahlström expressed doubt that the disaster would ultimately stimulate an economic boom. The damages are estimated at a minimum of 7.8 billion dollars, more than equivalent to the country’s GDP in 2009.

“What hopefully will lead to an economic growth are efforts that were initiated before the earthquake, combined with hopefully now, new resources. The long-term negative impacts in terms of loss of school for young people are often very serious,” she said.

For a nation with a large, young population, ensuring that safe schools are built in place of the 4,992 schools that were either damaged or destroyed is a high priority for the campaign.

Asking locals what would motivate them to return home, Fisher said they have consistently emphasised the need for income opportunities and schools for their children.

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By Beatrice Paez
NEW YORK, Jul 12 2010 (IPS)

A group of 80 students, broken into smaller groups with their notebooks in tow, troop through the boroughs of New York City to survey the produce that populates farmers’ markets and grocery stores in their neighbourhoods. Across the world, a similar image emerges in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where female students are learning to grow edible mushrooms in their villages.

Students like Vivienne Cain who participate in the Harlem Children Society’s Nutrition and Healthy Living project have been looking at the cost, appearance and size of the fruits and vegetables, as well as their availability. The goal was to correlate these differences with the neighbourhood’s demographics and socioeconomic status and rates of nutrition-related disease.

The teens discovered that the neighbourhood with the worst quality produce was Manhattan’s Washington Heights, home to large Hispanic community with a generally low level of formal education.

Fusing her passion for sociology and anthropology, Cain expressed hope that students could apply the data gathered to examine the particular areas where obesity is rampant – altogether, about one in three U.S. citizens is considered obese.

“Hopefully we can spread obesity awareness where nutritional values are lacking,” she told IPS.

Meanwhile, the Harlem Children Society (HRC) project in Tanzania is focused on the growing patterns of mushrooms and how they can help contribute to the local economy. Other students are engaged in social issues that directly affect their communities – HIV/AIDS, alcoholism and agriculture.

Coming from underprivileged households and under-resourced high schools, these children are now ahead of the curve as they venture into research projects, fronted by top-ranking scientists, engineers, mathematicians worldwide. Most beneficiaries of the mentorship and internship programmes in the U.S. are of African-American (40 percent) and Hispanic (26 percent) descent, but there also initiatives that engage Native Americans (16 percent) on reservations.

HRC is not-for-profit science programme geared at nurturing the talents of aspiring scientists, giving students the rare opportunity of pursuing hands-on research. This training ground for future Einsteins and Marie Curies attributes its humble beginnings to Dr. Sat Bhattacharya, a molecular geneticist and cancer research scientist who had a simple but innovative vision, and started by taking three students under his wing.

The pilot project began in New York and has multiplied to hosting more than 750 students. The programme is now operational in 12 countries, spanning five continents; 350 of its students are from countries such as Mexico, Honduras, Ethiopia, India and Malaysia.

“I initially thought of just reaching out to people in the neighbourhood and those who are under-resourced and under- served in the community,” Bhattacharya told IPS. “But the concept grew and now there is a huge organisation in itself.”

Shaveene, one of his early students, is currently studying nursing at Columbia University. About 20 percent of HCS students attend Ivy League schools.

He continues to dream big, and is at the stage of planning for the establishment of a university-type setting that will act as a support system for HCS students who are entering post-secondary education.

“There are high drop-out rates, especially for the Hispanic, African and Native Americans – as high as 60 percent during the first three years,” he told IPS.

Bhattacharya imagines a space where students can continue to have access to hands-on research and hopes to extend the programme’s reach to include other members of the community and their parents.

Word traveled along the corridors of schools in the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, where teachers have either nominated or vouched for students expressing an inclination towards science. For Elena Feldman, currently a junior in high school, her curiosity for science runs in her genes. Learning about the programme through her older brother, she said it has helped her zero in on an ambition: she wants to study mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Rubbing elbows with elite scientists has been a highlight of the experience for Feldman, where she and her partner showcased their project and won an award at Sigma Xi, a scientific research society that meets annually to discuss new developments in science and technology.

The students received some words of wisdom last week from Nobel Laureate Sidney Altman, a molecular biologist who studied RNA, at an induction ceremony to celebrate their involvement in the programme. “Never give up the habit of asking questions…there are no stupid questions,” Altman stressed.

HCS is oriented towards applying a community perspective. Dr. Rani Roy, the coordinator of the nutrition project, explained to IPS that, “The awareness and nutrition education should first affect their immediate families, and then the communities with the science fair.”

Every September the urban streets of Harlem are lined with projects for the science fair and festival, where students’ families and members of the community can get engaged with the students’ work.

“Even professors from college come and they might get interested in you and your work,” Feldman explained.

For the programme to be sustainable, Bhattacharya emphasised that “the students should be able to bring it back to their community.” He added, “The most rewarding is when I see students already giving back.”

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By Beatrice Paez
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 2 2010 (IPS)

Nine million more people have fallen into poverty in Latin American and Caribbean countries since the global financial crisis struck, threatening the achievement of all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the 2015 deadline, according to a report released Thursday by 18 U.N. agencies.

The region has almost crossed the finish line in certain areas, but others remain largely unfulfilled, the report said.

For example, between 2002 and 2008, Latin America saw poverty rates drop from 19.4 percent to 12.9 percent. While the 2008 crisis interrupted this trend, the social and economic policies pursued by many governments leading up to and following the crisis helped to cushion the blow, said Antonio Prado, the deputy executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

The forecast for economic growth in Latin America this year is still expected to be 4.5 percent.

Prado explained to IPS that, “Latin America went through over the last six, seven years a quite different period of development – growth with income distribution…We had very dynamic periods before but without income distribution.”

He added that its adoption of an unorthodox approach – refusing to cut social expenditures and not implementing a sharp reduction of fiscal expenditures – “enhanced the social resilience of the region”.

The report examines the strides and challenges that remain for Latin America and the Caribbean in narrowing gaps in development between the wealthy and the poor. It assumes a rights perspective to ensure that inequalities are addressed at each level, namely those based on gender, ethnic identity, socio-economic status and territory.

Poverty is greatest among children, women, indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendants and in rural areas, and these asymmetries must be addressed, said Prado. “We don’t think it is possible to deal with poverty in a horizontal way, we have to consider and distinguish the different situations,” he told IPS.

Its measurement of poverty reduction looks beyond the raw data – it also assesses progress in opportunities for productive employment and decent work, with close attention to the employment conditions of women and young people.

Prado reported that these groups are at the bottom of the ranks – many belong to sectors with low productivity and without an increase in the jobs available, significant economic progress will remain elusive.

If the trend and momentum continues, Latin America could fulfill its objective of cutting extreme poverty in half. Countries such as Brazil and Chile have reached this objective, with Peru trailing close behind.

On MDG 2, ensuring that children complete their primary education, the registration rates for most countries peak at 90 percent, close to levels in the developed world.

Prado indicated that in the area of education, more efforts are being poured into ensuring that educational enrolment extends to secondary and post-secondary education as well. “It’s a necessary target mainly because of the quality of jobs and the question of productivity,” he said.

The story is different for improving maternal health (MDG 5) and environmental sustainability (MDG 7). Most countries have met the demand for family planning but the report also notes that gaps persist in access to sexual education, modern contraceptives and services. As for the environment, the rate of deforestation across the region has doubled in comparison to the rate worldwide.

The records for MDGs 4, 5 and 6 as a whole are mixed – there has been progress, but these improvements have not trickled down to all groups. Despite a regional progress rate of 79 percent since 2009, only about a third of these countries may witness a reduction of the infant mortality rate by 50 percent.

While women remain underrepresented in occupations that afford security and benefits, Prado is hopeful that through the increase in their presence across the political landscape, more policies reflecting the concerns of women will be advanced. Since 1990, representation for women in parliament increased by 10 percent for Latin America, seven percent for the Caribbean.

“We have seen progress in women’s participation in decision making and politics, especially in parliament, for countries like Argentina, Chile, and Jamaica,” he added.

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By Beatrice Paez
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 1 2010 (IPS)

The sight of girls and boys playing cricket and skateboarding together in the streets of Afghanistan and Iraq may be unexpected to some, but it is a homegrown effort aimed at fostering gender equality.

“It’s amazing. It’s been at the encouragement of the elders. It’s not an imposition, they’ve asked for it,” Amir Dossal, executive director of the U.N. Office for Partnerships (UNOP), told IPS.

“Sport is one of the greatest equalisers…where young people can play, live together and grow up to be better citizens. They learn to understand that adversarial situations do not mean you are enemies. You actually look at the best of the other side through sport,” he added.

Acting in concert with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and other U.N. agencies, UNOP believes that promoting women’s participation in sports can help achieve wider aims, particularly the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) on women’s empowerment.

Studies have found that sport programmes help reduce girls’ and women’s feeling of social exclusion and isolation, especially those who live in poverty or are unable to attend school.

The IOC’s new role as a permanent observer to the U.N. gives it the opportunity to help shape the decision-making process at the General Assembly and to partake in concrete initiatives on the ground, officials said this week.

The IOC organises a conference every four years on women in sports. Its last meeting drew more than 600 people from 116 countries. At the grassroots level, it has created spaces for dialogue, where people can exchange information and share their disappointments on the inclusion of women in the decision-making within the sports community. From there, the IOC assesses the situation and uses these recommendations to move forward.

On the benefits of being a permanent observer, “We’ll learn how we can be helpful to the other agencies, they’ll learn more about how we operate,” Anita L. DeFrantz, IOC chair, told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday.

The U.N. has long advocated for sports to be recognised as integral to development, and it has been successfully used as a tool in peacekeeping operations.

The benefits of practicing a sport extend beyond increased self-confidence, U.N officials say. The U.N.’s children’s agency UNICEF views sport as a requisite for growth. It “ensure[s] that children play sport almost as a side by side issue to being fed, clothed and educated,” said Dossal.

UNOP together with UNICEF has also provided disabled children and adults with prosthetics.

Dossal stressed that one of the impediments in reaching MDG 5 – to reduce the maternal mortality rate by three-quarters – is a lack of information. Coupled with programmes aimed at increasing women’s health through sport, UNOP has also started a broadband initiative to facilitate access to information on maternal health.

Through music and dance programmes such as aerobics for pregnant women, which are geared at addressing maternal health issues, women are able to reduce and prevent cardiac stress, ease labour pains and strengthen their pelvic muscles. It creates a space for women to share their experiences and to build a support system.

Once a privilege of the wealthy, DeFrantz noted that even the most cash-strapped countries now participate in international games. “It’s not the same for women, but for me, that’s just an excuse,” she said.

Among the 205 National Olympic Committees, only Brunei, Darussalam, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have yet to send women to the games, DeFrantz said. Nevertheless, this gap has been narrowed since 1996; previously, there had been 26 committees and they sent only men.

Between 1984 and 2008, the percentage of women at the Olympics grew from 23 to 43 percent.

Asked by a reporter whether government involvement was necessary to ensure that everyone has a chance to participate in sports, DeFrantz said that women needed more support, and most countries do acknowledge that governmental responsibility in this area is important.

Women leaders from countries like Brunei, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been more vocal about getting young girls engaged in sports, Dossal told IPS. “We just don’t intervene on national policies because it is a homegrown approach.”

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By Beatrice Paez
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 27 2010 (IPS)

Ahead of a week-long meeting on gender equality starting Monday at the United Nations, women’s rights activists have been pushing for concrete progress on a pledge made last September by the world body to create a new, better-funded U.N. agency for women.

After the Gender Equality Reform (GEAR) Campaign, a leading advocate of the new entity, sent a petition to the General Assembly, the president of the GA, Dr. Ali Abdussalam Treki, said he hoped it would be established by the end of July. However, as of Friday, negotiations had stalled over staffing issues and review of countries’ domestic gender policies, among other things.

The decision to create a separate powerful body to deal exclusively with gender-related activities came years – in some cases, decades – after the United Nations created specialised agencies to deal with specific issues, including children, population, refugees, food, environment, education, health and tourism, among many others.

Its implementation has been bogged down by political wrangling on issues such as geographical representation on the board, and an effort by some countries to use “the gender architecture as a bargaining chip to advance their still undisclosed agenda”, as one activist told IPS in March.

Still, women’s groups have high hopes for the new entity’s mandate. Its head – a position yet to be appointed – will have the rank of an under-secretary-general, the third- highest rank in the U.N. system. The entity will also have greater funding and a more holistic approach to gender issues.

Responding to questions about the new agency’s inception, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave few specifics, but said, “We hope soon to have a dynamic entity for gender equality and women’s empowerment within the U.N. system, that would provide more coherent programming and a stronger voice for women.”

Next week, delegates will gather here for the Annual Ministerial Review from Jul. 28 to Jul. 1. This year’s focus is on gender empowerment and equality. The session is drawing participants from civil society, academia, private sector and other key U.N. stakeholders. It is expected to adopt a declaration on the implementation of goals and commitments to advance efforts in this area.

Roundtable discussions will assess developments in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and highlight breakthroughs and challenges in the implementing Security Council Resolution 1325. Adopted unanimously in 2000, that resolution is intended to increase the presence of women and their concerns during peace dialogues.

The AMR has a comprehensive agenda but “the way it is addressing [these] is separate from the way the Security Council is pressing states to address women’s concerns in conflict situations,” Pollyanna Truscot, Amnesty International’s deputy representative to the U.N., told IPS. “The new women’s agency is more important. It will be assisting governments and U.N. agencies and will adopt a more comprehensive approach.”

Truscot stressed that whether women were living in conflict areas or not, resolution 1325 is also of relevance to those living in favelas and slums, and other circumstances where violence is rampant.

“They are just as exposed to all sorts of violence…they need to be involved in the design of development programmes,” she said.

She attributed the significant lag in progress in achieving MDG 3, empowerment of women and achieving gender equality, to “a huge human rights gap… The MDGs aren’t going to tackle abuses on women that are holding progress back.”

“The actual indicators are not the best because they don’t measure the underlying human rights abuses,” she added.

The MDG Report 2010 tracks progress in relation to Goal 3 by measuring the enrolment of girls compared to boys in primary school, employment opportunities for women, and their political representation. The report adopts a regional perspective and does not conduct a separate assessment of women living in war-torn areas or those embroiled in conflict.

In Afghanistan, which has been ravaged by war for the last two decades, the target date for the achievement of the MDGs is 2020, using 2002 to 2005 as the baseline.

“When countries are in especially difficult situations, the priorities are national – the national budget and planning processes, it sort of ignores these direct targets. There have to be special interventions that even in countries in conflict these will be protected,” Nikhil Seth, director of the Office for ECOSOC Support and Coordination, told IPS.

Afghanistan has made some steps toward national reconciliation, with the launch of a Peace Jirga – a dialogue among leaders in May – but women remain drastically underrepresented in the process. Out of 1,400 delegates, less than 50 were women.

Asked by IPS about the link between political representation and representation at peace negotiations, Sarah Taylor, executive coordinator of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, said, “It is not a matter of causality.”

She added, “What we need is a shift in perspective on what the qualifications are…This expertise does not necessarily come from being elected into office, but often from women doing peacebuilding work within their community.”

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By Beatrice Paez
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 23 2010 (IPS)

Despite the ongoing financial crisis, global poverty rates are expected to fall by half in the next five years compared to 1990, according to the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Report 2010 launched on Wednesday by Secretary-General Ban Ki- Moon.

This could mean lifting up 920 million people who are now living under the international poverty line.

“Economic growth has been robust enough to guarantee that all regions remain on track to meet the poverty target,” said Francesca Perucci, chief of the U.N.’s Statistics Planning and Development Section.

However, progress remains uneven in sub-Saharan Africa, Western Asia and parts of Eastern Europe.

The report says that the number of people living on less than 1.25 dollars a day fell from 1.8 billion in 1990 to 1.4 billion in 2005, and the poverty rate dropped from 46 percent to 27 percent. These advances were partly driven by India and China, along with countries in Eastern Asia, which experienced sharp reductions in poverty.

The MDGs are a set of far-reaching commitments undertaken by governments in September 2000. They range from the empowerment of women to reducing child mortality. The deadline for meeting these targets is 2015, leaving governments five years to go.

The report will be used as a tool in preparation for a high- level summit on the MDGs this September at U.N. headquarters in New York. It noted that development aid continues to rise, but cautioned that the flow of funding has been uneven and only five donor countries – Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden – are meeting or exceeding the U.N.’s target of 0.7 percent of gross national income.

The lag in certain development goals is partly due to skewed budget priorities, “but also objective difficulties for governments not being able to fund and sustain all those changes in the long run,” Perucci told IPS. “There might be changes if there is strong political will from both sides – the donors and national governments from developing countries.”

She noted that the fastest progress has been mostly towards goals that do not require major infrastructural changes – like Goal 6, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. The availability of anti-viral drugs and treatment has risen rapidly for HIV and malaria. Countries where malaria is endemic have seen an increase in aid from 0.1 billion dollars in 2003 to 1.5 billion dollars in 2009.

However, other key goals, such as the empowerment of women, remain distant. Job insecurity and lack of benefits for women are widespread, and have been exacerbated by the financial crisis, the report said.

Providing sanitation for the 2.6 billion people who lack it has also proven difficult to achieve – only half of the developing world has met this critical need.

“The good news is that countries as poor and diverse as Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Malawi, Nepal and Tanzania have all experienced surges in primary school enrolment after the elimination of user fees,” said Olav Kjorven, assistant administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

For Nepal, this is just one highlight of its achievements towards meeting the MDGs. Together with UNDP, the government has also delivered clean energy to a population of 250,000 people living in remote villages, some more than a day’s walk to the nearest road.

While access to modern energy is not explicitly listed among the MDGs, it is a cross-cutting issue that has the ability to bolster efforts on other fronts, said Kjorven. Presently, almost half of the world’s population has limited (or no) electricity, according to UNDP. This initiative has the potential to serve as a model for other countries to follow.

In Nepal, the project has spurred the growth of jobs and incomes, along with opportunities for women and school enrolment. Women are able to devote less time to the collection of firewood and water. They are also able to avoid open fires while cooking, which pose hazards to their health.

The micro hydro plant initiative is distinctive because “it is a community-based infrastructural development programme”, Gyan Chandra Acharya, permanent representative of Nepal to the U.N., told IPS. It has also helped activate an entrepreneurial spirit among women and other rural dwellers.

Kiran Man Singh, project manager of the Rural Development Programme, spoke to reporters about a woman who now runs her own agro-processing unit, milling grains for other communities. Though public investment helped kick-start the programme, sustaining it requires the mobilisation of small private investors.

Most of the decisions and control remain in the hands of the community and electricity prices will remain affordable, but the government has employed the private sector to do the construction and to buy the equipment necessary to keep the hydro plants running.

“We have the framework conditions that protect the community and that also allow entrepreneurs to do something, and that’s a win-win,” said Olav.

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By Beatrice Paez
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 17 2010 (IPS)

Individuals and armed groups that are considered repeat offenders in the recruitment and use of child soldiers may soon be subject to United Nations sanctions.

“They are moving toward using the existing sanctions committees to deal with sanctions against these persistent violators,” said Radhika Coomaraswamy, special representative of the secretary-general on children and armed conflict, at a press briefing following an open debate at the Security Council on Wednesday.

A presidential statement issued by Mexican Ambassador Claude Heller expressed the Council’s “readiness to adopt targeted and graduated measures against persistent perpetrators”.

Sanctions against groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo “might move ahead, that seems to be the sanctions committee most active on this issue”, Coomaraswamy told IPS.

Among the persistent violators identified by the U.N. are 16 insurgent groups from countries that include the Philippines, Colombia, Sudan, and the DRC. These non-state actors have an opportunity to be de-listed if they enter into action plans with the United Nations.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Sudan People’s Liberation Army, and the Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist have signed onto these agreements. The action plan facilitates the release and the rehabilitation of children in armed conflict.

The tactic of “naming and shaming” and the threat of sanctions are aimed at convincing parties to enter into and comply with the action plan. Groups seeking legitimacy internationally and those that hope for a national leadership role often choose this avenue, like the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) which was de-listed last year. Still, the endemic use of children in armed conflict persists, especially in Somalia.

Within countries implementing the Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism (MRM), over 9,500 children have been removed from armed groups. This number excludes the 3,000 people recruited as minors released in Nepal just last January and February.

Breakthroughs have also been made with the addition of two triggers for listing grave violations such as sexual violence and the killing and maiming of children.

No accurate figures on child soldiers or children associated with insurgent groups exist because the MRM captures the situation only in areas covered by the Security Council. Tracking global trends is even more difficult with the lack of documentation on recruitment, said Hilde Johnson, UNICEF’s deputy executive director.

There have been situations where children were released en masse as part of peace agreements. But Coomaraswamy told IPS that, “We prefer the action plan route – that means children come to us and we can help them in reintegration and rehabilitation.”

Otherwise, children are not under the framework for rehabilitation programmes and follow-up activities, she noted.

The road to reintegration into the community is more difficult for women who are recruited as soldiers and who may have killed people in the village. “Society has a hard time dealing with them, especially in Nepal, where women are supposed to be docile,” Coomaraswamy explained.

Manju Gurung, a former Nepalese child soldier, spoke before the Security Council Wednesday on the difficulties of community reintegration. “In the village, everyone continued to show suspicion towards me and to talk behind my back,” she said.

At age 13, Gurung was forced to join the Maoist guerrilla army under the “One Family, One Member” campaign. Five years later, she is continuing her education and has had assistance in forming a group to advocate for the rights of children and HIV issues.

The last group of Maoist child soldiers was discharged in February, but the secretary-general’s recent report on Nepal noted the importance of monitoring the activities of youth groups that recruit children for involvement in violent protests. These groups, affiliated with political parties and movements, continue to proliferate, it said.

Youth wings affiliated with political movements and groups that engage in violent protests are not subject to the same protocol as insurgent groups that misuse children for their political agenda.

“This is more of a grey area…we are not opposed to children having political opinions, taking part in political activities,” Coomaraswamy said.

The situation is being monitored by her office and UNICEF and the approach may be revisited if these groups devolve into situations of violence.

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By Beatrice Paez
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 15 2010 (IPS)

Gangs and armed groups may rank below militaries and law enforcement agencies in the possession of firearms, but “they have consistently shown a willingness to use guns and use them for violence,” says Dr. Jennifer Hazen, a senior researcher with the authoritative Small Arms Survey.

The survey is conducted as an independent research project at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

Gangs are in possession of between 1.2 and 1.4 million firearms. While girls do not figure prominently in the intensive use of small arms and light weapons (SALW), many are active supporters and participants in gangs. It is estimated that within Britain and the U.S., females represent between 25 and 50 percent of all gang members.

Women are often cast as victims of violence but the infrequent use of firearms by women does not mean they abstain from violence, experts say. “We don’t know how much they are carrying,” Jasna Lazarevic, an associate researcher specialising on girls in gangs for the Small Arms Survey, told IPS.

“Since so much of what ends up in criminal hands and gangs starts out as legal, we need to better understand this trade. Governments are still very reluctant to share information on trade in small arms,” said Eric Berman, the managing director of the Smalls Arms Survey.

Another round of deliberations on mechanisms to combat the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons began here in New York on Monday, with the launching of the Fourth Biennial Meeting of States (BMS4) on SALW, which will end Friday. The U.N. Programme of Action, a document adopted in 2001 that outlines non-binding commitments made by countries, will serve as the guide.

BMS4 will also act as a preparation base for subsequent meetings on the SALW trade. Next month, the Arms Trade Treaty Preparatory Committee will begin discussions on the negotiation for a treaty governing conventional arms. The Review Conference in 2012 will be the formal meeting for these deliberations.

Ambassador Pablo Macedo, the chair of BMS4, says the U.N. Programme of Action addresses the disproportionate consequences small arms have on women and children.

“We have a special responsibility to protect those vulnerable groups,” he told IPS. “The trafficking of arms have terrible consequences socially, they disrupt social order, development, encourage transnational crime so all these phenomenon are linked. Women and children are very much affected by them, perhaps more so than others.”

However, among the outstanding concerns outlined by Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon regarding the U.N. Programme of Action, he cited the lack of gender-specific responses to address the impact small arms have on women, children and the elderly.

High priority issues to be tackled at the meeting are facilitating international cooperation in implementing the action plan, ensuring that the weapons can be traced from origin to user, and implementing mechanisms to stem the illicit cross-border trade. Aside from these issue areas, Macedo told IPS that the meeting would also address the concerns affecting women and other groups in their debates.

The increase in the number of women and girls in prisons around the world points to the lack of programmes tailored to the needs of women within gangs. “The research is already weak, it is difficult to make gender-targeted programming specific for women because we don’t have much knowledge,” Lazarevic told IPS.

Whether taking on the role of fighter, spy or conveyor of weapons and messages, girls within mixed gangs have marginal status in comparison to men. This second-class designation is reinforced when girls engage in horizontal violence because it supports the status quo, the study revealed. Girl-on-girl violence is a tactic used to consolidate their place and commitment to the gang.

Many of the intervention programmes aimed at secondary prevention are designed for boys while girls, because of their presumed peripheral role within the gang, are sometimes excluded from the programmes. Preventive measures directed at girls at risk, from the ages of nine to 15, are also scarce, the survey reports.

In Haiti, the dismantling of gangs and incarceration of their leaders has placed women at risk because they hold valuable information that can be sought by rival gangs or used by the police.

Though women have been reported to leave gang life earlier than men for reasons that may involve pregnancy and more employment opportunities in the service sector than men, there are not as many gender-sensitive projects fit to help them leave and build a life outside of the gang, said Lazarevic.

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By Beatrice Paez
NEW YORK, Jun 12 2010 (IPS)

The U.S. currently lags behind several Western European countries in closing a legislative loophole banning the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) beyond its borders to protect U.S. citizens and residents. But this may soon change.

Congressman Joseph Crowley and Fanta, who escaped FGM with the support of her parents Credit: Beatrice Paez/IPS

FGM rituals are practiced in many parts of Africa, the Middle East and some countries in Asia. It involves procedures that partially or completely remove the external female genitalia and is undertaken at infancy or later in childhood, depending on a particular culture.

There are four types, which range in severity. Most common as characterised by the World Health Organisation is Type II, “the excision of the clitoris with partial or total excision of the labia minora.”

Political asylum has been granted in the United States to FGM survivors, and activist organisations for women such as Equality Now and Sanctuary for Families warn that those at risk also include women living in the U.S.

Canada, Spain, Britain and several Scandinavian countries have already enacted such legislation, commonly known as “vacation provisions”, which protect girls sent during on “holiday” for circumcision.

In the past, under these provisions, Sweden and France have prosecuted parents that have forced their child to undergo this rite of passage. While these laws cannot monitor and establish conclusively who is at risk, they are intended to act as a deterrent.

“If you make something illegal, people tend not to want to break the law,” Crowley told journalists at a briefing this week. If found guilty, the adults responsible can be fined or serve up to five years in prison.

However, prosecuting is a tricky situation when bearing in mind the child’s welfare and the mother’s second-class citizenship within her culture. “We’re not calling for the arrest of parents, especially the mothers, who very often do not have the power to decide whether or not their girls will be cut,” Taina Bien-Aimé, the director of Equality Now, told IPS.

The bill will also be coupled with community outreach and educational programmes to shore up awareness on the link between FGM and many serious health complications. Potential consequences for those subjected to FGM include urinary tract infection, complications at childbirth, infertility, cysts, death and need for surgery.

For girls aware of these hazards, they are balanced in mind with the stigmatisation and rejection they face from family members. Mothers preparing their child for marriage facilitate the practice as an “act of love”, to ensure their child will not be rejected by men and the broader community. Local terminology describes FGM as “cutting the dirt” or “cleansing”, a way to preserve the chastity or virginity of a woman.

The impetus for the bill owes to the efforts of grassroots movements and the testimony of FGM survivors campaigning to uproot this tradition from their culture.

Fanta, an FGM survivor who escaped the procedure with the support of her parents, has spoken out about the pressure young girls from her community here in the U.S. face. “I went through so many rejections, I was not accepted by certain members of the family. It took a lot of sacrifices for my parents,” she said.

Dismissed in the past as a cultural matter, service providers such as guidance counselors, social workers, the police and teachers on the frontline are often unequipped to help those at risk, said Archana Pyati, an attorney from the group Sanctuary for Families.

Bien-Aimé underscored the importance of scaling up grassroots efforts and in establishing networks within the communities as a source of support and information on FGM.

Whether the approach to outreach and education is tailored to a specific culture or not, it is vital that service providers can tackle the issue, Pyati and Bien-Aimé agreed.

“State laws also need to have the vacation provision as a counterpart because the first responders are the police and local service providers,” Bien-Aimé told IPS.

Currently, out of 17 state laws that ban FGM, only Nevada and Georgia instituted these provisions.

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By Beatrice Paez
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 10 2010 (IPS)

Blasts from a megaphone accompany the sounding of alarms, a woman’s voice repeatedly pleading, “We are civilians, we have no guns…we need help for people…please don’t attack.”

Brazilian-American filmmaker Iara Lee, a passenger on board the Mavi Marmara, managed to smuggle an hour of footage taken during the May 31 attack on a six-ship humanitarian flotilla bound for Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces. An activist from the group Cultures of Resistance, Lee released her footage to the press Thursday at the United Nations. She plans to make it available to the public, to let the images speak for themselves.

The footage starts before the attack, with the sounds of a passenger chanting prayers, while others kneel in observance of prayers. Later, it features gripping images of wounded passengers, along with passengers bearing metal poles and slingshots targeted at the helicopters flying above.

Attempts were made to reroute the ship to avoid confrontation when those aboard realised that Israeli vessels were approaching, Lee said.

“We were not mentally prepared,” she said. “We thought we would have had some sort of verbal confrontation, or a shot in the foot.”

Both sides charge that video and audio images have been altered or selectively edited to corroborate the clashing accounts of what occurred.

The Israeli government released doctored footage to support the accounts of soldiers involved in the raid, which seemed to indicate they had been beaten with metal rods and chairs upon boarding. Meanwhile, Reuters has defended its cropping of images that conceal a knife-wielding passenger and a wounded soldier as inadvertent, an editing error.

Israeli soldiers claim they had acted in self-defence, while Pro-Palestinian campaigners say they did nothing to provoke the violence that led to nine passenger deaths, and were not in possession of deadly weapons. The footage released by Lee appears to confirm elements of both accounts – that passengers wielded metal poles and slingshots, while the soldiers who stormed the ships used excessive force.

Edward Peck, a former U.S. diplomat and vocal critic of U.S. policy toward Israel, was also a passenger, as a member of the Free Palestine Movement, and witnessed the unfolding of the raid. He told IPS they had planned to offer passive resistance. “I don’t think anyone expected bloodshed,” he said.

Asked if it was possible passengers on board were wielding any kind of weapons, he said, “I don’t know if they had them, some people would say they were justified in using them – the Israeli force was overwhelming and unhesitating.”

Israeli authorities confiscated most of the audio and visual evidence gathered by the dozens of journalists who had accompanied the activists to report on their stated intention of breaching the blockade imposed since 2007, following the de facto rule of Hamas over the Gaza Strip.

Lee’s footage also captured a passenger on board who was able to get a hold of a document carried by soldiers that she interpreted as a list of high-profile passengers. It contained pictures of a member of parliament from Sweden and Former Jerusalem Archbishop Hilarion Capucci, Lee said. She speculated that perhaps it was a list of people who should not be harmed.

Altogether, the flotilla had about 700 passengers, including 60 journalists.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has called for a “prompt, credible, impartial and transparent investigation” with an international element. Ban has consulted with his legal counsel to solicit an assessment and advice, but has not made a statement confirming whether the soldiers contravened the Charter on the Law of the Sea.

The Israeli government has yet to accede to these terms, and negotiations continue on the framework for an investigation. The Israeli Defence Forces have reserved the right to be the only ones to question their soldiers – as is the protocol with armies worldwide – and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has issued a statement invoking this right.

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