Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Fiona Broom
Jul 17 2020 (IPS)

Global travel restrictions as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak are accelerating a trend towards research publications focussed on the global South, publishers say.

It means the days of fly-in-fly-out field work may be winding back for researchers from developed countries.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted some research programmes, the pause offers opportunities to develop greater, more equitable collaboration between researchers in the global North and South, an Oxford Forum on Research for Development (OX4RD) online seminar heard last month (30 June).

“Research by African institutions is conspicuous by its almost complete absence in Western media”

Peter Green, Managing Director, AlphaGalileo

“Recognition of the expertise of researchers worldwide is important in tackling both global and local problems,” Siân Harris, communications specialist at INASP, a research-focussed international development organisation, tells SciDev.Net.

Harris says the range of responses to the COVID-19 crisis has also highlighted the importance of learning from health workers and researchers in Africa and Asia.

The science news service AlphaGalileo says the contribution of research in the global South, but particularly Africa, must be recognised.

“Research by African institutions is conspicuous by its almost complete absence in Western media,” says managing director Peter Green.

“Research about Africa is carried by AlphaGalileo, but it is always undertaken by organisations based outside Africa.”

Green says AlphaGalileo had already been working to encourage Africa’s research community to engage with the media, by reducing subscription rates for African academic institutions and taking news from African peer-reviewed journals at no cost.

Journals

The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journal groups, has announced The Lancet Regional Health, a suite of open access titles based on World Health Organization region designations, in planning since 2019.

The English-language Western Pacific title will launch this month with online articles, while the first issue is expected to be published in August, says editor Jie Cai. The remaining five titles will follow over the next two years.

Article authors whose primary funder is in a low- or middle-income country will be exempt from an article publishing charge, but those in wealthier countries will be charged a processing fee.

A spokesperson for The Lancet tells SciDev.Net the regional titles will “aim to stimulate conversations and facilitate information exchange within and between communities”.

Local research is “immensely important and relevant to the health and wellbeing of underrepresented communities”, The Lancet spokesperson says. “[W]e see an opportunity to promote the best science from these regions to advance health and improve lives of local populations.”

Kamran Rafiq, co-founder and communications director at the International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases, says the open access format is “something to applaud”.

Rafiq says the emerging regional focus of research publications “could … ultimately build up the evidence base that could change operating models and culture to facilitate [developing] country ownership [of research programmes]”.

New barriers

INASP’s Harris says there is widespread support for open access to research in the South. Many journals are publishing articles under gold open access, which makes final versions of articles freely and permanently accessible while authors retain copyright.

But, Harris says these new models are also creating new barriers. “[T]here are well-documented challenges and concerns about replicating the costs and structural inequities of the subscription model, with a pay-to-read barrier being replaced by a pay-to-publish barrier,” she says.

Costs to publish are often high, says Harris, and waivers for researchers in the global South can be unclear. “[W]e have seen in our own research that many researchers pay these costs out of their own pockets,” she says.

Many Southern journals enable open access without passing on high charges to authors, through government or institution-based support, or by using volunteers. New models for journals and research publishing platforms that are emerging in the developing world have been neglected by Euro-American science policy, Harris argues.

Language is also important, as many journals publish in English. “We hear often of challenges faced by researchers whose papers are rejected because of imperfect English rather than problems with the science,” Harris says.

“It is also important to recognise the challenges that language can bring for readers. What impact can research have to a local problem if it is written in a language that the healthcare professional or farmer or policymaker cannot understand?”

Future

Existing journals serving local communities play an important role in communicating research within their countries and beyond, Harris adds: “INASP believes it is vital that Southern research becomes more visible and trusted — and this requires Southern representation and accessibility to international journals.”

She cites African Journals Online (AJOL), which hosts 526 journals including 265 open access publications, Nepal Journals Online (NepJOL) — an active platform that hosts 179 journals — Sri Lanka’s journal database SLJOL and Central American Journals Online (CAMJOL), with 58 journals.

AlphaGalileo news manager Kosta Stefanov says much of the research now being published through his news service has a focus on topics that often have specific relevance in global South contexts, such as life sciences, biology, personal protective equipment and, of course, virology.

He predicts this trend will continue “for at least a year or two” — in which time the research landscape may have expanded to include a larger cohort from across the developing world.

This story was originally published by SciDev.Net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women and girls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remittances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story was originally published by SciDev.Net