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

Zimbabwean smallholder farmer relies on weather information via his mobile phone to aid his cropping activities. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Gareth Willmer
Nov 4 2019 (IPS)

People living in Africa are charged an average of 7.1 per cent of their monthly salary for a gigabyte (GB) of mobile data, more than 3.5 times the threshold considered affordable.

That’s according to a report by the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), which classifies the affordable rate as 2 per cent of monthly income. It finds that progress towards competition is stalling across low- and middle-income countries amid consolidation between mobile and internet operators.

The trend threatens to jeopardise the push towards affordable internet access for all, with half the world’s population still unable to connect. Even though the 50 per cent mark was reached at the end of last year, that’s still far short of the UN’s goal of universal access.

The trend threatens to jeopardise the push towards affordable internet access for all, with half the world’s population still unable to connect. Even though the 50 per cent mark was reached at the end of last year, that’s still far short of the UN’s goal of universal access

The 2019 Affordability Report, published on 22 October, estimates that people in countries with low levels of mobile and internet competition pay about US$3.42 per gigabyte (GB) of data more than those in competitive ones. This premium, says A4AI, is “unaffordable” for many people in low-income countries.

A4AI estimates that 1GB of data costs $7.33 more in a country with a monopoly market than one with two mobile operators — with an estimated 260 million people worldwide having access to just one operator, and 589 million living in low-competition countries.

The impact of limited competition is substantial in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa, where that price equates to about 5.8 per cent of average monthly income.

In a range of countries that A4AI tracked for affordability between April and June 2019, African nations made up the bottom 13, with the price for a gigabyte in those countries at 10 per cent of average monthly income or more. The figure was as high as 26 per cent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and more than 20 per cent in the Central African Republic and Chad.

Lack of competition

Less than half (65 out of 136) of the low- and middle-income countries studied in the report have fully competitive markets, says A4AI. “This trend underlines the urgency of promoting competition to support healthy markets that provide affordable internet access,” it adds. “Policymakers and regulators must work to encourage competition and support new entrants.”

Dhanaraj Thakur, research director at the World Wide Web Foundation, which runs A4AI, believes competition must be boosted through regulation to encourage new entrants, more options for public internet access and joint initiatives between the public and private sector, and municipally owned or community networks.

Villages or groups of villages can set up their own not-for-profit networks with services that are relevant to them, Thakur suggests, pointing to examples such as the Zenzeleni community-owned network in rural South Africa.

“Access to broadband internet is still too expensive,” he says. “One of the ways to help reduce costs is through greater competition and a greater mix of solutions… We believe not enough is being done in that regard.” This requires a concerted push from governments, he adds.

Moving forward

Although progress is slow, Thakur says governments are gradually adopting policies and affordability is improving. The report names Cameroon and Mali among countries that have helped boost affordability with new national broadband plans.

Fekitamoeloa Katoa ‘Utoikamanu at the UN Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States says the world has seen “tremendous advances” in digital technology, but that millions of people are being “left behind”.

Claire Melamed, CEO of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, says it is vital that “technological advancement doesn’t reinforce disadvantage”.

“Giving people visibility and opportunities to connect with others and make their voice heard are an important part of human and economic progress,” she said. “It’s not easy for overstretched governments to grapple with complex regulatory environments, but coordinated policies and approaches are needed to make a reality of the push to ‘leave no one behind’.”

This story was originally published by SciDev.Net