Prospects for post COVID-19 recovery are dangerously diverging, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The United Nations said developing nations have spent 580 times less per capita on their COVID-19 response, in comparison to richer nations, because they do not have the money to do so. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Mar 30 2021 (IPS)

The inability of developing nations to spend on post COVID-19 recovery and resilience has placed the world on the “the verge of a debt crisis”. “We face the spectre of a divided world and a lost decade for development,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said on Monday, Mar. 29, during a high-level meeting on financing development post COVID-19.

He said that developing nations needed access to liquidity to allow them to sufficiently respond to the pandemic and invest in recovery and urged the global community to provide this necessary support.

Guterres highlighted the over 2.7 million COVID-19-related deaths and the over 128 million people who fell into extreme poverty over the last year.

He noted that while the world’s rich nations have benefited from an unprecedented $18 trillion of emergency support measures, setting the stage for economic recovery post COVID-19, many developing nations could not invest in recovery and resilience. In fact many have spent 580 times less per capita on their COVID-19 response, in comparison to richer nations, because they do not have the money to do so.

One third of emerging market economies where at high risk for fiscal crisis while six countries had already defaulted on loan payments. Guterres said the situation was even worse for least-developed and low-income countries.

“They face a painfully slow recovery that will put the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement completely out of reach,” Guterres warned.

The meeting titled “International Debt Architecture and Liquidity – Financing for Development in the Era of COVID-19 and Beyond Initiative” was convened jointly by Guterres, Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“We are at a turning point in the COVID-19 crisis,” Guterres said.

He said the stark reality of lack of funding among developing nations was clearly evident in the access to COVID-19 vaccines.

“Many developed countries are on the brink of mass vaccination drives. In developing countries this could take months, if not years, further delaying a global recovery,” Guterres said.

Jamaican Prime Minister Holness said that while vaccine rollouts where gathering pace, “an uneven and inequitable vaccination programme will lead to an uneven global recovery and sadly a re-inforcement of poverty”.

“Unless we are prepared to enter deeper cooperation with fairer, smarter, and broader views of our world and common interests, we should temper our expectations that the crisis is nearing its end,”  Holness said.

While Guterres welcomed that steps that had been taken to date by international financial institutions, noting the G20s debt services suspension initiative and the common framework for debt treatments, he said this was still “far from enough”.

He also pointed out that the common framework for debt treatments was facing difficulties as countries were reluctant to use debt recovery mechanisms as they were concerned this would have a negative impact on their credit ratings.

He said there was an opportunity to address weaknesses in current debt architecture. 

“Ultimately we need a shift in mindsets to responsible borrowing and lending.”

Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said because of the closure of export opportunities and lowering commodity prices, COVID-19 has worsened debt dynamics for many developing countries.

“The collapse of export receipts from tourism has prompted balance of payment difficulties for many developing countries, especially island economies from the Caribbean to the Pacific to the India Ocean,” Okonjo-Iweala said.

She noted that the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, trade finance dried up for ‘several’ low-income nations as foreign banks cut existing credit lines or refused to endorse letters of credit unless guaranteed by others.

“Without trade finance countries cannot import the basic necessities, they can only do it by paying cash in advance,” she said, adding that action on trade can help alleviate debt pressures.

“Lowering trade barriers gives countries more opportunities to push down their debt to export ratios. Addressing supply side constraints and improving access to trade finance would help them take better advantage of market opportunities,”  Okonjo-Iweala said.

She said that by delivering results at the WTO, including at the organisation’s 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12), which will take place in November, “governments can reinforce the predictable framework of rules that underpin global trade and enhance the ability of countries to earn their foreign exchange they need”.

“Lost decades are a policy choice. We can and we must do better,” Okonjo-Iweala said.

Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), admitted that while the global economic outlook was improving thanks to efforts on vaccines and unprecedented actions by governments and the international community “prospects for recovery are dangerously diverging”. 

“What we can now report is that relative to pre-crisis projections, and excluding China, this group [of developing nations] is projected by 2022 to have cumulative per capita income losses as high as 20 percent,” Georgieva said, noting this would be a one-fifth loss of what was already a lower income to begin with.

The per capital income loss in advanced economies would be 11 percent, she said.

“We need a comprehensive approach to support vulnerable countries and people. And it must include measures at home to improve revenue collection, spending efficiency … as well as very substantial international support, [such as] grants and concessional lending,” Georgieva said.

She said the IMF would do its part through concessional financing. She also noted that the new special drawing rights (SDRs) or supplementary foreign exchange reserve assets defined and maintained by the IMF, of $650 billion, which was endorsed by the G7 earlier this month to address the long term needs for formal assets. She said she submit a proposal in June to provide more transparency into lending.

“A new SDR allocation would support the global recovery, provide substantial direct liquidity boosts to all IMF members, without adding to debt burdens, and freeing up resources for countries under pressure to do what is right and take care of their people and their businesses,”  Georgieva said.

She said in parallel the IMF was exploring options for members with strong financial positions to reallocate SDRs to support vulnerable countries.

She added that action on debt was an integral part of the comprehensive response to COVID-19 recovery.

President of the World Bank Group David Malpass said the world faced devastating challenges, especially for the poorest countries.

“For countries with unsustainable debt we are looking for solutions that meet both the near-term liquidity challenges and the longer-term sustainability challenges,” Malpass said, explaining that solutions for both time frames was critical in helping people get access to resources for health, education and climate.

He said along with the IMF, the World Bank was supporting the G20s debt services suspension initiative that saw 40 countries benefit from $6 billion in debt services suspension last year. He added that the 6-month extension of debt services suspension initiative to June 2021 could provide an additional $7 billion of temporary relief for countries.

President of the African Development Bank (AfDB) Akinwumi A. Adesina said the COVID-19 pandemic “has devastated Africa’s accounts” in a year that saw 106,000 deaths related to the virus and GDP decline of between $145 to 190 billion.

Despite the current situation, Adesina said that the AfDB projects that the Africa’s read GDP growth would recover from -2.1 percent GDP growth in 2020 to 3.4 percent for 2021. He added, however, that this growth was conditional on equitable access to vaccines and on resolving Africa’s debt distress. He said the structure of Africa’s debt had changed dramatically and its total external debt stands at $700 billion.

“We need global solidarity on vaccine access for Africa. We also need global solidarity on debt for Africa,” Adesina said.

He called for the extension of the G20 debt services suspension initiative and for it to also include vulnerable and middle income countries.

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Catherine a nurse at Jinja referral hospital in Uganda. (file photo) During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, caseworkers — the majority of whom are women — attended work daily. The 65th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is currently being held. This year’s them is women's full and effective participation and decision-making in public life, as well as the elimination of violence, for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. Credit: Lyndal Rowlands/IPS.

By Nalisha Adams
BONN,Germany, Mar 18 2021 (IPS)

During the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, while many sought safety being at home, women in the healthcare, child care, aged care, teaching and services fields — who hold the majority of jobs in those occupations — went to work everyday. 

“The tragedy was those workers on whom we depend most, the fabric of society, are actually amongst the lowest paid,” said Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation. She was speaking during a side event to the 65th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) that is currently taking place from Mar. 15 to 26.

The year’s commission theme is ‘Women’s full and effective participation and decision-making in public life, as well as the elimination of violence, for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls’.

Yesterday’s side event titled ‘On the Path to Economic Justice and Rights: Working towards Women’s Economic Empowerment’ was organised by the government of Germany as well as the Action Coalition on Economic Justice and Rights. The coalition is one of six themed coalitions that exist within Generation Equality, a UN Women campaign that promotes gender equality.

The high-level side event aimed to discuss women’s participation and decision-making in economic life. Globally women present the majority of the working poor with less than half of women of working age in paid employment.

Germany’s Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, Dr. Gerd Müller, said the quest for economic justice and equal rights was made even more difficult by COVID-19, which brought existing inequalities into sharp focus.

He said that women and girls in Africa, Asia and Latin America were particularly hard hit.

“Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, women and girls enjoyed fewer rights, had less access to education and resources and often lived and worked under appalling conditions. And now they are being hit by the fallout from the pandemic, the lockdown and the economic decline.

“Typically women were often the first to lose their jobs. Many girls will never return to school because they have to work in cottage industries in order to help support their impoverished families, or because they have an unplanned pregnancy or have been married off,” Müller said, adding that violence against women and girls had also increased worldwide. He called this a disaster and tragedy.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women, acknowledged that violence against women, which she called ‘a shadow pandemic’ had increased.

“We also know that those who are experiencing violence and those who are experiencing job losses in large numbers are women in their 20s and 30s who have young children and still need to contribute to look after their families,” Mlambo-Ngcuka said.

“What are we going to do to assist women make a re-entry to the labour force as well as address the economic fall out that they will experience?” she asked.

Mlambo-Ngcuka said there was also a skills gap to address, as women were affected by the gender digital gap, they would not likely qualify for the new jobs that were likely to be created post-pandemic.

She also noted that women were carrying the burden of unpaid work at home, which required them to be at home and give up work.

She said a number of obstacles had emerged from the pandemic that affected the sustainability of women in the labour force.

Burrow said women were at “the forefront of every aspect of a labour market that is broken”.

“Are governments, are employers serious about rectifying the inequality of income, gender and race? If we are, then we need jobs, jobs and jobs because women have fallen out of the labour market and fallen into precarious work,” Burrow said.

She said because governments failed to regulate the labour market, 60 percent of workers worked in the informal market — the majority of whom were women.

A woman farmer selling her produce at a local market in Casamence, southern Senegal. (file photo) In sub-Saharan Africa, 90 percent of those in informal employment, which is typically low-skilled with poor working conditions, are women. A UN high-level side event aimed to discuss gender equality, women’s participation and decision-making in economic life. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

These women, she said, had no rights, no minimum wage and their work conditions were not subject to compliance.

“So [they are] absolutely at the forefront of survival everyday. And then you have 40 percent of workers in the formal economy, but a third of those are in precarious or in insecure work. Again, the majority are women,” Burrow said.

Women are also most likely to be in low-paying, insecure and informal work and earned on average, in developed economies, 20 percent less than men. In developing economies the gap is believed to greater. Women are also highly represented in the sectors that are hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Mlambo-Ngcuka noted that the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action still remained the most ambitious and far-reaching framework for achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. The Beijing Declaration sets out common goals, definitions and values for countries that are UN Member States in achieving gender equality.

“Twenty-five years later we have still not been able to implement it fully but it is still important for us

to do your best to implement it,” Mlambo-Ngcuka said.

“As we have not achieved everything that we wanted to achieve in the Beijing Declaration. We are therefore at that stage where we have to review how far we have come and Generation Equality is borne out of a realisation that we have a long way to go.

“We have also realised that the implementation of the SDGs have not moved as far and as fast as we wanted it,” Mlambo-Ngcuka said.

Mlambo-Ngcuka said that Generation Equality helped advance gender quality on the following three fronts by:

• advancing the Beijing Declaration
• advancing the the SDGs, and
• responding in a gender-responsive way to the pandemic.

She said the Action Coalition on Economic Justice and Rights was an action-orientated coalition that “with very concrete actions that we are going to take”.

“We are asking you to join us in this action coalition because these are the that issues we intend to address. We are hoping that in this action coalition we will look at the disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work that women are carrying.

“We will look at gender-based violence, including sexual violence in the workplace, and we are also going to be asking member states to ratify the ILO [International Labour Organisation] convention on sexual harassment and violence in the work place,” she said, adding they were looking at closing the gender pay gap as well as looking at the need for women to have protected and decent jobs.

She said in the event of another pandemic “we should not find ourselves in this situation again where there is a bloodbath of jobs that are occupied by women because they are unprotected and women have no benefits”. She said they also wanted to eliminate the $1.5 trillion credit gap that affects women.

Diane Ndarbawa, president of Manki Maroua, an association of girl-child mothers, from northern Cameroon, spoke about the constraints that women in rural areas face in accessing economic opportunities. 

She said that in Central Africa and Cameroon in particular, there were several constraints that resulted in the low rate of participation by women in economic decisions, often relegating them to them to second place when it came to economic decision-making. Some of these constraints included; a lack of information on laws, policies and programmes related to economic opportunities; a lack of control over the required documentation (particularly the drafting of project and activity reports); poor computer and digital technology skills, and the misinterpretation of traditions and religions; among others.

“As a young woman there are additional constraints. In my region where there is violence and insecurity linked to extremism and traditions, young women limit themselves to small craft businesses,” she said.

She said the establishment of Generation Equality Action Coalitions would improve the participation of young women in economic activities in sub-Saharan Africa’s rural areas, particularly in Cameroon’s extreme north. Far North Cameroon has been caught in the midst of a Boko Haram insurgency in the Lake Chad Basin.

“Our participation in this multi-stakeholder process gives young women and associations the strength to contribute and influence decision-making bodies at all levels,” she said.

“It would be important to advance the rights of young women and girls by involving, by raising awareness with the population, more specially, parents, religious leaders, local leaders,  showing them the importance of the empowerment of young women,” Ndarbawa said.

Meanwhile, Müller said Germany had stepped up support for action to empower women and girls and the work of the UN. He said Germany had allocated €38 million in additional funding to help promote gender equality during the current pandemic.

“If we are serious about our desire to recover better together, we will need women and girls who are empowered and therefore strong. Now more than ever,” Müller said.

Excerpt:

Sudanese youth live with continuous insecurity due to climate change vulnerability, including droughts, desertification, land degradation and food insecurity. Courtesy: Albert Gonzalez Farran/ UNAMID/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Feb 24 2021 (IPS)

For Sudanese youth, climate change is synonymous with insecurity.

“We are living in a continuous insecurity due to many factors that puts Sudan on top of the list when it comes to climate vulnerability,” said Nisreen Elsaim, Sudanese climate activist and chair of United Nations Secretary General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change.

She said this was directly linked to insecurity within Sudan. She noted that even a Security Council resolution from 2018 which acknowledged “the adverse effects of climate change, ecological changes and natural disasters, among other factors,”, including droughts, desertification, land degradation and food insecurity influenced the situation in Dafur, Sudan.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) ranks Sudan as one of the world’s most vulnerable countries when it comes to climate change. Increased frequency of droughts and high rainfall variability over decades has stressed Sudan’s rainfed agriculture and pastoralist livelihoods, which are the dominant means of living in rural areas like north Dafur.

“In a situation of resources degradation, hunger, poverty and uncontrolled climate migration will [mean] conflict is an inevitable result,” Elsaim said, adding that climate-related emergencies resulted in major disruptions to healthcare and livelihoods and that climate-related migration increased the risk of gender-based violence.

She also pointed out that women, youth and children where the groups most adversely affected by climate insecurity.

In January, inter-communal violence in Darfur displaced over 180,000 people — 60 percent of whom are under the age of 18. “Displacement has declined in recent years in Sudan, but many of its triggers remain unaddressed. Ethnic disputes between herders and farmers over scarce resources overlap with disasters such as flooding and political instability,” the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre said in a statement. There are currently 2.1 million internally displaced persons in Sudan.

Elsaim was speaking yesterday, Feb. 23, during a high-level United Nations Security Council debate focusing on international peace and security and climate change, led by United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The UK currently holds the Security Council presidency and will also be host to the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), which will take place in November in Glasgow, Scotland.

“Land and resources in Africa and in many other parts of the world, because of climate change, can no longer maintain young people,” Elsaim cautioned.

She said in the youth’s search for decent lives, jobs and proper access to services, the new challenge of COVID-19 meant the only solution for many was in country, cross-border or international migration.

The issue is a global one.

Natural historian Sir David Attenborough addressed the council in a video message also giving a stark warning that the “stability of the entire world” could be altered by climate threats.

“Today there are threats to security of a new and unprecedented kind,” Attenborough said.

“They are rising global temperatures, the despoiling of the ocean — that vast universal larder which people everywhere depend for their food. Change in the pattern of weather worldwide that pay no regard to national boundaries but that can turn forests into deserts, drown great cities and lead to the extermination of huge numbers of the other creatures with which we share this planet.”

He cautioned that no matter what the world did now, some of these threats could become a reality, destroying cities and societies.

“If we continue on our current path, we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security: food production, access to fresh water, habitable ambient temperature, and ocean food chains,” Attenborough cautioned.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the last decade was the hottest in human history and that wildfires, cyclones and floods were the new normal which also affected political, economic and social stability.

“Climate disruption is a crisis amplifier and multiplier,” Guterres told the Security Council. “While climate change dries up rivers, reduces harvests, destroys critical infrastructure and displaces communities, it [also] exacerbates the risks of instability and conflict.”

He referred to a study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute which noted that 8 of the 10 countries hosting the largest multilateral peace operations in 2018 where in areas highly exposed to climate change.

“The impacts of these crises are greatest where fragility and conflicts have weakened coping mechanisms,” Guterres said.

The UN has already stated that 2021 will a be critical, not only for curbing the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, but also for meeting the climate challenge. Guterres has already stated that he plans to focus this year on building a global coalition for carbon neutrality by 2050.

Alongside the Security Council debate, the Fifth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly wrapped up yesterday. The assembly, world’s top environmental decision-making body attended by government leaders, businesses, civil society and environmental activists, met virtually on Feb. 22 to 23 under the theme “Strengthening Actions for Nature to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals”.

The assembly concluded with member states releasing a statement acknowledging “the urgency to continue our efforts to protect our planet also in this time of crisis”, and calling for multilateral cooperation as they “remain convinced that collective action is essential to successfully address global challenges”.

Joyce Msuya, the Deputy Executive Director for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), noted that 87 ministers and high-level representatives participated during the two days. She shared some of the points of the dialogue noting that the health of nature and human health were inextricably linked. 

“For our own well-being we must make our peace with nature in a way that demonstrates solidarity,” Msuya said, making reference to a recent UNEP report. 

The report serves a blueprint on how to tackle the triple emergencies of climate, biodiversity loss and pollution and provides detailed solutions by drawing on global assessments.

Msuya added that the nature crisis was linked with the climate and pollution crisis and that the world now had the chance to put in place a green recovery “that will transform our relations with nature and heal our planet”.

She said the green recovery should put the world on a path to a low-carbon, resilient, post-pandemic world.

Meanwhile, Elsaim said that as a young person, she was “sure that young people are the solution”. She urged world leaders to engage with the youth and listen to them.

“Stop conflict by stopping climate change. Give us security and secure the future,” she said in conclusion.

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The rugged landscape of Tigray, Ethiopia’s most northern region, stretches away to the north and into Eritrea. The Tigray Region has been rocked by conflict since November 2020, and the International Crisis Group believes the conflict is far from over despite the federal government gaining administrative control of the Tigrayan capital, Mekelle, and other main cities in the region. (File photo) Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Feb 19 2021 (IPS)

While Ethiopia’s federal government may have administrative control of the Tigrayan capital, Mekelle, and other main cities in the region, including Shire, Adwa, and Aksum, after removing the regional government from power in late November — armed resistance in Tigray is not over and could continue for months.

According to William Davison, the International Crisis Group’s Senior Analyst for Ethiopia, “there is still considerable conflict ongoing in Tigray, which runs against the narrative being propagated by Ethiopia’s federal government that the fighting ended when they took control of Mekelle”.

“It seems that in large chunks of rural Tigray, away from the main roads, away from the main cities and the bigger towns — normally about 15 to 20 km into the countryside — especially in central Tigray, the federal government and allied entities are not in control.

“We presume in those areas there is a significant presence of forces directed by the ousted Tigray leadership, now known as the Tigray Defence Forces, although it is hard to be sure due to the continued telecoms and access restrictions,” Davison told IPS.

The Tigray region has been rocked by conflict since Nov. 3, 2020, when the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)-run regional government clashed with federal authorities following a dispute over the autonomy of the region that was related to the TPLF’s loss of power at the federal level.

A briefing published last week by ICG noted that the presence of the Eritrean military in Tigray — repeatedly denied by the Ethiopian government and not admitted by Eritrea’s leadership — is exacerbating tensions as there were credible reports of widespread Eritrean looting and atrocities.

Davison said Eritrea’s military has largely been active in northern and central Tigray, including some cities, such as Adigrat, and has used the conflict to reclaim disputed territory that was the focal point of Ethiopia and Eritrea’s 1998-2000 war. 

In addition, Amhara region security forces and administrators who are in control of large portions of western Tigray (West Tigray Zone) and also districts of South Tigray Zone “claim these parts of Tigray as rightly belonging to their region, and say they intend to stay”, according to the ICG briefing. “The Amhara takeover of territory within Tigray, along with Tigrayan anger at Eritrea’s role, are inflaming the situation,” the briefing said.

However, the unfolding humanitarian situation in the region is also a pressing concern.

A report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated that before the conflict just under a million people in the region needed emergency food aid. However, in January that figure was thought to have grown to 4.5 million people, including 2.2 million internally displaced persons – out of a regional population of around 6 million.

While the Ethiopian government has said it can handle aid distribution itself, last Monday it granted some approvals for United Nations agencies to provide more assistance to people in Tigray, although it is not yet clear what impact that has had on the ground.

This was preceded by a visit from UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) chief Filippo Grandi earlier this month, who met with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed as well as Eritrean refugees who had been housed in Tigray. UNHCR said that refugees had resorted to eating leaves because there was no other food available.

Meanwhile Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which has moved around the region since the conflict began, raised concern about the humanitarian situation in rural areas as they had been unable to travel to them because of either insecurity or lack of authorisation.

“We are very concerned about what may be happening in rural areas…But we know, because community elders and traditional authorities have told us, that the situation in these places is very bad,” said Albert Viñas, who has been involved in almost 50 emergency responses with MSF and prepared medical teams to access areas of eastern and central Tigray and assist people affected by the current crisis. 

He added the MSF  did not know “the real impact of this crisis”.

Crisis Group says that the federal government needs to insist on the withdrawal of Eritrean and Amhara forces in order to reduce Tigrayan opposition to the federal intervention and so open up the space for some kind of dialogue at the national level over Tigray’s autonomy and the related constitutional-electoral debate that escalated the tensions that led to war.

“Steps need to be taken to reduce the huge political challenges in Tigray. Because that Amhara and Eritrean presence and the atrocities means that much of the Tigrayan population seems, at the moment, more inclined to support the Tigrayan armed resistance than the federal interim administration for the region.”

Excerpts of the interview follow. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Inter Press Service (IPS): Tigrayan leaders and the UN say fighting is still widespread?

William Davison (WD): In January and February there have been regular reports still of large-scale confrontations between the Tigray Defence Forces and opposing allied contingents, primarily the Ethiopian National Defence Force and the Eritrean Defence Force. Although it is hard to be sure about the details, there is little doubt that significant clashes are occurring, and at times they are corroborated by humanitarian actors.

What is always hard to verify is whether the claims of battlefield victories are accurate, including the claims of the capture of enemy equipment, which often come from the Tigrayan side. Or the claims of the huge fatalities that the opponent has suffered, again that often come from the Tigrayan side.

The bigger picture here is that when the federal government and allied forces took control of the regional capital Mekelle, on Nov. 28, and ousted the Tigrayan regional leadership, that was indeed a very significant moment. But, it did not mean the elimination of Tigrayan armed resistance.

Moreover, there are still a lot of the fugitive political and military leaders are at large, with only perhaps a third of those sought have been captured. Therefore, there is still a significant armed confrontation in Tigray, which runs against the narrative being propagated by Ethiopia’s federal government that “normalcy” is returning to the region and no substantive resistance remains.

IPS: A briefing by ICG last week said there is the possibility of the conflict continuing for some time to come. Can you explain?

WD: I think that is definitely a possibility and indeed a fairly likely possibility. But at the same time, we, and others, did not expect the TPLF government to be ousted from regional power within a month of this conflict beginning – so possibly the current resistance will also prove less sustainable than expected. Still, as of now, it does seem that since losing control of the regional government, the armed resistance of the ousted Tigray leadership has been relatively resilient.

As discussed, by no means are all the leaders captured, significant fighting is ongoing, and the federal government and allied forces do not control anything like all of Tigray’s territory. In conjunction with that there is also reason to believe that the presence of those allied forces — the Eritrean military and the Amhara factions — is opposed by a large proportion of Tigray’s population. And so that portion of Tigrayans appear more inclined to support the ousted leadership than the federal interim administration, and many even seem to now back Tigray’s secession from Ethiopia.

It is these factors that lead us to think that this conflict could be entrenched, and that fighting will continue for weeks, possibly months, and maybe even for longer than that. And, of course, that outlook has hugely worrying ramifications for an already critical humanitarian situation.

IPS: With regards to the humanitarian situation, until recently not all aid agencies were allowed access to the region. What are some of the concerns around the current situation?

WD: Tigray, like other places in Ethiopia, suffers from chronic food insecurity, meaning that large numbers of people every year need support. Last year this was exacerbated by the desert locust invasion – and then the outbreak of war occurred around harvest time. This created a major humanitarian crisis in Tigray.

During the conflict, the federal government has been very keen not just to control territory and try and win the war, but also to control the flow of information from Tigray and so set the narrative about the intervention.

This has contributed to a continued federal unwillingness to allow media access, bureaucratic restrictions on aid agencies, and also the failure to restore telephone and, particularly, internet services across large swathes of Tigray. 

All this exacerbates the humanitarian situation, as little is known about the fate of millions of people, including possibly up to one million who were displaced from western to central Tigray when Amhara elements reclaimed land there in the first weeks of the war.

The overarching desire to maintain control has meant that the federal government – which is party to this conflict – has largely kept itself in charge of aid distribution. This goes against core humanitarian principles. And furthermore, there are widespread concerns that, firstly, the government does not have the capacity to deliver aid at the scale needed in the time needed.

Secondly, there is a major doubt regarding political will because the government is still very keen to control the information that is emerging about the conflict. For example, the presence of Eritrean troops and the atrocities that have been committed by them, that is not something which has been acknowledged by the federal government. Therefore, maintaining that narrative is contributing to the decision to restrict information and restrict access to conflict areas, leading to increased civilian suffering.

Additionally, with the federal government denying that an organised opponent still exists, as part of efforts to manage the story, that means there is very little aid reaching large parts of rural central Tigray where allied forces are not in control of territory and large numbers of civilians are thought to have fled to.

IPS: Is there anything else that you would like to add that is particularly important?

WD: When Tigray’s ousted leaders recently made statements, there was no focus on a cessation of hostilities, a humanitarian corridor, or even really the humanitarian situation overall. Instead, like the federal government, they are fixated on trying to win the war.

Given these dynamics, it is likely that this is going to get worse; the fighting will continue and that will exacerbate the civilian suffering, both in terms of direct attacks and also the humanitarian impact. Therefore, there is a desperate need for a rethink.

First, what is needed is for the federal government to acknowledge the heavy cost of the war so far and that it is likely to get more damaging. This reality means that there is an incentive for Addis Ababa to roll back the involvement of the Eritrean and Amhara forces, as this would hopefully reduce the intensity of the fighting, ease Tigrayan anger, and allow greater space for urgently required humanitarian relief.

However, by no means will this resolve the political disputes. Instead, as Crisis Group and many other have repeatedly argued, what is needed is a fundamental country-level political negotiation, addressing all of Ethiopia’s deep fault lines, such as over the legacy of the imperial era and the merits and demerits of current federal system, probably through the vehicle of an all-inclusive national dialogue.

One of the concerns that Crisis Group had at the outset of the war is the cocktail of problems— such as mounting killings in Benishangul-Gumuz region, growing tensions with Sudan, simmering discontent in Oromia—and violent political rifts that threaten to widen. In short, the country was already fragile and volatile. Falling into this war, which split the Ethiopian military and was a huge shock to the federation, came at a moment when it was not clear Ethiopia could absorb such at destabilising blow.

While Ethiopia and Ethiopians are incredibly resilient, there is a risk that this predicament could lead to some sort of spiralling nationwide unrest, which would of course threaten Ethiopia’s overall stability and so therefore the wider region’s. That is why is it is so important that de-escalatory steps are immediately taken to move Ethiopia off this trajectory.

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This year marks South Sudan's tenth independence anniversary (file photo). A new report by the International Crisis Group says that in order to ensure lasting peace the country needs wider power-sharing and decentralisation of government. Credit: Charlton Doki/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Feb 10 2021 (IPS)

The threat of a full-blown civil war in South Sudan remains unless the country’s leaders can broaden power sharing, warns a new report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) released almost year into the country’s formation of a government of national unity.

The report titled “Toward a Viable Future for South Sudan” formulates a stark conclusion. Almost a decade after its 2011 independence from Sudan, “South Sudan – the world’s newest country – needs a reset, if not a redo.”

“Our argument is that South Sudan is so fragile and faces so many challenges and is so diverse that we think the only way to govern South Sudan peacefully is through radical consensus as a form of power sharing and government,” Alan Boswell, ICG’s Senior Analyst for South Sudan and one of the authors of the report, told IPS.

The report urged South Sudanese elite, religious leaders and civil society to rethink the country’s system of governance and create a political system that would work for one of Africa’s most diverse nations with more than 60 different ethnic groups.

Upcoming elections, which could possibly be set for 2022, as well as the country’s “winner-take-all” political system which “ill suits a country that requires consensus among major blocs to avert cyclical power struggles,” could inflame tensions, said the report released today, Feb. 10.

“Incentives for post-election violence will be acute. South Sudan’s highly centralised power structure and political economy raises the election’s stakes, since there are limited consolation prizes especially if [President Salva] Kiir continues to flout the constitution by refusing to devolve oil revenues and removing powerful governors by decree,” the report said. South Sudan has the third-largest oil reserves in sub-Saharan Africa, which generates the majority of the government’s wealth.

South Sudan gained independent after Africa’s longest civil war, which lasted from 1956 to 1972 and then again from 1983 to independence. But two years later, in 2013, the nation descended into civil war after  Kiir fired his cabinet and accused his vice president, Riek Machar, of being behind a plot to oust him.

Majoritarian democracy proved itself to not be a successful model for South Sudan.

“We make the argument that although South Sudan has structured itself along with many other states around the world as a majoritarian democracy, where in theory they go to polls and whoever the majority picks rules. That in practice in South Sudan’s context is likely a recipe for many groups feeling shut out of power, and a recipe for the ongoing power struggles that have already killed 100,000s of South Sudanese,” Boswell said.

In September 2018, all sides signed the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS), which included a power sharing agreement. The government of national unity was formed almost a year ago, at the end of February 2020, as part of the conditions of the agreement.

Boswell urged South Sudanese elites and the country’s external partners to support the country and “go back to the drawing board” and think “how they create the political system that works for them rather than copying political systems from other places that might not be as appropriate.”

Boswell said in order to prevent more conflict, the ICG called for pre- and post-election power sharing. “In order to prevent more conflict South Sudan really needs a very broad, inclusive power sharing before, during and after the vote. What you don’t want is a situation where the election is seen as a path by the one party to defeat another party,” Boswell said.

The report cited examples of rotational power sharing that could “encourage multi-ethnic alliances or mean losers of elections feel they have a shot at the presidency next time around,” the report stated.

For example, Nigeria — where through informal agreement the country rotates its presidency between the Muslim north and the Christian south; and Tanzania — where the presidency is rotated between a Muslim and Christian every decade.

Additional recommendations included, among others:

• Setting aside prominent positions in the national government for electoral runners-up as a way of guaranteeing them positions of influence to prevent them from taking up arms.
• Having regional leaders broker pre-election dialogue, to extract assurances from losing parties in order to lower the stakes as well as guaranteeing in advance another broad-based unity government.
• A system where power can be shared more equitably at the centre.
• Agree to designate the first vice president position, for the presidential runner-up, while allocating at least one other vice presidential position to the next most successful contestant.

More than four million South Sudanese have been displaced across the region and within their own country in one of Africa’s largest displacement crises (file photo). Credit: Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin/IPS

Life for South Sudanese remains a harsh reality of food insecurity and continued conflict.

Last September, Yasmin Sooka Chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan said in a statement that the implementation of key areas of the revitalised agreement had stalled. “While the COVID-19 pandemic can take some of the blame, the lack of progress poses a threat to the peace process,” she said, noting the the escalation in violence in Central Equatoria, Jonglei, Lakes, Unity, Western Bahr el-Ghazal, and Warrap States, and the Greater Pibor Administrative Area.

“A breakdown in the ceasefire with armed groups in the Equatorias has fuelled the violence and already displaced thousands of South Sudanese civilians,” she said in a statement to the Human Rights Commission.

According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), “more than four million South Sudanese have been displaced across the region and within their own country in one of Africa’s largest displacement crises”. Of the four million displaced, UNHCR notes that there are almost 2,3 million refugees and asylum seekers, with the largest number in Uganda (over 890,000), followed closely by Sudan (736,700), followed by Ethiopia, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Last December, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that almost half — 5.8 million — of the country’s 11 million people were acutely food insecure. “In 2020, communities were hit hard by the triple shock of intensified conflict and sub-national violence, a second consecutive year of major flooding, and the impacts of COVID-19. Some 1.6 million people remained internally displaced and another 2.2 million as refugees in the region,” OCHA said in its 2021 Humanitarian Needs Overview for South Sudan.

Meanwhile, the ICG report also noted that development partners, fatigued by years of conflict resolution had “no clear plan for finding peace, despite the substantial sums still devoted to humanitarian aid.”

There was also widespread cynicism among donors, Boswell said. “They have lost any vision of what a peaceful South Sudan could look like and how to help get it there,” he said.

He cautioned this was not very sustainable.

“If there is not a vision or a plan that both South Sudanese and both donors can look upon and push towards where the country is heading and what a peaceful situation looks like then we fear that donors would gradually, as they have been, pull more and more out of South Sudan and start doing the bare minimum of just keeping people alive,” Boswell said.

South Sudanese have lost a lot of hope in their country, because they have lost faith in their leaders after seeing them act in ways that are clearly selfish, Boswell said.

One example of this is the large-scale corruption within the country.

According to Transparency International, in 2012 Kiir accused at least 75 government and ex-government officials of embezzling $4 billion of public funds and in a public statement urged for the money to be returned. Only $60 million was reportedly returned to a bank account in Kenya.

Last September, during her statement to the Human Rights Commission, Sooka cautioned that “lives are being destroyed by financial corruption on an epic scale” in South Sudan.

She referred to a recent report to parliament by South Sudan’s National Revenue Authority that had shown “that approximately $300 million have been “lost” in the last three months alone”.

“At one end of the spectrum, South Sudan’s political elites are fighting for control of the country’s oil and mineral resources, in the process stealing their people’s future. At the other, the soldiers in this conflict over resources are offered the chance to abduct and rape women in lieu of salaries,” Sooka had said.

Despite the challenges faced by South Sudan, the country’s diversity remains a strength.

“Europe is not necessarily weaker, in fact a lot of people argue that they are in fact stronger, because of their diversity … So our point is that South Sudanese need to look at what they are constituent-wise and the elites — if they are serious about building their country and not just looting its resources — should think about how to forge a settlement that works for its parts,” Boswell told IPS.

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Myanmar’s military has sized control of government and reportedly detained civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, senior members of her governing National League for Democracy (NLD) as well as human rights activists and student leaders. Courtesy: Yves Alarie on Unsplash

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Feb 1 2021 (IPS)

Responding to reports this morning that Myanmar’s military has seized control of government in a coup on the eve of the country’s opening session of its new parliament, rights group Amnesty International said it “sends a chilling message that the military authorities will not tolerate any dissent amid today’s unfolding events”.

Civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, senior members of her governing National League for Democracy (NLD) as well as human rights activists and student leaders were reportedly detained this morning, Feb. 1. The BBC reported military “was handing power to commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing because of “election fraud”” and that soldiers were “on the streets of the capital, Nay Pyi Taw, and the main city, Yangon”.

Amnesty International said in a statement today that phone lines and the internet have been cut in some areas, further stating, “the military-owned television station announced that a one-year state of emergency was being imposed under the authority of the Commander in Chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing”.

The President of the European Council Charles Michel condemned the coup in a tweet this morning.

I strongly condemn the coup in #Myanmar and call on the military to release all who have been unlawfully detained in raids across the country.

The outcome of the elections has to be respected and democratic process needs to be restored.

— Charles Michel (@eucopresident) February 1, 2021

As did the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

I condemn the coup and unlawful imprisonment of civilians, including Aung San Suu Kyi, in Myanmar. The vote of the people must be respected and civilian leaders released.

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) February 1, 2021

A statement from White House spokesperson Jen Psaki read the United States was alarmed by the reports of the coup and subsequent arrest of Suu Kyi and civilian officials. “The United States opposes any attempt to alter the outcome of recent elections or impede Myanmar’s democratic transition, and will take action against those responsible if these steps are not reversed,” the statement read.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres also condemned the coup and called for Suu Kyi’s release as well as that of other leaders and government officials.

Guterres expressed “grave concern regarding the declaration of the transfer of all legislative, executive and judicial powers to the military. These developments represent a serious blow to democratic reforms in Myanmar”, a statement said.

Myanmar’s Nov. 8 election, which was won by Suu Kyi’s NLD which increased its parliamentary majority — taking 396 of the 498 seats — had been disputed by the military. The Rohingya population had been excluded from participating in the vote.

Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for Campaigns, Ming Yu Hah, called it “an ominous moment for people in Myanmar”, stating it threatened “a severe worsening of military repression and impunity. The concurrent arrests of prominent political activists and human rights defenders sends a chilling message that the military authorities will not tolerate any dissent amid today’s unfolding events” he said in a statement.

“Previous military coups and crackdowns in Myanmar have seen large scale violence and extrajudicial killings by security forces. We urge the armed forces to exercise restraint, abide by international human rights and humanitarian law and for law enforcement duties to be fully resumed by the police force at the earliest opportunity,” Hah said.

Concern remains about the safety of the Rohingya, an ethnic minority in the mostly Buddhist country.

The Rohingya have long been persecuted by the military and according to an October report by Human Rights Watch, “have faced decades of systematic repression, discrimination, and violence under successive Myanmar governments”.  

According to the UN Refugee Agency, a million Rohingya refugees have fled violence in Myanmar since the 1990s. However, in August 2017 when violence broke out in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, more than 700,000 Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh.

In November, The Gambia brought a case against  Myanmar to the UN’s International  Court of Justice, arguing that the mainly-Muslim Rohingya had been subjected to genocide. Suu Kyi had downplayed the allegations of genocide and serious human rights violations.

Last month, Jan. 23, the ICJ ruled that Myanmar must take steps to protect its minority Rohingya population. ICJ’s orders are binding against Myanmar.

But as late as last November, Amnesty International reported it had “documented a litany of serious human rights crimes in Rakhine, Chin, Kachin and northern Shan States in recent years, including  attacks killing or injuring civilians, extra-judicial executions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrest and detention, torture and other ill-treatment, forced labour, looting and confiscation of property”.

Amnesty International’s Hah said today, “Reports of a telecommunications blackout pose a further threat to the population at such a volatile time – especially as Myanmar battles a pandemic, and as internal conflict against armed groups puts civilians at risk in several parts of the country. It is vital that full phone and internet services be resumed immediately.”

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A wind energy generation plant located in Loiyangalani in northwestern Kenya. The plant is set to be the biggest in Africa, generating 300 MW. This renewable energy project was supported by the African Development Bank. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Jan 13 2021 (IPS)

2021 is going to be critical, not only for curbing the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, but also for meeting the climate challenge.

But as Dr Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) was clear to point out, the climate challenge is essentially an energy challenge. And as large polluters continue to commit to targets of net zero emissions by 2050, the world could — in theory — potentially address the climate challenge.

“The energy that powers our daily lives our economies also alone produces about 80 percent of global emissions,” Birol noted while addressing the virtual COP26 Virtual Roundtable on Clean Power Transition earlier this week on Jan. 11.

And as the UN plans to focus on building a global coalition for carbon neutrality by the middle of this current century, there will be increased focus and a push towards providing clean, renewable energy to all by 2030.

Clean and renewable energy was the focus of discussion of this weeks COP26 Virtual Roundtable on Clean Power Transition.

Birol said the good news was that China, the European Union, UK and Japan have ambitious 2050 net zero emission targets. He said he was positive that once he took office, United States President Elect Joe Biden would make similar commitments and other major developing nations may join. The joint global emissions by the current countries committed to the net zero emission targets amount to 60 percent of the world’s emissions.

“The issue is how to transform these ambitions into real energy action,” Birol said. He said in light of this the IEA was going to introduce the world’s first roadmap to net zero emissions by 2030, scheduled to be released on May 18 so that it can be used for input for COP26.

The roadmap will outline how the world needs to transform the energy sector, how much investment is needed and what needs to be done to reach the target and “provide a concrete plan for all of us”.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, also addressed theCOP26 Virtual Roundtable on Clean Power Transition, saying that to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, an urgent transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy was needed but also that developing countries needed to supported with this shift.

Noting the figures of some 789 million people across the globe without access to electricity — the majority of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa, Guterres said that while all nations need to be able to provide electricity to all, this energy needed to be “clean and renewable so it does not contribute to the dangerous heating of our planet”.

According to the IEA, while the number of people without access to electricity has decreased over past years — with some two-thirds of the world’s progress occurring in India “where the government announced that more than 99 percent of the population had access to electricity in 2019, thanks to the ambitious Saubhagya Scheme launched in October 2017” — reaching a low in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has reversed past gains particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Sub-Saharan Africa, home to three-quarters of the global population without access to electricity, has been particularly hard hit, and recent progress achieved in the region is being reversed by the effects of the pandemic: our first estimates indicate that the population without access to electricity could increase in 2020 for the first time since 2013,” IEA states in its SDG7 Data and Projections report.

Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO of Sustainable Energy for All, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All, co-chair of UN-Energy, and co-chair of the COP Campaigns Energy Transition, said it would be impossible to achieve zero emissions without delivering sustainable energy to all.

“We have to make something clear. The energy transition story is also the energy access story, especially in Africa. We must recognise that we cannot achieve net zero emissions by 2050 without delivering sustainable energy for all by 2030,” she said.

Ogunbiyi, who was the first female Managing Director of the Nigerian Rural Electrification Agency, went on to say that 2021 was a pivotal year for Sustainable Development Goal 7 which focuses on access to affordable and clean energy for all.

She said with less than 10 years to go on the SDGs, the world must “now turn towards supporting bold and ambitious plans that will deliver impact at scale to help achieve SDG 7 by 2030”.

Dr Akinumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank (AfDB), which is also a member of the COP26 energy transition council, outlined what the bank was doing in support of energy transition across the African continent.

Adesina acknowledge that Africa had the lowest levels of access to energy in the world with 570 million people without electricity.

“The challenge for Africa is simple. Africa has so little electricity. This presents a real opportunity to build reliable, affordable and sustainable energy systems for Africa,” Adesina said. He said this is one of the reasons why the bank had launched the Light Up and Power Africa project as one of its High 5 priorities for transforming the continent. Since 2015 the bank has provided electricity for 16 million people by focusing mainly on renewable energy, Adesina said.

Indeed, his comments comes as just last week the AfDB announced it would roll out a second giant electricity-generation project this time in the the Sahel. The first, largest solar power project in the world is funded by the bank and based in Morocco.

The bank stated that the Desert-to-Power project — which covers 11 countries from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east, and includes the Sahel countries of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger — when completed, “will turn the Sahel into one of the largest solar-power-generating areas in the world”. The AfDB went on to state that the $20-billion programme “aims to produce 10 gigawatts of electricity by 2025, providing 250 million people with power, of whom at least 90 million will be connected to the electricity grid for the first time”.

“The bank has been at the forefront of transformative renewable energy projects in Africa, including large-scale concentrated solar power projects, in Morocco…which are the largest in the world, the wind to power project which is the largest in sub-Saharan Africa,” he said, adding that the AfDB would no longer support coal projects.

“Unlocking that renewable energy future will ensure that we have a clean Africa, however, there are some challenges,” he said, explaining that this included the intermittency of solar and wind, the need for baseload power for grid stability, and the prohibitive costs of energy storage with policy and regulatory environments for renewable energy.

Adesina said the bank expected to invest $10 billion over the next five years in the energy sector.

Meanwhile Ogunbiyi  highlighted the importance of commitments as well as their financing and technical support for successful transition to renewable energy.

“Both the COP26 campaign and the UN high-level dialogue on energy need to be mutually reinforcing, just as energy access and energy transition are support another,” Ogunbiyi said. She said that the UN energy compact — an outcome of the UN high-level dialogue on energy — would be where countries can pledge their new ambitious commitments on sustainable energy in writing.

As member states, organisations, countries and cities sign up to the UN energy compacts, Ogunbiyi said it was critical that the international community rally around these commitments and support them with financing and technical assistance.

Meanwhile, Birol said critical to achieving net zero emissions was bringing the world’s countries together and providing momentum within an international context.

COP26 will be hosted by the United Kingdom and held in Glasgow, Scotland Nov. 1 to 12 and could provide the impetus for this momentum.

The UK announced the Climate Compatible Growth (CCG) programme — a £38 million fund that will focus on supporting developing nations transition to green energy.

Dr Amani Abou-Zeid, Commissioner for Energy and Infrastructure at the African Union said the that 900 million people in Africa depended on charcoal and firewood for cooking.

“This is not only an economic problem but mainly a moral issue and cause,” Abou-Zeid said.

Indeed the access to energy is also about human rights.

Last September, Ogunbiyi led a panel at the UN Global Compact’s Uniting Business Live event, where Chebet Lesan, founder of renewable energy startup BrightGreen discussed how their work in providing renewable cooking energy to vulnerable communities across Kenya and East Africa was impacting on a basic human right.

BrightGreen recycles post harvest waste, waste left on farms after harvesting, and then processes the waste into fuel that is easily adaptable by customers.

“They don’t need much change in behaviour in switching cost because the customers we are dealing with are very risk adverse and very money tight,” Lesan explained.

She said in response to a question on how to accelerate energy services to Africa, she said a key indicator was how good energy access services improved the lives of people in Africa.

“We are beginning to understand that as much as we are in the cooking energy space, our work is directly impacting the most basic human rights, even outside energy,” Lesan had said.

Respondents being questioned for the United Nations global conversation on the world they want. Many called for universal healthcare in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Courtesy: United Nations

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Jan 11 2021 (IPS)

The peoples of the world are unanimous – access to basic services such as universal healthcare must become a priority going forward. So too should global solidarity, helping those hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and addressing the climate change emergency.

The collective thoughts of the world’s future by some 1.5 million people, including those from various organisations and networks, from all countries across the globe has been highlighted in a global initiative by the United Nations, which it called the world’s largest conversation on the future people want.

Last year, to mark the 75th anniversary of the UN, it conducted various townhall discussions, dialogues and an online survey from January until November.

The resultant report, Shaping Our Future Together, showed that people across the world were unified in their concerns, with the current coronavirus pandemic being the foremost in their minds.

“When you ask people about their fears and hopes for the future, when you ask people about their expectations of international cooperation about their priorities in the immediate, post-COVID, there is remarkable unity across generations, regions, income groups, education groups, and from people from different political direction,” Fabrizio Hochschild, Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on the commemoration of UN’s 75th anniversary, said during a virtual press conference on the findings on Friday, Jan. 8.

Indeed respondents of the UN conversation from all but two regions – sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern and South-eastern Asia – had listed access to universal healthcare as an immediate short-term priority, according to the report.

In the regions of sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern and South-eastern Asia the call for increased support to places hardest hit by the pandemic and greater global solidarity ranked top. Next was the need for universal healthcare.

“This reflects the grim reality reported by UNDP – that daily COVID-19 related deaths have exceeded other common causes of death throughout much of 2020. Emergency services, health systems and health workers are under enormous strain around the world, with indirect health impacts also expected to rise,” the report noted.

Yesterday, Jan. 10, UN Secretary-General, António Guterres marked the 75th anniversary of the first UN General Assembly held in London by giving a keynote address. He noted that the COVID-19 pandemic “has had a disproportionate and terrible impact on the poor and dispossessed, older people and children, those with disabilities and minorities of all kinds”.

“It has pushed an estimated 88 million people into poverty and put more than 270 million at risk at acute food insecurity,” Guterres said.

The second short-term priority was a call for greater global solidarity and increased support to places hardest hit by the pandemic. 

Indeed, Guterres said in his speech that the COVID-19 pandemic had highlighted serious gaps in global cooperation and solidarity.

“We have seen this most recently in vaccine nationalism, some rich countries compete to buy vaccines for their own people, with no consideration for the world’s poor,” he said.

But he went on to thank the government and people of the UK for supporting the COVAX facility, established by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

COVAX is the global initiative to ensure rapid and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines for all countries, regardless of income level. In December, COVAX announced that it had arrangements in place to access two billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine candidates on behalf of 190 participating nations. At the time, WHO said in a statement that this would ensure deliveries of the vaccine in the first quarter of 2021 to participating countries.  

Guterres said the pandemic has highlighted the “deep fragilities in our world” and in order to tackle them we need to reduce inequality and injustice and to strengthen the bonds of mutual support and trust.

He also said that the world needed “a networked multilateralism, so that global and regional organisations communicate and work together towards common goals”.

“And we need an inclusive multilateralism, based on the equal representation of women, and taking in young people, civil society, business and technology, cities and regions, science and academia,” he said.

People around the world also called for safe water and sanitation, and education.

Rethinking the global economy and making it more inclusive to tackle inequalities was another concern.

Meanwhile addressing climate change and destruction to the environment also remained top long-concerns for respondents.

“Respondents in all regions identified climate change and environmental issues as the number one long-term global challenge,” the report noted.

Guterres was pragmatic, admitting that while the UN was proud of its achievements over the last 75 years, including helping to boost global health, literacy, living standards and promoting human rights and gender equality, it was also aware of its failures. The biggest one being the inability to adequately address climate change.

“The climate emergency is already upon us and the global response has been utterly inadequate,” he stated.

“The past decade was the hottest in human history, carbon dioxide levels are at record highs, apocalyptic fires and floods, cyclones and hurricanes are becoming the new normal,” he stated.

“If we don’t change course,” Guterres warned, “we might be headed for a catastrophic temperature rise or more than 3 degrees this century.”

“Biodiversity is collapsing, one million species are at risk of extinction, and whole ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes.

“This is a war on nature and a war with no winners,” Guterres said.

He said that while the pandemic was a human tragedy – it can also be an opportunity.

“The past months have shown the huge transformations that are possible, when there is political will and consensus on the way forward,” Guterres said.

He said the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development already provide the blueprint for this.

“We now need increased ambition and action to deliver – beginning with the climate emergency. The central objective of the UN this year is to build a global coalition for carbon neutrality by the middle of the century,” he said, adding that meaningful cuts — reduction in global emissions by 45 percent by 2030 compared to 2010 levels – were needed.

“Every country, city, organisation, financial institution and company needs to adopt plans to reach net zero emissions by 2050 — and start executing them now, with clear short-term targets.”

Akosua Agyepong, a youth activist from Ghana, asked Guterres after his speech how the lessons learned from the current pandemic could be used in addressing climate change “so that we can achieve the [goals of the] Paris Agreement and the SDGs”.

Guterres replied saying that currently trillions of dollars were spent on supporting economics facing the impacts of COVID-19. “When spending those trillions, we are borrowing in relation to the future. We need to make sure those trillions are spent to address the recovery from COVID but also the challenge of climate change.”

“We can use the same money to build coal power plants or build renewable energy. We can use the same money to support industries that pollute or use the same money to create new jobs in the green economy. We can tax people and income or we can tax carbon and pollution.

“There are many ways in which we can organise our recovery to make it sustainable and inclusive, reducing at the same time inequalities and making peace with nature and our planet in order to make sure we are able to tame climate change, and in order to make sure we do not allow temperatures to rise by more than 1.5 degrees C at the end of the century and that we can get a net zero coalition in the middle of the century to make sure that we rescue our planet,” he said.

In his speech Guterres also highlighted the role of gender equality in development, saying that justice and equality, including gender equality, were prerequisites to transforming the challenges ahead.

“Women’s leadership and equal participation are key ways to address the global challenges we face.

“The past year has highlighted the effectiveness of women’s leadership, adding to evidence that gender-balanced decision-making leads to stronger climate agreements, greater investment in social protection, longer-lasting peace, and more innovation,” Guterres said, adding that achieving women’s equal representation required bold action.

Despite the challenges in the years ahead, the world’s people were optimistic about the future with many believing they will be better off in 2045, with respondents in sub-Saharan Africa — where the median age is just 18 — being the most optimistic about the future. 

Guterres was also optimistic, in turn praising the youth of the world.

“Today, it is often young people who are showing courage, and demanding courage from the rest of us. Let me be clear: I stand with you. You give me hope. Young people can and do change the world,” he said.

He said he was confident that working together the world can emerge from the pandemic “and lay the foundations for a cleaner, safer, fairer world for all, and for generations to come”.

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Shkula Zadran, Afghanistan’s Youth Representative to the United Nations, addresses U.N. Security Council. She said her generation have been the main victims of the war in Afghanistan. “We are being killed, our dreams are being buried everyday,” she told the Security Council. Courtesy: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Dec 18 2020 (IPS)

While Afghanistan ends a historic year, filled with the hope for peace as the government and Taliban sat down for almost three months of consecutive peace talks for the first time in 19 years, it was also a year filled with violence with provisional statistics by the United Nations showing casualties for this year being higher than 2019.

Yesterday, Dec. 17, in a virtual meeting of the U.N. Security Council, Deborah Lyons, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Afghanistan and head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), praised the peace efforts on the close of “one of the most momentous years that Afghans have endured”, while also highlighting the causalities of the year.

She said that the Afghanistan government and the Taliban had “made incremental but genuine progress in their peace talks”. They agreed on a preliminary deal, reportedly the first written agreement after 19 years of conflict.

“These developments are an early but a positive sign that both sides are willing and able to compromise when needed,” Lyons said.

Talks continued uninterrupted in host country Qatar for almost three months, but are currently in a three week recess.

However, despite the talks, the Taliban has refused to a ceasefire and continued its war on the Afghanistan government.

It was, however, reported this week that a top U.S. general held recent talks with the Taliban in Doha, urging a reduction in violence as this risked the peace process. 

Lyons also raised the issue, stating that the “unrelenting violence remains a serious obstacle to peace and a threat to the region.” She added that one Afghan official had told her recently, “the sense and perception of violence and insecurity is higher now that ever”.

While UNAMA is still compiling this year’s data, Lyons provided some provisional statistic on the impact of the violence.

“In October and November, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) caused over 60 percent more civilian casualties than in the same period last year. In the third quarter of 2020, child casualties rose 25 percent over the previous three months; while attacks against schools in this same period increased fourfold.

“In the first 11 months of 2020, targeted killings by anti-government elements rose by nearly 40 percent compared to the same period in 2019,” she said, adding that it was no surprise that the Global Peace Index for 2020 listed Afghanistan as the least peaceful nation in the world for a second year in a row.

She highlighted some of the conflicts experienced over recent months — two separate rocket attacks in Kabul, an attack on Kabul University, and the increased conflict in some areas — and said these served to heighten fears around the emergence of new terrorists threats.

She called for all countries to continue to pressure all parities to the conflict to bring about a sustained reduction in violence. “I except this will be a top priority when the negotiations resume,” she said.

Meanwhile, Shkula Zadran, Afghanistan’s Youth Representative to the U.N. also briefed the Security Council.

She said that “while it is very difficult to represent a generation born and raised in violence and conflict,” she was honoured to speak on behalf of Afghan youth, including those who were killed in the terror attack on Kabul University and other education centres.

“I have met their families. Their pain is beyond our imagination. I have promised them that I will be their voice and I am fulfilling my promise,” Zadran, who spent her childhood as a refugee in Pakistan, told the Security Council.

“I’m representing a generation who have been the main victims of this proxy war. We are being killed, our dreams are being buried everyday.”

She called for the end to the daily killings of Afghan youth who are a majority of the country’s population as two thirds of citizens are under the age of 25.

“Terrorists are afraid of Afghan youth. And that is why they are targeting our education institutions.

“They know that an educated and informed generation will never allow terrorism and extremism to grown in their country,” Zadran said.

Zadran said that as an Afghan youth representative, her message to terrorists and their supporters was clear and obvious.

“You tried to bury us. You didn’t know that we were seeds.”

Zadran said that the youth supported the end of the conflict through the peace negotiations.

Lyons said Afghanistan’s youth were a key constituency, and were also the most educated generation of youth in the country’s history.

“Young Afghan’s have clear views on the future of their country, and we must do all we can to amplify their voices.”

“Through our youth-focused local, peace initiatives, which are conducted throughout Afghanistan, UNAMA has provided a platform for the youth of Afghanistan to have their say on peace,” Lyons noted.

“Most recently, in the rural province of Faryab, young participants issued their own declaration with strong recommendations, specifying an immediate ceasefire, setting out the role of Islam under Afghanistan’s constitution, identifying the all-important sustainable development goals and emphasising the need for transitional justice.

“These are the young people of Afghanistan, their voices deserve to be heard,” Lyons said, adding that cooperation throughout the region of Central and South Asia will be essential for enduring peace.

Lyons also noted an increasing commitment among regional players for peace in Afghanistan as this was linked to attaining peace within the region.

“Increased trade and connectivity will build the foundation for peace and regional prosperity,” Lyons said, adding it was important to support regional efforts, including the regional efforts on drug trafficking and transnational organised crime as these were considered two serious threats to peace.

Lyons said that any sustainable peace needed to be owned by Afghan’s diverse society. “This is only possible if the process is inclusive from the outset, with meaningful participation by all constituencies, including women, youth, minorities, victims of conflict, and religious leaders,” Lyons said.

She added that the ongoing security transition, with the international troop withdrawal, added to the anxiety of the Afghan population. She said in the coming months this larger security transition will become a central topic in the dialogue among Afghan officials, regional countries and the international community.

She, however, pointed out that the $3 billion raised in financial support for the country during a donor conference in Geneva was remarkable within the context of the current financial environment.

Lyons said that the full security transition, peace negotiations, the health and socio-economic challenges of COVID, the ongoing commitment of the international donors and the expected results of even more regional cooperation meant that Afghanistan would continue to move forward in this new year.

“By all accounts this was a big year. But a bigger year lies ahead,” she said.

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A herder is about to take his sheep to graze early in the morning in Mauritania, the West Sahel. Peacebuilding and stability in the region is dependent on solving the challenge of food and security, says the African Development Bank. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Nov 3 2020 (IPS)

In 2013, when Jamila Ben Baba started her company, the first privately owned slaughterhouse in Mali, she did so in the midst of a civil war as Tuareg rebels grouped together in an attempt to administer a new northern state called Azawad.

Ben Baba, who is originally from Timbuktu, in northern Mali — where much of the civil war conflict took place — based the business in the country’s western region of Kayes and grew it into what is considered the largest private slaughter house in the West African nation.

She started her business with a deep desire to develop one of the country’s first rural, raw resources — livestock.  Her aim was to promote Malian meat and to “make it known both in the sub-region and internationally”.

She said that while her business created 100 jobs, the company was evolving in a very difficult political and social context.

“War and Jihadists are rampant in the centre and north of Mali, which penalises us greatly in our livestock supply. Livestock farmers are forced to move constantly for their safety and that of their animals,” she said on Monday Nov. 2.

Ben Baba was speaking at the annual meeting of the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, during which various stakeholders met to call on member states to increase funding to the commission’s Peacebuilding Fund. The Peacebuilding Fund is used as an instrument of first resort to respond to and prevent conflict.

But the impact of an Aug. 18 coup and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have placed the country in an unprecedented economic crisis, she said.

“Closed borders have slowed down our exports. Several purchase orders in Ghana and Guinea have been cancelled.”

Hotels that were closed during the pandemic restrictions caused her company’s turnover to drop by more than half, she said.

Ben Baba’s business success, and the success of other businesses and industries in the country and on the continent, is directly linked to peace.

While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has “definitely already derailed Africa’s positive growth projectory and hit the poorest and most vulnerable particularly hard, especially in fragile states,” according to Khaled Sherif, the Vice-President, Regional Development, Integration and Business Delivery at the African Development Bank (AfDB), there remains “a direct link between poverty, and extreme poverty specifically, and terrorism, as is currently being witnessed in the Sahel”.

A report released by Amnesty International earlier this year noted that rife insecurity, food insecurity and more than 7.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance had left the region in crisis. In addition, the global coronavirus pandemic was expected to worsen the situation.

“The rise in violent extremism in the Sahel is linked to the conditions that the populations face in their daily lives. Many parts of the Sahel have never seen electricity, they have no access to potable water, education is at a premium, so these connects obviously lead to a deterioration of the security situation,” Sherif said during the same meeting.

He said that it was no surprising that in regions with chronic food insecurity, especially in Africa, “become unstable sooner or later”.

“We are all aware of the devastating consequences this means for peace, stability and social cohesion,” Sherif said.

But Ben Baba is convinced that her business could impact various factors of development within the country at different levels.

“From the bridges in our countryside, to the improvement of Mali’s balance of trade, with the creation of added value of course the creation of jobs in the Kayes region, which is usually the first region of emigration, especially for young people,” Ben Baba said.

A 2018 World Bank report showed that Mali needed to diversify its exports as “gold and cotton account for over 80 percent of total exports”. The report further suggested, “ an agriculture-based light manufacturing diversification strategy can deliver structural change by creating abundant and better paying jobs for low skilled Malians”.

Sherif called on the Peacebuilding Commission to address basic needs at a community level and to prioritise this accordingly.

“If generations of farmers are unable to get out of substance agriculture, there will always be a risk of conflict,” Sherif said. He said while there were many initiatives by development partners in this area, they all failed to reach the required scale.

“The Peacebuilding Commission should therefore focus on scaling up these interventions to avoid community pockets of fragility that lead to insecurity,” Sherif said.

He said that in Africa, where more than half the population of 1.3 billion live below the poverty line of less than $2 a day, “our priority has to be to create wealth and this takes us back to the reality of how we develop value chains,” Sherif said.

He added that the AfDB looked at the African Continental Free Trade Area as an opportunity to create a level of resilience.

But Sherif pointed out that on a continent of 54 countries, 26 countries had a GDP growth of 5 percent or more but in those same countries the GDP per capita was reducing, creating inequality.

“So how are African countries getting richer but the citizens of Africa are actually getting poorer? If we don’t address this issue, we are not addressing the basic reality of stability that is going to be a persistent problem, a perennial problem, that will affect Africa, especially fragile states, for many years to come,” Sherif said.

While there were many ways to address the issues, Sherif said he felt it was important “to start with the people and the communities that the live in, as this is where conflict ultimately manifests itself”.

He said that villages, towns, communities, local governments, municipalities could undertake certain measures to mobilise the needed investment to tackle the issues at the roots. 

“Our experience shows that food security can be enhanced locally by groups of producers getting together pooling cash resources and utilising local technologies to help with basic food processes. These are investments that can be done locally to create jobs and profit-sharing opportunities that enhance income.”

Ben Baba, however, pointed to the obstacles that women faced when accessing investment in her country.

“As a woman it’s very difficult to be involved in this very masculine world where the cultural barrier is very pronounced with prejudices against the female gender.

“Obtaining financing in a high-risk country remains complex,” she said. And if financing was given, the rates were too high that it would affect the company’s results, she explained.

“Indeed women know that the cultural problem in raising funds because of a lack of confidence in the female gender,” Ben Baba said.

She said that in order to convince one bank she had to invest almost 80 percent of a project’s equity, and despite this “we were very poorly supported by the banking network”.

“Malian industries are not very developed and those invested in by women are non-existent,” she said. “Attracting and convincing investors is almost impossible,” Ben Baba added.

But Sherif stressed that it was important to “find a model that is specific to regional development, that is specific to community development, that is specific to wealth creation, so we can begin to create a level of consumption based on increasing disposable income so we can begin to break this chain of lack of availability of growth of incomes, desperation and then lack of security.”

In a recorded message U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said he saw great value in enriching the U.N.’s partnership with international monetary funds.

“Sustained support for peacebuilding cannot be delivered by any single actor. It requires a multi-layered strategy with several layers of financing; bi-lateral, multi-lateral and international financial insinuations working in concert,” he said.

Guterres urged donors to reverse a worrying trend and commit to spend at least 20 percent of official development assistance on peacebuilding priorities in conflict settings. 

“As the world seeks to recover from COVID-19, countries will require carefully designed and conflict-sensitive support to get back onto a sustainable micro-economic footing,” Guterres said.

But he said that the demands for the fund were far outpacing the resources.

“We’ve already had to scale back our target for 2020 by $30 billion,” Guterres said. Already some member states had responded to his call for unspent committed peacekeeping budget and he called on others to do so.

Guterres welcomed the work of both the World Bank and African Development Bank.

“It is important that these funds help tackle conflict drivers, reach marginalised areas and support key governance needs, especially those that create the conditions for private sector investment.”

Guterres said more could be done to advance innovate financing solutions for peacebuilding, including partnerships with the private sector.

But Sherif pointed out: “So long as we don’t solve the challenge of food and security, we haven’t solved the problem of fragility and we will continue to see one crisis after the other.”

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Kenya’s Lake Turkana Wind Power project opened in July is generates 300 MW of wind power. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Nov 11 2019 (IPS)

Africa, where close to half of its 1.2 billion people have access to electricity, is set to become a world leader in renewable energy. As global business and development leaders met in Johannesburg, South Africa, to attend the Africa Investment Forum (AIF), held Nov. 11 to 13, one of the key focuses of the deals being discussed was around sustainable, renewable energy.

Organised by the African Development Bank (AfDB) and its various partners, the forum is expected to see $67 billion in deals closed over the next few days.

Leaders are doing all they can to encourage investment

In attendance where heads of state from South Africa, Ghana, Rwanda and Mozambique. At an invitation-only discussion among the leaders, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame said there was a lot of progress in Africa as a whole.

“I have always thought it was Africa’s time. We African’s have let ourselves down, we are now realising it has always been our time. And we are now seize every opportunity and be where we should be by now,” Kagame said.

• Kagame was the driver of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) during his time as chair of the African Union in 2018. The agreement had not been in existence during the first AIF last year.
• Established in March 2019, the AfCFTA has now been signed by 54 of the 55 African member states.

Alain Ebobisse, CEO of Africa 50, the Pan-African infrastructure investment platform capitalised by the AfDB, said that there was a consensus from African leaders that they needed to do whatever they could to attract more private investment. He said that the AIF attendance showed that there was a changing narrative for investment on the continent.

• Earlier figures had been revealed by the South African premier of Gauteng Province, David Makhura, that over 2,000 delegates were in attendance from 109 countries. Of this, only 40 percent where from Africa with the majority of investors attending from Asia, Europe and the Americas.
• Gauteng is South Africa’s wealthiest province and includes the financial centres of Johannesburg and Sandton, as well as the seat of government in Pretoria. 

Renewable energy on a positive trajectory   

Ebobisse said that a lot was already happening on the continent and while the media focused on the challenges there were huge success stories too — like the 1.5 GW Benban Solar Park in Egypt, which is the world’s largest solar photovoltaic plant.

“I’m sure that people are not talking enough about this major achievement which is the Benban Solar Programmer, 1.5 GW of solar that was invested mostly by the private sector in a record time,” he said.

• Africa 50 invested in 400 MW in that project and completed it from design to commercial operations in two and a half years.

Ebobisse went on to highlight Kenya’s opening this July of the Lake Turkana Wind Power project, which at a generation capacity of 300 MW makes it the largest wind power project on the continent.

“It was funded by the private sector,” Ebobisse told the media. He also looked towards Senegal which was implementing many independent power producers or IPPs in the solar sector.

“So there is a lot that is happening. We need to also widely understand the challenges and understand what is happening on the ground. And people are actually making good money in this investment. And there is nothing wrong about that. Let’s celebrate those successes,” he said.

African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina said today the bank had doubled its investment in climate finance from $12 billion to $25 billion by 2020. Credit: Nalisha Adams/IPS

Making Africa a world leader in renewables

A few weeks ago, the Governors of the AfDB met in Cote d’Ivoire’s capital Abidjan, approving a historic $115 billion increase to the bank’s authorised capital base to $208 billion. “This is the highest capital increase in the history of the bank since its establishment in 1964,” AfDB president Akinwumi Adesina said today.

During the October announcement Adesina had said that a significant portion of funding would be invested in climate change.

Today, in response to a question from IPS, Adesina further explained that the bank had doubled its investment in climate finance from $12 billion to $25 billion by 2020.

“Almost 50 percent of our finance will be going to climate adaptation as opposed to climate mitigation. So we are the first multilateral development bank to actually reach that balance in terms of adaptation and mitigation,” he said.

• Climate mitigation is the actions taken to reduce or curb greenhouse gases, thereby addressing the causes of climate change to prevent future warming. However, climate adaptation addresses how to live with the impacts of climate change.

“I believe that coal is the past. I believe that renewable energy is the future and we as a bank are investing in not in the past, but in the future in making sure that we are investing in solar energy, in hydro energy, in wind, all types of renewable energy that Africa needs,” Adesina said.

“We want Africa to lead in renewable energy.”

He said one of the projects was the AfDB’s Green Baseload Facility, which according to the bank, aims “to accelerate the transition towards more sustainable baseload power generation options and prevent countries from locking themselves into environmentally damaging and potentially economically costly technologies”.

“It’s a $500-million facility that we have set up to support countries that want to shift out of fuel-based energy into renewable energy and providing access to finance at a cheaper rate to be able to make that transition,” Adesina said.

• The bank’s biggest investment is the Desert to Power project, which was announced in December at the United Nations’ Climate Conference in Katowice, Poland.
• The initiative plans to supply 10 GW of solar energy by 2025 to 250 million people across 11 Sahelian countries. 

“That would make it the largest solar zone in the world,” Adesina stated. The bank will work in partnership with various investors to also establish plants on the continent that will manufacture the solar panels for the project.

• The AfDB has always stated “a lack of energy remains a significant impediment to Africa’s economic and social development“.
• According to AfDB, energy poverty in Africa is estimated to cost the continent 2 to 4  percent  GDP annually.

Africa’s climate crisis

The continent is facing climate change impact with rising temperatures and reduced rainfall.

The Sahel, which lies between The Sahara and the Sudanian Savanna, offers a blaze of sunlight with little rain as it is the region where temperatures are rising faster than anywhere else on Earth, according to the Great Green Wall initiative, a project that aims to reverse desertification and land degradation in the area.   

Last month, IPS reported that as The Sahara desert continues to expand, it tears apart families, forces migration from rural areas to cities and has contributed to conflict for precious resources of water, land and food.  

In July, IPS reported that the parts of Kenya had already warmed to above 1.5˚C — a figure deemed acceptable by global leaders during the 2015 Paris Agreement. But at such high temperatures a study found that over the last four decades livestock some Kenyan counties had decline by almost a quarter because of the temperature increase over time.

• During the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris in 2015, all countries committed under the Paris Agreement to “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”.
• But last year the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report warning that the world would face the risk of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty at a temperature rise of 1.5°C.

Siby Diabira, regional head for Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean for PROPARCO, a subsidiary of Agence Française de Développement (AFD) focused on private sector development, told IPS that last year the group did $1.76 billion in investment deals, half of which was in Africa. Credit: Nalisha Adams/IPS

However, the forum showed that there remain a number of investors looking to provide funding for renewables and other development project on the continent. 

Siby Diabira, regional head for Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean for PROPARCO, a subsidiary of Agence Française de Développement (AFD) focused on private sector development, told IPS that last year the group did $1.76 billion in investment deals, half of which was in Africa. The AIF was still in its early stages to make a pronouncement on the success of the deals, Diabira said, but “so far so good”.

Diabira said the French development agencies aimed to be 100 percent compliant with the Paris Agreement and hence were investing heavily in renewable energy.

• She explained that PROPARCO was involved in “all types of renewable energy from hydro to solar to wind”, adding that there was a need for a mix of both traditional and renewable energy generation.

“I have been attending some of the boardroom [discussions]. It is a quite interesting gathering to have for the second year and to have so many different types of investors and projects that are raising funds for these types of events,” she said.

“We have been present in financing the first few rounds of renewable energy projects in South Africa and our idea is also as a [Development Financial Institution] DFI to be able to contribute to create this market for the commercial banks to come with us on those types of projects,” Diabira said.

Admassu Tadesse, President of the Trade and Development Bank, also pointed out that partnership agreements among the various banks and partners had strengthen their position in deals.

“If you have smart partnerships you can scale up collectively. With the African Development Bank we have signed a risk participation agreement to the tune of $300 million, which will allow us to move speedily into fields and have partners coming into deals alongside us.”

He said they expected to soon sign a deal with the European Investment Bank (EIB) that will again strengthen their position.

EIB vice president Ambroise Fayolle said they were attending this year with great intentions to develop transactions. He said it came on the back of their 2018 record year of investments in the continent, which amounted to some $3.6 billion — more than 50 percent of which was in the private sector. The bank signed 3 partnerships already, he said, none of which would have been possible without the AIF.

And as Adesina stated in a video message at the start of the forum, “Let the deals begin”.

A new report, Fixing the Business of Food, advocates the aligning of business practices to the SDGs. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Nalisha Adams and Busani Bafana
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa/BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Sep 16 2019 (IPS)

Arama Sire Camara, a fruit and vegetable seller in the province of Kindia, some 135 km from the Guinean capital of Conakry, feels safer trading well into the night thanks to the Rural Electrification Project, financed by 21-million-dollar investment by the African Development Bank.

“With lighting on the road at night and illuminating our goods, it means we are safer, especially with all the cars on the road. You can work for longer after nightfall, and so we can make more of our products,” she says.

Shuaibu Yusuf, a farmer from Nigeria, can now not only afford to pay for the food for his family thanks to his high yields that are resultant of the high-quality fertiliser he is able to access through the AfDB programme, Feed Africa, but he can also pay his children’s educational costs and his family’s medical bills.

In South Africa’s Limpopo province, Sarina Malatji, now a 39-year-old mother of three, grew up in an area where access to education was limited. But thanks to investment from AfDB in the state power utility Eskom’s Medupi Leadership Initiative and the Eskom Contractors Academy, her life now is a far cry from her childhood. She is now the owner of her own cleaning business – Green Dot – which currently employs 115 people at the Medupi power plant, one of the largest energy projects in the country. She says the skills she learned through the leadership initiative helped her grown her business.

These are just the stories of a few people who have been the beneficiaries of investments made by the AfDB across the continent.

From supporting the construction of a 563 km power transmission line in Mozambique as part of a commitment to aid post cyclone Idai recovery through restoration of livelihoods and infrastructure; to singing a 28.8-million-dollar grant deal with Somalia for road and water projects; to signing a 4.8-million-dollar grant with the African Union for a continental free trade secretariat; and to committing to pool its resources with other stakeholders to counter food insecurity on the continent. This year has already seen the AfDB make a huge footprint in terms of development.

Last year, the bank’s Global Benchmark programme successfully launched two large global benchmark issuances in the dollar market of two billion dollars each and a 1.25 billion euro 10-year bond.

“Africa will develop not through aid but through the discipline of investments,” AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina said, noting that the bank and partners had launched the Africa Investment Forum in 2018, which raised 38.7 billion dollars in investment deals.

But as the AfDB wrapped up the 20th annual meeting of world’s leading financial institutions last week at the bank’s headquarters in Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire, plans are underway for a renewed push for Africa’s development as the bank lobbies for a general capital increase from shareholders.

The bank is committed to assisting Africa tap into its potential to be a competitive global investment destination with Charles Boamah, senior Vice President of the bank, citing talks around the general capital increase, stating that “this is a pivotal year, a year in which very, very important decisions are being made about what kind of bank we want to have for the next 20 years.”

Earlier this year, Canada committed 1.1 billion dollars in temporary callable capital to support AfDB. Canada also urged other AAA-rated member countries to join Canada in providing support to the bank.

At the time Adesina welcomed the announcement saying it was a “huge boost”. He said that it would allow the bank to “strengthen its Triple A rating and increase lending to member countries while discussions are ongoing among all shareholders for a general capital increase.” Canada has been a member of the AfDB since 1983 and is the 4th-largest shareholder among the bank’s non-regional member countries.

Adesina was in Japan at the end of August to attend the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) where he told Japanese companies, “Africa presents a compelling return for investors”.

The AfDB is upbeat about Africa’s economic growth, which it has supported through various funding services availed to its 54 regional member countries.

In 2018, Africa recorded real GDP growth of 3.5 percent, the bank said in its 2018 annual report. This is a positive development for harnessing new investment on the continent.

The bank said 17 African countries achieved real GDP growth higher than 5 percent in 2018, and 21 countries showed growth between 3 and 5 percent. Only five African countries recorded a recession in 2018, down from eight in the two previous years. Six of the world’s 10-fastest growing economies are African nations, which include Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Libya, Rwanda, and Senegal.

According to the bank, some non-resource-rich countries had high growth rates in 2018, including Côte d’Ivoire (7.4 percent), Rwanda (7.2 percent), and Senegal (7 percent), supported by agricultural production, consumer demand, and public investment.

Economic fundamentals in most African countries continued to improve, the bank said, attributing this to fiscal consolidation and massive investments in infrastructure, major inroads in financial innovation, increased domestic demand, and substantial improvements in the investment climate.

Developing Africa

Convinced of Africa’s strong economic growth potential, the bank has continued to invest in various sectors. In 2018, the bank approved lending worth 9.95 billion dollars under its High 5s programmes — five programmes that focus on key sectors:

• Light Up and Power Africa, approvals amounted to 1.9 billion dollars, 23 percent more than in  2017, with 447 MW in new total power capacity being installed—197 MW of it renewable. Close to 90 percent of bank lending was focused on investment in infrastructure.
• Feed Africa, saw 19 million people provided with improved agricultural technologies, with 1,700 tons of agricultural inputs (fertilisers, seeds, etc) provided. Almost 1.54 billion dollars was approved in 2018 to transform agriculture on the continent.
• Industrialise Africa saw 154,000 owner-operators and micro, small, and medium enterprises provided with access to financial services. Additional loans  supported  activities  across  a  wide  range of manufacturing and services in the private sector. 
• Integrate Africa has seen about 14 million people gaining access to better transport services. The bank approved investments to the value of over one billion dollars, and to invested more than 20  million dollars over the past five years in trade agreement support and in cross-border transport, and energy soft infrastructure.
• Improve the Quality of Life for the People of Africa, project saw 8 million people benefit from improved access to water and sanitation.

“By any measure, these numbers and impacts are impressive,” said Adesina. “But the needs in Africa are enormous. That is why the bank is engaged in discussions with its shareholders for a General Capital Increase to do much more for Africa—toward Agenda 2063.”

Risks remain

Despite Africa’s GDP growing by an estimated 3.5 percent in 2018, the continent’s economic growth is threatened by domestic risks such as climate change, security and migration concerns, increasing vulnerability to debt distress in some countries, and uncertainties associated with elections and political transitions, the bank said, recommending significant private sector investment and external funding  in regional infrastructure and financing.

On average, Africa’s fiscal deficit declined from 5.8 percent in 2017 to an estimated 4.5 percent in 2018, while inflation fell from 12.6 percent in 2017 to 10.9 percent in 2018. However, the bank lamented that these growth rates remained insufficient to address the persistent challenges of high unemployment, low agricultural productivity, inadequate infrastructure, and fiscal and current deficits as well as debt vulnerabilities.

Although tax revenues and spending efficiency have improved, domestic resource mobilisation has generally remained well short of potential, said the bank, noting that 16 African countries were classified as being in debt distress or at high risk of debt distress at the end of 2018. The bank urged the strengthening of the debt-investment links to ensure a high social return on debt-financed public investments.

“I am optimistic about Africa’s future. I am confident in our capacity as a Bank to make a greater impact on the lives of millions of people across this beloved continent we have been called to serve,” Adesina said, adding that, “We need universal access to electricity. We must help make Africa self-sufficient in food. We must fully integrate the continent. We must industrialise the continent. And we must improve the quality of life for the people of Africa.”

Filipino businessman Ariel Lazarte was diagnosed with Hansen’s Disease in 2014. Since his treatment he has built a successful business and has become a patron for those affected by the disease. Credit: Nalisha Adams/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
MANILA, Mar 4 2019 (IPS)

When Ariel Lazarte from Quezon City, Philippines, was first diagnosed with leprosy in 2014, his life seemed as if it were falling apart. But now more than four years later Lazarte’s life is a huge contrast from the poverty and isolation he experienced as a person affected by leprosy.

Now the owner of multiple businesses, including ones in transport and construction, and the owner of a large family home as well as an in-patient home for persons receiving treatment for leprosy, Lazarte was driven to become a success by his strong desire to help others.

“I didn’t get any help from my family, my friends, my relatives. I only trusted the doctor,” Lazarte tells IPS of the year he spent receiving treatment for leprosy, which is also known as Hansen’s Disease. “I was very thirsty for the help from others. I was in need.”

He was one of the participants of the Regional Assembly of Organisations of People Affected by Leprosy in Asia. The assembly is being held in Manila, Philippines, Mar. 3 to 5 and is supported by the Nippon Foundation (TNF)-one of the biggest private foundations in Japan that has been working to provide assistance to people with leprosy since the late 1960s.

At the time of the diagnosis, the then 32-year-old who worked as a manager in a fast food store, was able to afford treatment at a private hospital. But instead of being cured, his condition worsened.

Eventually, he lost his job and felt more and more alone as his wife stopped sharing a bed with him and his friends stopped visiting. His wife’s dried fish kiosk business become their sole support of income and much of the money was spent on survival and not medicine.

And while he kept receiving treatment, he kept thinking: “I’m dying.”

Eventually Lazarte’s doctor told him he couldn’t cure him and referred him to the Jose Reyes Memorial Hospital. He began an 8-month treatment course that eventually cured him.

“The doctor promised me I would be helped. And I promised that I would help those with leprosy,” Lazarte says, explaining that it didn’t want others who were affected by the disease to experience what he did.

According to a World Health Organisation report, the country has 2,000 new leprosy patients a year. Dr Maria Francia Laxamana, assistant secretary of Health in the Department of Health, says only one in four receive treatment because many fear the social stigma.

Unique to the Philippines, jeepneys are long wheel based taxis, converted from American jeeps left in the country after World War II. Credit: Nalisha Adams/IPS

But after a year of treatment that cured him of Hansen’s Disease, Lazarte started fulfilling his promise.

Lazarte started small. With 15 dollars, he bought some shorts and pillows and began selling them. Soon he bought a tricycle – a Filipino transport bicycle with a small cab. And soon he owned seven of these.

And then later he was able to afford a jeepney. Unique to the Philippines, jeepneys are long wheel based taxis, converted from American jeeps left in the country after World War II.

He is now the owner of 12 jeepneys.

With the money from the businesses he built a 4-bedroom in-patient home for those receiving treatment for Hansen’s disease. Situated just outside the capital, it houses people receiving treatment at the Jose Reyes Memorial Hospital. The property also has a car so the patients can drive to the hospital, which is some 45 minutes away, for their check ups.

He’s very clear about what he spent the income from these business on in the early days. “I knew that my wife was able to support my children …so I kept on dreaming of having enough money to buy my afford to the house [for the leprosy patients].”

While they now have a large home and not all Lazarte’s income goes into the in-patient home, Lazarte says that wants the Hansen’s Disease patients to learn to self-sufficient. They have a garden to plant vegetables for resale and recently received funding for a poultry project.

“I started my own pathway for my own direction,” he tells IPS.

Dr Cyrus Rustomjee, a former director of economic affairs at the Commonwealth Secretariat, says there is clearly the will, the determination, the excitement, the collective endeavour at an African level to take the blue economy forward. Credit: Nalisha Adams/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
NAIROBI, Nov 26 2018 (IPS)

The first every global conference to address the twin focuses on both conservation and economic growth of the oceans has fulfilled the broad range of expectations it set out to define.

It could also be starting point for spurring on a whole new range of global development co-ordination challenges harmonising terrestrial and ocean-related laws and treaties.

This is according to Dr. Cyrus Rustomjee, a former director of economic affairs at the Commonwealth Secretariat, and a senior fellow with Global Economy Programme, Centre for International Governance Innovation.

Rustomjee was at the Sustainable Blue Economy Conference in Nairobi, Kenya as some 18,000 participants gathered in the East African nation. The conference hosted by the Kenyan government and co-hosted by Canada and Japan, set out to discuss how to create economic growth that is inclusive and sustainable, how to ensure healthy and productive waters, and how to build safe and resilient communities.

Rustomjee has held various positions for his native South Africa with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. IPS was able to speak to the South African who holds a Ph.D. in Economics and a Masters in Development Economics.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Inter Press Service (IPS): Can you tell us in terms of this conference what were the expectations that you had coming here.

Cyrus Rustomjee (CR): I think I didn’t want to create expectations for myself about this because it is the inaugural Sustainable Blue Economy Conference. It hasn’t happened before in this way. We have had conferences on the Blue Economy in various parts of the world, we have had global United Nations-driven conferences. We haven’t had one which tries to bring together the conservation and the growth dimensions of the Blue Economy.

In the past they have really been seen as two contending perspectives of the Blue Economy, where as in fact what this conference is saying is that they are part and parcel of a sustainable blue economy. You have to have sustainability of the oceans if you want to harness the wealth or other opportunities from it. But at the same time you can’t continuously focus on conservation because there will be some who will exploit the ocean while others persist simply with conservation.

So the benefits that the ocean offers will be then inequitably shared.

No one wanted to confront this issue at a global level. And to try to discern practical ways to harmonise this and to bring these two strands, which is a common concept together. So I didn’t have any particular expectations. I had a whole lot of questions about the scope and the ambition of the conference. And that has been fully fulfilled. Because I think the scope is enormous, it’s covered a very very wide range of policy issues, a wide range of conceptual issues, it’s brought it science, it’s brought in legal frameworks and transboundary challenges which are part of the unique characteristics of this sustainable blue economy concept.

It really has brought many many countries to the table to discuss, in some sense without preconceived positions, which is very valuable. Which is really saying let us kind of take a step back and then take a collective step forward. And I think that is what is happening at this conference.

IPS: In light of what you have heard, what are your first impressions?

CR: It is only day one. First impressions are that I wasn’t sure to what extent an African voice would come forward. Because it is in this space that the fullest potential of the Blue Economy will reveal itself or not in the years ahead. So Africa has watched the oceans being utilised and has hesitated to utilise the resources of the oceans for a whole host of reasons, including insufficient technology, skills, human resources, legislative frameworks, co-ordination at an inter-continental level and many many other factors.

Whereas I would say many advanced economies particularly have gone surging ahead with the blue economy, whether sustainable or not, I don’t know.

Now Africa has an opportunity to take advantage of all of that. And build on continental momentum to do so in many other areas. For example, we just recently secured a continental free trade arrangement and there are already ingrained in African continent-wide policies and strategies the concept of the Blue Economy. It is the 2063 Agenda [of the African Union]. It is in the 2050 Africa Integrated Maritime Strategy (AIMS) framework. Not it is time to operationalise it in practical ways.

So a big take-away from me is there is clearly the will, the determination, the excitement, the collective endeavour at an African level to take this forward.

I think if there is anything we look back on in, say five years from now, we will look back at two things. One is, this is where the world got together to recognise this concept as a practical mechanism in some sense for operationalising sustainable development fully. Not only in terrestrial activity but across the whole spectrum of what the earth’s surface is.

We started also talking today about the interaction and the interplay between the terrestrial sustainable development framework and the ocean and realising it is actually a single framework…

The second big thing from today is the arrival of the African Blue Economy as a real prospect.

IPS: Kenya says it wants to lead the way in building a sustainable blue economy. With your background in finance and development, can you give us some key take-aways they need to look at?

CR: It’s a difficult one because we are very much in a pioneering state for a continent that has 38 coastal states, and has 31,000 km of coastline, and which also has 13 million square kilometres of exclusive economic zone. It’s a huge, huge environment. [The number of people living along the coast] is high and it’s rising. For a whole host of reasons.

We are at the dawn of the journey. We are at the dawn but in the context where there are many components that is encouraging many african countries have started developing their blue economy strategies and laws and concepts. And they have started to tackle some of the co-ordination issues that come with that, simply-explained ones, co-ordination between the coastal tourism and fisheries sectors, for example, jurisdictional issues between different portfolios, they’ve developed integrated coastal zone management strategies and many have developed marine protected areas and have started working on the challenges in sustaining those.

Many have been in the forefront, globally now, of innovative blue finance [for example the Seychelles issued a Blue Bond last month]. We are seeing a lot more activity at a regional level. We are starting actively to see discussion about how to integrate regional and continental initiatives. In a certain sense the Blue Economy in an African context is an African Blue Economy, not an African-specific national series of Blue Economies.

That is where the full potential of the Blue Economy will arise, rather than at a national level. We are starting to see this is part of the longer-term vision which we will end up realising as a continent.

So there are lots of promises, lots of opportunity and lots of action. But a lot of action is happening at a national level and some critical steps for the future now, in an African context is to build the institutional capacity to share knowledge, experience within the continent and to build the institutions what will quickly bring the inter-continental collaboration needed to realise the Blue Economy.

Excerpt:

A leatherback turtle on the beach. Communities in Trinidad and Tobago are actively conserving the leatherback. Courtesy: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region Follow/CC by 2.0

By Nalisha Adams
NAIROBI, Nov 26 2018 (IPS)

On the north-eastern shores of Trinidad and Tobago, on the shoreline of Matura, more than 10,000 leatherback turtles climb the beaches to nest each year. But there the local community is keenly area of one thing: ‘a turtle alive is worth more than a turtle dead.”

It’s a lesson the community learned almost three decades ago when the government of Trinidad and Tobago first created a tour guide training course in the north-eastern region. Dennis Sammy, Treasurer of the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute (CANARI), also a community leader from Matura, was part of the course. But instead of just working as tour guides, the community had a bigger vision of conservation, at a time when people were “killing lots of turtles”.

The area of Matura is one of the few places in the world where the leatherback turtles nest. Sammy tells IPS that it is also easily accessible via a beach road, something which places the turtles at risk to poachers.

But in four years the community residents, who had formed a conservation organisation, were able to stop the slaughter of turtles, Sammy tells IPS. The residents themselves had been part of the problem initially, he adds.

“They changed because the community became part of the solution.”

By 2000, the population of turtles rose as a result of the conservation efforts, thereby creating a problem for local fishers as up to 30 turtles a day became caught in their nets.

Now, ecotourism is practiced and people pay to come watch the turtles nesting.

Sammy is one of the participants at the Sustainable Blue Economy Conference, which is currently being held in Kenya and spoke to IPS alongside a side event on blue enterprises.

He uses the above example of turtle conservation as a key example of a community-led intuitive during the discussion on the blue enterprise titled “SIDS inclusive economic development through community-led conservation and social enterprise”.

“We have seen one turtle, by documenting and tagging it, come up so many times and we have been able to identify the number of people seeing this turtle. And we have traced back the value that these people pay to come and look at this turtle, and it’s a very high value,” Sammy says.

He explains that this is clear to the local communities that, “a turtle is worth more alive than dead”.

Nicole Leotaud, Executive Director of CANARI, a non-profit technical institute which facilities and promotes participatory natural resource management, says that in order to engage further community engagement, the Local Green-Blue Enterprise Radar, a tool that engages small enterprises by questioning them about their sustainability.

The radar is a list of questions, with each question being an indicator related to the SDGs. It looks particularly at poverty, environmental sustainability, well-being, and good governance.

This happens through a facilitated process where each and every member of the enterprise, not just business leaders, are asked probing questions.

“The blue economy and green economy are very top-down concepts being imposed on us. How do we make it real and how do we involve local communities and recognise small and micro enterprises as part of economic development?

“Very much you are hearing about big sectors, tourism and shipping and [seabed] mining and how do you involve the real enterprises that are there and always doing it?”

Nicole Leotaud, Executive Director of CANARI, a non-profit technical institute which facilities and promotes participatory natural resource management. Credit: Nalisha Adams/IPS

CANARI asked the questions how local, rural and marginalised communities could become part of the movement that was not only delivering economic benefits to communities but also asked how these communities could practice environmental sustainability.

“The radar is really designed for community enterprises that are using natural resources,” Leotard tells IPS.

“They are already starting to make changes. We are not telling them to make changes, it is a self-discovery.”

Leotaud explains that the organisation Grande Riviera Turtle Conservation experienced a similar process of discovery.

“One community enterprise working on turtle conservation have big tanks where they keep baby turtles, if these have been born in the day,” Leotaud says. She says thanks to the radar, the organisation then looked into not merely conserving turtles but also conserving water and using renewable energy.

“They said can we think about renewable energy. It would not only be good for the environment but it would be a steady energy supply because [they are based] in a remote village where they are cut off [from electricity] all the time.

“They realised that they can do better in terms of energy and water. And they realised they have a few powerful leaders but they are not doing enough to engage other members of the enterprise and bring them in, they are not doing enough to build partnerships,” says Leotaud.

“They said: ‘Ah now we see how we are part of the blue economy.’”

Mitchell Lay of the Caribbean Network of Fisherfolk Organisation says that in order to help community enterprises become part of the blue economy and to become even stronger, the actors already operating in the space have to be recognised.

The small fisheries sector, he says has “across the globe operating in the aqua environment over 90 million individuals. In the Caribbean region, the Caribbean community alone, we have in excess of 150,000 operating in the entire production already in the blue economy space.”

He says their contributions should be recognised. These contributions include “not only to SDG 14, but to the other SDGs. Their contribution to eradicating poverty, in terms of job creation, their contribution to human health and wellness. The contribution to ending hunger.”

Lay says support is critical because of the nature of the enterprises as they are small and micro and that their sustainable development needed to be promoted.

“So support from a policy perspective, support from other perspectives as well, capacity development etc.”

Meanwhile Leotaud says that “Community enterprises especially because they are informal they are marginalised. They are not part of the decision making they are not part of the discussion. So how can we get them to feel a part of this movement, for them to make their own transformation? And for them to call on governments?”

She explains more enabling policies were needed and that CANARI was working on building a more enabling environment for the micro enterprises.

She says that community enterprises don’t have access to finance, and that the technical capacity available in countries for enterprise development was not tailored for them.

Fruit and vegetable prices in South Africa have increased to the point that poorer people have had to remove them from their grocery lists. Credit: Nalisha Adams/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
JOHANNESBURG, Aug 10 2018 (IPS)

Every Sunday afternoon, Thembi Majola* cooks a meal of chicken and rice for her mother and herself in their home in Alexandra, an informal settlement adjacent to South Africa’s wealthy economic hub, Sandton.

“Vegetables is only on Sunday,” Majola tells IPS, adding that these constitute potatoes, sweet potato and pumpkin. Majola, who says she weighs 141 kgs, has trouble walking short distances as it generally leaves her out of breath. And she has been on medication for high blood pressure for almost two decades now.“It is precisely a justice issue because at the very least our economy should be able to provide access to sufficient and nutritious food. Because, at the basis of our whole humanity, at the very basis of our body, is our nutrition." -- Mervyn Abrahams, Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group

“Maize is a first priority,” she says of the staple item that always goes into her shopping basket. “Every Saturday I eat boerewors [South African sausage]. And on Sunday it is chicken and rice. During the week, I eat mincemeat once and then most of the time I fill up my stomach with [instant] cup a soup,” she says of her diet.

Majola is one of about 68 percent of South African women who are overweight or obese, according to the South African Demographic and Health Survey. The Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition’s Food Sustainability Index (FSI) 2017 ranks 34 countries across three pillars: sustainable agriculture; nutritional challenges; and food loss and waste.  South Africa ranks in the third quartile of the index in 19th place. However, the country has a score of 51 on its ability to address nutritional challenges. The higher the score, the greater the progress the country has made. South Africa’s score is lower than a number of countries on the index.

Families go into debt to pay for basic foods

Many South Africans are eating a similar diet to Majola’s not out of choice, but because of affordability.

Dr. Kirthee Pillay, lecturer of dietetics and human nutrition at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, tells IPS that the increase of carbohydrate-based foods as a staple in most people’s diets is cost-related.

“Fruit and vegetable prices have increased to the point that poorer people have had to remove them from their grocery lists.”

The Pietermaritzburg Agency for Community Social Action (Pacsa), a social justice non-governmental organisation, noted last October in its annual food barometer report that while the median wage for black South Africans is USD209 a month, a monthly food basket that is nutritionally complete costs USD297.

The report also noted that food expenditure from households arise out of the monies left over after non-negotiable expenses, such as transport, electricity, debt and education needs have been paid first. And this resulted in many families incurring debt in order to meet their food bills.

“Staples are cheaper and more filling and people depend on these, especially when there is less money available for food and many people to feed. Fruit and vegetables are becoming luxury food items for many people given the increasing cost of food. Thus, the high dependence on cheaper, filling staples. However, an excessive intake of carbohydrate-rich foods can increase risk for obesity,” Pillay tells IPS via email.

Majola works at a national supermarket chain, with her only dependent being her elderly mother. She says her grocery bill comes to about USD190 each month, higher than what most average families can afford, but agrees that the current cost of fruit and vegetables are a luxury item for her.

“They are a bit expensive now. Maybe they can sell them at a lesser price,” she says, adding that if she could afford it, she would have vegetables everyday. “Everything comes from the pocket.”

Monopoly of Food Chain Creating a System that Makes People Ill

David Sanders, emeritus professor at the school of public health at the University of the Western Cape, says that South Africans have a very high burden of ill health, much of which is related to their diet.

But he adds that large corporates dominate every node of the food chain in the country, starting from inputs and production, all the way to processing, manufacturing and retail. “So it is monopolised all the way up the food system from the farm to the fork.”

“The food system is creating, for poor people anyway, a quite unhealthy food environment. So for well-off people there is sufficient choice and people can afford a nutritionally-adequate diet, even one of quite high quality.

“But poor people can’t. In most cases, the great majority, don’t have a kind of subsistence farming to fall back on because of land policies and the fact that in the 24 years of democracy there hasn’t been significant development of small scale farming,” Sanders, who is one of the authors of a report on food systems in Brazil, South Africa and Mexico, tells IPS.

According to the report, about 35,000 medium and large commercial farmers produce most of South Africa’s food.

In addition, Sanders points out that a vast majority of rural South Africans purchase, rather than grow, their own food.

“The food they can afford tends to be largely what we call ultra processed or processed food. That often provides sufficient calories but not enough nutrients. It tends to be quite low often in good-quality proteins and low in vitamins and minerals – what we call hyper nutrients.

“So the latter situation results in quite a lot of people becoming overweight and obese. And yet they are poorly nourished,” Sanders explains.

The Sugar Tax Not Enough to Stem Epidemic of Obesity

In April, South Africa introduced the Sugary Beverages Levy, which charges manufacturers 2.1 cents per gram of sugar content that exceeds 4g per 100 ml. The levy is part of the country’s department of health’s efforts to reduce obesity.

Pillay says while it is still too early to tell if the tax will be effective, in her opinion “customers will fork out the extra money being charged for sugar-sweetened beverages. Only the very poor may decide to stop buying them because of cost.”

Sander’s points out “it’s not just the level of obesity, it is the rate at which this has developed that is so alarming.”

A study shows that the number of young South Africans suffering from obesity doubled in the last six years, while it had taken the United States 13 years for this to happen.

“Here is an epidemic of nutrition, diet-related diseases, which has unfolded extremely rapidly and is just as big and as threatening and expensive as the HIV epidemic, and yet it is going largely unnoticed.”

Overweight people have a risk of high blood pressure, diabetes and hypertension, which places them at risk for heart disease. One of South Africa’s largest medical aid schemes estimated in a report that the economic impact on the country was USD50 billion a year.

“Even if people knew what they should eat there is very very little room for manoeuvre. There is some, but not much,” Sanders says adding that people should rather opt to drink water rather than purchase sugary beverages.

“Education and awareness is a factor but I would say that these big economic drivers are much more important.”

Sanders says that questions need to be asked about how the control of the country’s food system and food chain can “be shifted towards smaller and more diverse production and manufacture and distributions.”

“Those are really the big questions. It would require very targeted and strong policies on the part of government. That would be everything from preferentially financing small operators [producers, manufacturers and retailers]…at every level there would have to be incentives, not just financial, but training and support also,” he says.

Pillay agrees that the increase in food prices “needs to be addressed as it directly influences what people are able to buy and eat. … Sustainable agriculture should assist in reducing the prices of locally-grown fruit and vegetables and to make them more available to South African consumers.”

Mervyn Abrahams, one of the authors of the Pacsa report, now a programme coordinator at the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group, tells IPS that the organisation is campaigning for a living wage that should be able to provide households with a basic and sufficient nutrition in their food basket. The matter, he says, is one of economic justice.

“It is precisely a justice issue because at the very least our economy should be able to provide access to sufficient and nutritious food. Because, at the basis of our whole humanity, at the very basis of our body, is our nutrition. And so it is the most basic level by which we believe that the economy should be judged, to see whether there is equity and justice in our economic arena.”

*Not her real name.

By Nalisha Adams
JOHANNESBURG, Oct 22 2009 (IPS)

Eleven years ago, Raloke Odetoyinbo had been married for two years and a month when she found out she was HIV positive.

Graça Machel: hold government to account on prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS in mothers and children. Credit: Erik Forster/CEPA

But she still wanted to bear children and be a mother.

"Naturally in my society it is (bearing children) that makes you, what defines your womanhood. If you cannot have children your value as a human being is completely diminished," Odetoyinbo said.

And eventually deciding to fall pregnant was not an easy choice for Odetoyinbo.

"That was something I had to struggle with. I had access to the information and realised if I worked with my doctors I did have a chance to have a baby which was not HIV-infected," she said.

She was fortunate to have access to effective antiretroviral (ARVs) medication to prevent transmission of the virus to her unborn child.

But she is aware that many women in her country and the rest of Africa are not as fortunate. Odetoyinbo, who is now the project director of Nigeria's Positive Action for Treatment Access group, says she wants other HIV-positive women to have the same chance that she had to access ARVs.

It is one of the reasons why she has joined the newly launched Campaign to End Pediatric HIV/AIDS. CEPA is a network of civil society organisations which aims to eliminate pediatric HIV/AIDS by preventing parent-to-child transmission through the access to ARVs. CEPA also aims to ensure better access to pediatric treatment and care for HIV positive children.

CEPA is a three-year campaign that will initially focus on six countries: Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia and Nigeria. Of these six countries, Kenya has the highest number of HIV-positive children, 155,000.

Graça Machel, chair of CEPA's pan-African Leadership Council, said that sometimes one gets blinded by the huge numbers.

"It is not the numbers in my mind. It is the eyes of the children. Sometimes I have sleepless nights because I know this child is not going to live for another month," Machel recalled.

Speaking to IPS, Machel said that while children are vulnerable, they are also resilient and it is adults' responsibility to ensure that those born are not infected.

Figures show that most first world and industrialised countries have been able to reduce pediatric infection to less than two percent. But currently 90 percent of new worldwide infections occur in sub-Saharan Africa.

Odetoyinbo said that while the Millennium Development Goal Six is to halt and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015, CEPA plans to reduce the number of pediatric infections by 80 percent by 2012.

"The only reason why we have so many children who have HIV is because women are neglected. We need to give women access to services for treatment, for detection. You cannot give someone something you don't have. So you can't give your child HIV if you don’t have it," Odetoyinbo said.

She urged people to hold their governments accountable. She said Nigeria was an example of this. "It is possible to hold government accountable. I saw people change the way things are done… that is how we got free (HIV) treatment in Nigeria," Odetoyinbo said.

In 2005 Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo approved free ARV treatment to HIV positive Nigerians, at a time when the country had an estimated 3.5 million people living with HIV.

The World Health Organisation reported that during 2008 almost 20,000 pregnant HIV positive women in Nigeria were on antiretroviral medication. There were still 210,000 HIV positive pregnant women in need of treatment.

James Kamau from the Kenya Treatment Access Movement said that it was time that African leaders did more in combating the pandemic.

"We need to let African leaders put their money where their mouth is in terms of having 15 percent of a country's national budget set aside (for health). We cannot let them tell us they cannot afford it," Kamau said.

Machel added that there were civil society organisations across Africa that have been influential in the fight against HIV.

"On this continent they have really made a significant impact in terms of influencing parliament to enact legislation, government to put plans and systems in place to attend to various programmes."

She said monitoring of governments was needed to ensure that heads of state were really targeting the prevention of HIV/Aids and the treatment of HIV positive women and children.

"I think we need to do that kind of monitoring. It is a time not to make pledges but to start monitoring the pledges that have already been made. As civil society organisations we need to develop a capacity to really advocate. We need to have information which is factual, credible and which produces evidence," Machel said.

While she admitted that in some countries civil society organisations had to deal with lack of resources, financial and human resources, many organisations have already been effective in influencing government policy.

Dr Lydia Mungherera, an HIV positive activist and medical doctor who works with the AIDS Support Organisation in Uganda said in her country civil society plays a significant role in driving government policy.

"In our country you have civil society on every planning committee. We have been taken in as partners working with government and I think it makes a big difference. Now we know what is going on, and when things go wrong we are able to assist with a solution," Mungherera said.

The solution for Odetoyinbo was to educate herself about her choices and treatment options before she fell pregnant. And she feels she made an empowered decision with the right information.

"What mattered the most to me at the time was giving birth and you can place value judgment on that. I had this strong desire to have a baby, to make the choice going through that it could have turned out wrong," Odetoyinbo said.

She said it was only seven years after her diagnosis that she decided to become pregnant.

"I lived with HIV and I made a conscious decision. I dared to believe in science. I dared to work with my health care provider. It took them 10 minutes and 56 seconds to get the baby out. And my baby is HIV negative," Odetoyinbo said.

So while Odetoyinbo was fortunate that her baby was not born HIV positive, she is anxious about those women who do not have the medical support she had while pregnant.

"I don't know how I would have coped with my child being HIV positive. I can deal with my status but I am not sure how I would have dealt with my child.

"Can we dare say 'Enough'? Can we think of the children? Can we stop our children from getting infected?"

Excerpt:

By Nalisha Adams
MAPUTO, Aug 31 2009 (IPS)

In rural Mozambique, increasing numbers of families are growing their own food and lifting themselves out of poverty.

Credit: Zahira Kharsany/IPS

Currently over 70 percent of 21 million Mozambicans live in rural areas. The majority are smallholder farmers who grow food crops.

Three-quarters of these farmers are too poor to buy necessary items needed to increase their harvests. Many can not afford the seeds to plant, let alone the harvesting equipment. Figures show that less than 1 in 50 use fertilisers or pesticides and lack of suitable irrigation also effects the number of crops produced.

Population growth already outstrips growth in agricultural output, and without close attention to the use and adoption of improved agricultural technologies, the productivity level will likely slow and rural poverty will remain widespread.

Dr Firmino Mucavele is Director for Academic Reform and Regional Integration at Mozambique's Eduardo Mondlane University and a member of the steering committee of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network, which holds a regional policy dialogue in Maputo this week, taking as its theme "the true contribution of agriculture to the economy".

Mucavele said the way forward is to develop markets and marketing systems for produce. At present up to 40 percent of what farmers grow is lost to floods and disease. Agro-industry that will enable small farmers to break the cycle of poverty are greatly in need of development.

Excerpts of the interview follow.

IPS: Are there ways that the cash crop sector could have substantial yield increases to meet the growing population?

FM: There are several. We have about 10 agro-ecological zones in Mozambique and of these, six of them are in the northern parts of the country.

In all those six zones it is possible to raise something like ten times the yield we are currently producing, provided that we: use the right seeds, have irrigation, and have the right equipment for harvesting. The losses in production can be reduced if we have the proper technology.

IPS: Cash crops are significant to Mozambique’s agriculture. But does livestock play a significant role in the contribution to Mozambique’s economy?

FM: Yes, it plays a large contribution. Livestock is like a banking system. Families prefer to have livestock (to money) especially in rural areas where we don’t have banks or any of the systems of modern savings.

They use cattle, goats and animals as a way to save. Whenever they need money they sell the animals. Livestock is involved in traditions like, for example, weddings where they use some of these animals.

In central Mozambique livestock provides 45 percent of family income for the poorest, to nearly 60 percent for the less poor. In the provinces of Inhambane and Gaza, livestock provides between 21 and 65 percent of household income.

IPS: What are some of the immediate problems facing expansion of agriculture?

FM: The lack of access to credit is problem in crop agriculture and also undermines the livestock sector. Poor families cannot raise credit to purchase animals, and women have difficulty accumulating livestock. If widowed, they are stripped of all family assets upon the death of their husbands, including family animals.

The first problem with agriculture is that it does have a lot of risk and uncertainty as a result most banks don’t really want to finance agriculture.

Also, most of the farmers are involved in subsistence agriculture and for them to move from this they need investment. And the return on that investment doesn't come immediately, it takes about two or three years and usually banks can’t wait that long.

IPS: Does that mean government can play a role here?

FM: Government can certainly play a role in providing the infrastructure. The rural areas do not have electricity, they do not have roads and these are the minimum conditions required if someone wants to put a bank there. When these things are not in place the cost of lending money becomes very high.

IPS: What are the agricultural-related economic potentials for Mozambique?

The development of agriculture provides agro-industries (food processing, extraction industries and so on). And where you have these, you usually have social development. It would also result in the development of the manufacturing sector.

As farmers in rural areas get increased incomes they also would want to purchase manufactured goods and it creates a domino effect for development.

Although constraints exist, Mozambique possesses the fundamentals to realise its considerable agricultural potential. The country is endowed with natural resources, including numerous fertile agro-ecological zones but only about 10 percent of its 36 million arable hectares are cultivated. Mozambique has 104 river basins, 20 million hectares of forests, and a long coastline with three major ports.

IPS: The Mozambican government has launched several programmes including the New Green Revolution Strategy in 2007 which aims to increase the agriculture production and productivity of smallholder farmers. In your opinion what impact are these programmes having in the sector?

FM: The impact is very high and very good. In the last ten years, the growth in the agricultural sector has been significant in terms of employment and income-generation.

Even though I have said productivity is low, what has been implemented has been good. I think we can do much better though.

Mozambique aims to increase agricultural productivity and production by using science to improve crop varieties, and by boosting innovation. Incorporating science in agriculture in Mozambique is key to the modernisation of the economy and to provide jobs in rural and urban areas.

Excerpt:

By Nalisha Adams
JOHANNESBURG, Aug 2 2009 (IPS)

Civil society in Kenya has urged the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for greater representation within its decision making boards and the formation of a dispute resolution body.

This comes after the IMF announced that it would step up lending to low income countries at zero interest until the end of 2011 to combat the impact of the global recession.

As part of the process of drafting a summary of civil society recommendations on IMF governance reform, New Rules for Global Finance has conducted dialogues with various civil society organisations (CSOs) across the globe.

New Rules for Global Finance is a coalition of development, human rights, labour, environmental and religious organisations dedicated to the reform of global financial structures.

In 2008 the IMF laid out a four-pillar approach to reforming its governance structure. This included a working group of IMF executive directors; a committee of eminent persons; and the fourth pillar involved the direct interaction with civil society organisations.

Peter Gakunu, the former executive director of the IMF’s Africa Group One, a constituency representing 21 English-speaking African countries on the board of the IMF, and former advisor in the Office of the President in Kenya, called for greater representation of African countries on the board of the IMF.

He said that Africans were still under-represented at the level where vital decisions are currently being made.

“Developing countries, particularly in Africa, think the level of representation where crucial decisions are being made is inadequate. And to have a situation where Africa is represented by only two executive directors is unfair.”

He also called for greater African representation among IMF staff.

“Staff in the fund are very influential in terms of policies and African staff are very under-represented. We require a way to increase the level of participation of Africans,” Gakunu said.

Africa previously had only two executive directors on the IMF board who represented sub-Saharan African countries with three percent of contributing votes. It has only recently acquired a third seat.

In comparison, the executive directors of the United States have just over 16 percent of votes. This disparity is despite the fact that Africa accounts for a quarter of IMF membership and accounts for the bulk of the IMF’s operations.

Gakunu called for greater transparency in the lending conditions made by the IMF.

“There should be a more consultative way of reaching a framework. At the moment conditions for lending are discussed with the treasuries of countries without the wider consultation of the public and there sometimes may be some intimidation and thumb-twisting that takes place,” Gakunu said.

He admitted that reform was also needed on a country level, as some countries that received funding from the IMF were not willing to disclose the conditions of their loans.

Eve Odete from Oxfam said it was apparent that the IMF needed to embrace change and to also change its lending policies.

“The evidence out there is that this conditionality is strangling Africa’s economies.”

The New Rules draft document of recommendations stated that there was a consensus among CSOs to change the scope and nature of conditionality.

“These conditions are the root of the “stigma” attached to IMF loans, which led many emerging market countries to repay loans early and thereafter to self-insure – a practice which contributed to the financial crisis,” the document stated.

The document also stated that transparency was a major concern for CSOs: “With the exception of narrow and explicit exclusions for market sensitive information and personnel matters, all documents of the IMF should be presumed to be public.”

In March, IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn admitted that the Fund’s policy advice had not always been correct. He admitted that in the past the Fund had not only sought to lend money but to also felt it should fix what it saw as “problems” within the country it was lending to. He had promised more streamlined lending conditions. Later that month the IMF changed its lending policy to make borrowing easier and created a new line of credit for well-run economies.

CSOs in Kenya also expressed concern that the global financial crises handed the IMF a new lifeline. In May an increased number of African countries hit by the global economic crisis turned to the IMF for funding. IMF statistics showed funding for Africa was 1.6 billion dollars in May, twice the level for 2008.

Participants also called for the formation of an external dispute resolution body for the IMF. This complaints body, the New Rules draft document said should be able to contribute to lessons learned and to the design of better programs by the IMF.

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