Katja Iversen with French President Emmanuel Macron at the G7 2019 Gender Equality Council

By Nayema Nusrat
NEW YORK, Jun 28 2021 (IPS)

As the global gathering for gender equality, the Generation Equality Forum, kicks off in Paris on June 30, 2020, IPS conducted an exclusive interview with Katja Iversen.

Iversen is a leading global influencer on leadership, sustainability, and gender equality, an executive advisor to Goal 17 Partners, UNILEVER, Women Political Leaders, and others. She was also on President Macron’s G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council in 2019.

The Generation Equality Forum, convened by UN Women and co-chaired by the Presidents of France and Mexico, comes when the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to reverse global progress on gender equality.

The forum is expected to affirm bold “gender equality investments, programs, and policies and start a 5-year action journey, based on a Global Acceleration Plan for Gender Equality which will be launched at the Forum,” according to a media statement.

Iversen spoke extensively about the need for women to be included in decision-making, the role of the private sector, and how the world is on a tipping point.

“If we want to see positive development for both people and planet, we – in short – need more women in power and more power to women, in the economy and politics,” Iversen said. “The upcoming Generation Equality Forum, hosted by UN Women in collaboration with the governments of France and Mexico, comes at a pivotal moment and provides a great opportunity to catalyze progress. I want to see the whole world reacting to the clarion call coming out of Paris this week”.

She stressed that now was the time to act because “we see a destabilizing and widening inequality gap in the world. We also see a growing conservatism and pushback on women’s rights, including sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR). And very concretely, we see skyrocketing increases in gender-based violence, enhanced misogyny, women carrying even more of the unpaid care work, as well as alarming rates of girls dropping out of school, and women leaving the labor force”.

She spoke about the need to involve the private sector in creating a more gender-equal world.

“The private sector is a lead employer of women, women are consumers, and we will not see gender equality, nor a sustainable world at large if the private sector does not commit to change. Luckily more and more companies are stepping up to the plate and investing in sustainability and gender equality,” she told IPS.

She and Goal 17 Partners, a network of executives and entrepreneurs integrating the UN’s Sustainable Development goals into business practices, are working with new companies who are getting engaged in the SDGs, including SDG 5 on gender equality and women’s empowerment. Together, including UN Foundation, UN Forum on Business and Human Rights (BSR), UN Women, they have been shepherding commitments to Generation Equality.

“There is a tremendous need AND potential, not least for small- and medium-sized enterprises, whether we are talking women’s leadership, equal pay, parental leave, financial inclusion, diverse, inclusive and harassment-free workplaces, or health and education. Investing in the various aspects of gender equality is both the right and economically the smart thing to do, research shows”.

Regarding research, Katja Iversen spoke to IPS about the need for better and more data and research: “Decision-makers, whether in governments, funding institutions or private sector, need to invest in and get more and disaggregated data. If we don’t know the details of how many or where girls and women live and die, work and want to go to school, give birth or care for the sick, whether they are rich or poor, we won’t get the right policies, programs, or investments that can drive the needed solutions.”

She pointed out that according to UN Women, less than 25 percent of national COVID decision-making bodies have women included.

“It is too easy to cut resources from people who are not at the decision-making tables. We urgently need to get many women into leadership, including the COVID response and recovery efforts. All evidence shows that when more women are included in decision making, there is a more holistic approach and both societies and people fare better.”

In that regard, she highlighted some transformational, political commitments that will be put forward at the Generation Equality Forum, including from the vast network of Women Political Leaders, which count thousands and thousands of women ministers, mayors, parliamentarians, heads of states, and leaders from the private sector.

“I believe we will see some real game-changers,” she said.

Iversen expressed concern about the strong need for further funding, not least for women’s organizations on the frontline. It is linked to the recent and severe cuts to gender equality and sexual and reproductive health that could badly affect women and their health, especially in vulnerable communities.

“Adding to what happened during former US President Donald Trump era, the cuts we see right now from several countries, including the UK, will have devastating effects for girls, women, and gender equality, including for the most marginalized in emergency and humanitarian situations,” she told IPS. “The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), for example, estimates that with the 130 million GBP (180 million USD) the UK wants to withdraw from the Supplies Partnership, UNFPA could have helped prevent around 250,000 maternal and child deaths, 14.6 million unintended pregnancies and 4.3 million unsafe abortions.”

IPS: UNFPA and its partners estimate the significant health service disruptions by COVID 17 could result in 47 million women in low- and middle-income countries going without contraceptives. How do we deal with this loss of access to the most basic SRH services, especially now that the second wave of Covid-19 is disrupting health services again in many parts of the world?

KI: The shift of staff and funds away from maternal and reproductive health services due to the COVID response is devastating, and it will have ramifications for years, if not decades. We know from Ebola that maternal mortality went up, that access to family planning went down, and that girls and women paid the price in both lives and livelihood. Unfortunately, the evidence is mainly anecdotal as women’s health is not documented and measured the same way as other health services, just as there, in general, is a tremendous lack of sex-disaggregated data, including on key Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators and in COVID infections and deaths. This time – under the COVID pandemic – the gaps in SRHR services, shifts in resources, and cutbacks on services must be documented – in data and stories.

IPS: In many countries, the removal of the tampon tax (or period tax) has been at the forefront of equality of access to SRHR. What other key issues do you think we must focus on to ensure equity of access to SRHR and greater bodily autonomy?

KI: I am thrilled to see SRHR and bodily autonomy being a priority of Generation Equality and to see countries like Denmark, France, Burkina Faso, and UNFPA, etc., lead on this.

A woman’s right to decide on her own life and body is a fundamental human right. Bodily autonomy for girls and women – in all their rich diversity – is political, social, economically, and health-related. It is about having the power and agency to make choices over our own body, fertility, and future, living a life free of violence and coercion in both the private and public sphere, deciding who to have sex with and how to love. It’s about the right to decide whether to get children – or not – about having a health system that supports this with the full range of SRHR services readily available, affordable, and accessible. Bodily autonomy ties into norms, structure, systems – and if we want equity and health for all, we need to address all of it. I am glad to see this included in the progressive Generation Equality roadmap, with strong suggestions on how to counter gender-based violence, climate change, promote economic justice and feminist movements and leadership, etc.

The world is at a pivotal moment and a tipping point. With enough people and institutions reacting to the Clarion Call from the Generation Equality Forum in Paris, I believe we can make it tip the right way.

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The world should, with urgency, remove the barriers to education for crisis-affected children with disabilities, says Education Cannot Wait Director Yasmine Sherif. Here she is pictured in Lebanon speaking to a young child at an ECW-supported facility. Credit: Education Cannot Wait (ECW)

By Nayema Nusrat
NEW YORK, Jun 19 2021 (IPS)

With financing, the number of out-of-school refugees could be reduced to zero, Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait (ECW) says, as the world commemorates World Refugee Day.

In a wide-ranging exclusive interview with IPS in New York, Sherif shared her vision for a world where dignity and the right to believe in better prospects are returned child refugees – something, she says, can be delivered through education.

“When you sit down and listen to young refugees in Bangladesh, in Colombia, in Lebanon, or in Uganda, the large majority will tell you they dream of becoming somebody that lives a better life, that helps others, that serves their communities or their country,” says Sherif. “They know that the pathway there is an education. They understand the value of an education. This is their hope. This is their dream.”

Sherif chronicles the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the escalation of violence in Palestine, and ongoing conflicts on child refugees, especially in the past year.

A staggering 128 million children and youth are urgently in need of assistance, up 75 million from before the pandemic.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted funding for millions of people already reeling from conflict, record levels of displacement, and climate change shocks,” she says. “For these children, COVID-19 is a crisis upon a crisis. Some 79.5 million are currently displaced, more people than at any time since World War II. Almost half – 34 million – of those displaced are children, and youth and 48 percent of all school-age refugee children are out of school.”

Many of the displacees have never set foot in a classroom, she says.

“Most have been out of education for so long that they now lack the most basic competencies in reading, writing, and mathematics.”

Sherif speaks about the recent escalation of violence in Palestine which was especially hard for the organization as ECW lost 66 children in Gaza.

“Nine entire families were wiped off the civil registry,” she says, including Obaida, a 17-year-old from Hebron, Aroub Refugee camp in the West Bank.

“We have a video of Obaida from our program speaking about his aspirations, dreams, and fears. Now he is dead. It is heart-breaking to see these fears get manifested,” she says. “Here we are all trying to support these already vulnerable, long-suffering, yet heroic children and youth, only to see them die before our eyes.”

Long-term conflicts continue to exacerbate the refugee crisis, and long-term ECW projects are working with some success to bring education to some vulnerable young displaces – but educating girls remains a challenge.

Cameroon, for example, hosts almost 447,000 refugees and asylum seekers, most of them being from the Central African Republic (CAR) but also from Nigeria.

“While school attendance among CAR refugees in Cameroon has increased generally from 40 to 46 percent over the past seven years, girls attending school has not significantly increased due to the usual socio-cultural and protection barriers,” says Sherif.

Girls tend to be left behind, she confirms.

“Refugee girls often face layers of disadvantage and vulnerability. It is a reason that ECW has committed to raising the proportion of girls supported by its programming to 60% of the total children reached.”

However, Sherif warns, a funding gap could hamper ECW’s efforts.

“Our funding gap for 2021-2023 is US$400 million to maintain the same level of commitment to these children and youth left furthest behind in crisis,” she says. “The additional US$400 million will help ECW reach an additional 4.5 million children, and young people – including 2.7 million girls – affected by conflict, climate change, and COVID-19 receive an education over the next three years.”

As the world considers the plight of refugee children on World Refugee Day 2021, Sherif asks:
“Is it not a disgrace that we are unable as a human family to reduce the refugees’ out-of-school to zero and increase girls’ access to quality education to 100%? This is something that can be done. With financing, it is possible.”

IPS : As we commemorate World Refugee Day on 20 June – which this year has the theme Together we Heal, Learn and Shine – there is a particular emphasis on the education of the children of refugees. How important is education as an element of normalcy in crises where children, often on their own but also with their families, are forced to flee because of violent confrontations?

YS: When families with their children face such a level of danger that they have no choice but to run for their lives and even cross the border into another country for safety and protection, you can imagine how abnormal their life has become. That abnormality traumatizes children and youth. It paralyzes them with fear, impacts their sense of safety and personal security, makes it difficult for them to concentrate and think clearly. It makes them worried about what is next and how much more they may have to go through before it is all over.

All they have left is their will to survive, and that means hope and dreams. When you sit down and listen to young refugees in Bangladesh, in Colombia, in Lebanon, or in Uganda, the large majority will tell you they dream of becoming somebody that lives a better life, that helps others, that serves their communities, or their country. They know that the pathway there is an education. They understand the value of an education. This is their hope. This is their dream.

To these refugee children and youth, education is their only chance for some normalcy. It is critically important for their mental health, their physical protection, and for their development. What is the alternative? They sit and wait until the crisis is over 10-20 years later, and they can go home. Well, most conflicts last even longer than that. Look at Afghanistan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We are speaking decades and generations here. It is not acceptable that the world in the 21st century leaves them behind to wait.

Yasmine Sherif in Democratic Republic of the Congo with Central African Republic refugee children. Credit: Education Cannot Wait (ECW)

Now, look at the figures of their reality: 48 percent of refugees remain out of school today. These figures become even more stark among girls and older students. Just 27 percent of secondary-age girls are enrolled in education, and just 3 percent of all refugees are enrolled in tertiary education.

One ought to ask the question: Isn’t it inconceivable that a world so rich in resources, so wealthy amongst those who have, and so modernized in so many ways, is so unable to deliver on the basic human right of an education? Is it not a disgrace that we are unable as a human family to reduce the refugees out-of-school to zero and increase girls’ access to a quality education to 100%? This is something that can be done. With financing, it is possible.

IPS : Many countries hosting refugee children and youth have benefitted from ECW’s programs – including Afghanistan, Uganda, Bangladesh and Chad. You also have programs in Colombia, for example, for Venezuelan refugees. These include several multi-year programs for refugees and displaced children. Has Covid-19 affected the fundraising for the projects? Is sufficient funding available, and if not, what needs to be done?

YS: The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted funding for millions of people already reeling from conflict, record levels of displacement, and climate change shocks. According to the United Nations, 235 million people worldwide will need humanitarian assistance and protection in 2021 alone – an increase of 40 percent in one year. Among those urgently in need of assistance are 128 million children and youth whose education is disrupted by humanitarian crises, up from 75 million before the pandemic struck.

For these children, COVID-19 is a crisis upon a crisis. Some 79.5 million are currently displaced, more people than at any time since World War II. Almost half – 34 million – of those displaced are children and youth, and 48 percent of all school-age refugee children are out of school. Most have been out of education for so long that they now lack the most basic competencies in reading, writing, and mathematics. Many, forced to flee their homes at a young age, have never stepped foot in a classroom.

This brings us back to the solution: financing. Despite encouraging progress in recent years, education for displaced children and youth remains severely underfunded, with only one-third of current funding needs being met according to UNESCO. So, improving education financing for refugees and the internally displaced requires bringing together both humanitarian and development aid in line with commitments made at the World Humanitarian Summit, in the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, and at the Refugee Global Compact.

The time is over when humanitarians did their part at one end of the spectrum and the development actors their part at the other end of the spectrum. The time is over when silos and competition over funding take over cooperation and coordination, and a more enlightened awareness of working together for others emerges to stay.

This is why Education Cannot Wait was established. To end the silos and competition, to bring together the humanitarian and development actors through the United Nations established coordination system, to work jointly, for collective outcomes, which, in the education sector, means learning outcomes. Education is a development sector, but financing cannot be confined to children and youth living in traditional development settings.

What ECW does is to bring a development sector into a crisis or humanitarian setting. Besides the need for a crisis-sensitive approach, this requires a much bigger understanding of the abnormal context and a much deeper commitment to cooperation, joint programming, coordination, and – above all – a significantly higher level of financing.

As such, ECW’s primary strategic objective is to inspire political will that translates into more financing through increased levels of funding as well as multi-year and predictable funding. Only then can we ensure that refugees are guaranteed to become part of the national education system, and only then can we reach all those in emergencies who are otherwise considered “unreachable” due to the abnormalities of a crisis context. So far, we have seen an upward trend in financing and, as a result, a significant number of children and youth reached with a whole-of-child quality education in a very short period of time. Still, it is far from sufficient or adequate. Millions more are still waiting for an inclusive quality education.

Combining the resources raised to the ECW Trust Fund and the resources leveraged in-country towards ECW’s multi-year resilience programs, ECW has mobilized 1.5 billion. Through close cooperation with our strategic donors and emergency actors on the ground and within the humanitarian coordination structure, we have also been able to increase humanitarian funding from 2.4% to 5.1%.

Still, the funding situation for ECW will require strong action from donors to step in and ensure the ECW is well funded for 2021 and beyond to meet its multi-year finance obligations. If all ECW’s multi-year resilience programs to date were fully funded, our investments would have reached 16 million children and youth rather than the 5 million reached thus far – although a significant number given the short time of operations.

It is all about financing. The system, the structure, the partnerships, the coordination mechanisms, the joint programs, the speed, the governance structure, and – above all – the readiness and expertise of all our partners in government, civil society, UN agencies, and local communities, are in place. The ECW model as a catalytic fund is now a proven model based on external evaluations and the actual results.

Our funding gap for 2021-2023 is US$400 million to maintain the same level of commitment to these children and youth left furthest behind in crisis. This is a modest calculation made to accommodate the economic recession as a result of COVID-19. We have tried to meet our strategic donor partners, current and new ones, halfway, as we all equally are committed. The additional US$400 million will help ECW reach an additional 4.5 million children, and young people – including 2.7 million girls – affected by conflict, climate change, and COVID-19 receive an education over the next three years.

IPS : As ECW Director, you recently went on a visit to DR Congo and made an urgent plea for the world to take note of dire circumstances in which 200 000 children and youth are impacted by the protracted crisis in the DRC. You estimated that US$45.3 million was needed. How does education help young girls who face early marriages, GBV, and many other traumas?

YS: One has to go to the refugees to fully fathom what they are going through. Go to them. Be with them. Listen to them. This is what the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, and I did when traveling to meet the refugees arriving from the Central African Republic to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It also allowed us to see the enormous commitment by the government, UNHCR, UNICEF, and a number of civil society organizations working hand-in-hand with the -host-communities and refugees to make a difference: to build schools, train teachers, provide quality learning material, and so forth. Again, what they need more than anything is financing.

Yasmine Sherif with Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Credit: Education Cannot Wait (ECW)

In other parts of DRC, which is a big country affected by multiple and protracted crises, like many places around the world, women and girls are significantly disadvantaged by pre-existing harmful gender norms, gender discrimination, and the low social status of women and girls, which contributes to high rates of GBV such as sexual, physical, emotional, or economic violence, as well as harmful traditional practices such as child marriage. Continued population displacement, insecurity, and conflict further exacerbate the cycle of violence against women and girls.

The consequences of GBV are serious and often life-threatening. We know that exposure to GBV can lead to serious negative health outcomes such as HIV/AIDS and STI infection, unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions, maternal and infant mortality, and even suicide. After-effects of GBV can also lead to emotional and psychological distress such as post-traumatic stress and depression. Social stigma, rejection, and isolation are very common for GBV survivors, who are often blamed for what happened to them. As a result of this stigma, most survivors never report the incident. When it comes to education, the physical and psycho-social impacts of GBV have consequences for learning, attendance, retention, and achievement.

Education plays a key role in combatting and ending GBV. Schools provide a safe space for girls and boys where harmful norms that fuel gender inequality and GBV can be challenged to support gender equality and prevent GBV. Identifying and addressing the GBV risks and barriers related to access and retention in education services to ensure safe and protective learning environments for girls, boys, and female teachers decreases the risk of schools related GBV, increases access and retention in schools, and therefore limits the risk of exposure to GBV in the family and community or by other third parties (such as armed groups).

Additionally, through community mobilization, teachers’ training, sensitization of girls and boys on gender equality, and the development of gender-responsive curricula, education can address the root causes of gender-based inequalities and contribute to transform harmful gender roles, norms, and power relations into positive norms. Projections show that by 2030, only 1-in-3 girls in crisis-affected countries will have completed secondary school; 1-in-5 girls in crisis-affected countries will not be able to read a simple sentence, and girls in crisis-affected countries will receive on average just 8.5 years of education in their lifetime.

In the DRC, more than a third of girls are married before they turn 18, and around 10 percent are married before they turn 15. This figure is related to the lack of access to education, making marriage a more likely outcome, and a reason that girls are prevented from accessing or staying in education in the first place. Still, the impact of educating a girl does not stop with her. The knowledge, skills, and empowerment it provides are essential to the fate of any community or country. According to United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI), for each additional year of secondary education that a girl receives, infant mortality decreases by 10%, and her country’s resilience to climate disasters improves by 3.2 points.

Before the recent 2021 influx of some 92,000 refugees in DRC, there were over 173,000 CAR refugees already there. UNHCR continues to register all CAR refugees, but preliminary figures indicate that some 70 percent of primary age children had no access to education before arriving in DRC, and only 5 percent of children aged 12-17 had been enrolled in secondary school. The First Emergency Response Grant, which ECW provided during the UNHCR/ECW mission for the CAR refugee emergency, supports primary and secondary education, especially equitable access for girls, school capacity for teachers, and building up the school infrastructure. With funding available at hand when it most matters, we can make a difference.

IPS: Apart from the programs mentioned above, refugee girls – in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere are very often left furthest behind. Many are often not only survivors of armed conflicts but also of Gender-based violence (GBV). How is their trauma addressed in ECW programs?

YS: Refugee girls often face layers of disadvantage and vulnerability. That is why ECW has committed to raising the proportion of girls supported by its programming to 60% of the total number of children reached. We further recognize that girls, as well as boys, who have experienced the trauma of conflict, are more vulnerable and maybe ill-prepared for the classroom. ECW, therefore, supports a whole-of-child approach that prioritizes physical safety and psycho-social support alongside learning outcomes.

The ECW whole-of-girl-child approach helps create referral pathways to professional help for those impacted by gender-based violence; it builds teacher’s capacities to teach in a gender-sensitive way; it creates physical space that is appropriate for and accommodating to the needs of girl children, and it helps prioritize the hiring of female teachers who themselves are some of the best advocates and role models for crisis-affected girls.

As highlighted in the ECW Gender Strategy (2018-2021) and ECW Gender Policy (2019-2021), we are committed to addressing GBV in all our investments to our partners. This translates into a number of actions, such as mandatory gender analysis in all ECW investments, assessing and identifying the differentiated needs of girls and boys, including an analysis of access to and physical safety of learning environments to identify risks of GBV, as well as the capacity of education personnel to address risks of GBV and safely refer survivors. Such analysis becomes an integral part of program design, implementation, and measuring results and actual outcomes.

In Afghanistan and South Sudan, just to mention a couple of examples, ECW’s investments are aligned with the National Girls’ Education Strategies, which aim to address the root causes of gender inequality and GBV through education. As Protection is another of ECW’s priorities, our investments add an additional dimension that is so important in crisis countries by making the environment in and around schools safe and free from GBV through risk mitigation measures and capacity development of educational personnel, school safety plans, Codes of Conduct and training, while also advocating for the respect of international law and the Safe Schools Declaration.

IPS: Refugee and forcibly displaced communities have also had to face the challenge of COVID-19 over the past 18 months, with many communities in lockdowns. How has COVID-19 impacted ECW programs, and what actions is ECW taking to address the pandemic?

YS: The COVID-19 pandemic created a double emergency. Already disadvantaged by crisis, COVID-19 complexified and increased the barriers between children and youth and their education. Facing what could lead to lost generations in countries affected by crises, ECW concentrated its resources in places where this double emergency was most likely to deepen the already abnormal conditions for school-aged children and youth with a focus on refugees, girls, and children with disabilities. Thanks to our First Emergency Response Window and strong collective backing by our Executive Committee, ECW was able to move quickly and easily reprogram existing multi-year plans to respond to the crisis. With unprecedented speed, ECW had dispatched US$ 23 million to support 9 million vulnerable girls and boys, who could quickly access distance learning, safety protocol in classrooms, water, sanitation, and hygiene, to prevent further spread of the disease and prevent a disruption of their education.

IPS: Do these countries and communities where refugee children find themselves have enough trained educators and caregivers who can provide the quality support they need? How does ECW help address these challenges?

YS: Besides the parents (bearing in mind that many children and youth have either lost one or both of their parents due to conflict, separation during flight, and so forth), teachers are the single biggest contributor to a child’s education and development. However, in many of the countries in which ECW works, there are simply too few qualified teachers trained to provide quality teaching. ECW’s investments support ministries of education to improve the capacity of existing teacher cohorts, to recruit and train new teachers, and to advance professional development for volunteers, facilitators, and teachers, often this also includes refugee teachers.

Bearing in mind that teachers are often victims of conflict and forced displacement themselves, ECW’s investments also focus on the well-being of teachers. They are mentors and pillars of hope for their students, and yet they too have often experienced the same impact of crises as the girls and boys in their classrooms. Teaching support groups and training on personal well-being not only help teachers handle challenging circumstances but also their own well-being.

IPS: ECW has programs in Palestine, which was subjected to airstrikes on Gaza in the past month. How has the conflict impacted your projects in the region? You and your team recently visited Lebanon, where Palestine refugees have been hosted for decades. How has the recent and the long-term conflict and insecurity in the region impacted the numbers of displaced, and how are your programs addressing this?

YS: The escalation of conflicts in the Middle East is most concerning and alarming. Everywhere you turn your head, you see innocent people struggling and suffering without adequate solutions and bold support in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, and Palestine.

ECW is working in all these countries in the region through multi-year funding, as is the case now in Syria and Palestine and currently under development for Iraq, Lebanon, and Libya. We have eight first emergency responses active in all these countries responding to both covid19 as well as specific escalation of crises in places like Gaza, North Syria, Coastal governorates of Yemen, the Beirut blast, as well as responses to the refugee crisis in Iraq, Lebanon and Libya.

In Palestine, the recent escalation was especially hard as we have lost 66 children in Gaza of whom many were part of the ECW program – 9 entire families were wiped off the civil registry – Obaida, a 17-year-old from Hebron, Aroub Refugee camp in the West Bank was also killed that week. We have a video of Obaida from our program speaking about his aspirations, dreams, and fears. Now he is dead. It is heart-breaking to see these fears get manifested. The Norwegian Refugee Council speaks of similar losses, as does UNRWA. Here we are all trying to support these already vulnerable, long-suffering, yet heroic children and youth, only to see them die before our eyes.

In response to the crisis in Gaza, ECW is now launching yet another emergency response with UNRWA and UNICEF to provide MHPSS and catch-up learning during the summer to 50,000 children who were most affected by the recent attacks, especially those who are among the 8000 families that lost their homes. The investment will also help repair and equip some 30 schools that were lightly damaged so that the new school year can resume on time in September.

Supporting UNRWA, UNICEF, and the many partners active on the ground is essential to ensure minimum support to the Palestinian refugees in the region. UNRWA currently supports around 526,000 Palestinian refugee children and employs more than 22,000 education staff from the refugee community – we cannot halt these efforts until a just and long-lasting resolution is reached.

IPS: ECW announced earlier this month US$1 million grant to ensure refugee children and youth arriving from the Central African Republic (CAR) receive access to quality learning in Cameroon. This is just one of the grants made available in crisis areas in Africa, how important is the support of the refugee community there? How will the grant be spent, and how many children could potentially benefit?

YS: The program in Cameroon aims to reach over 6,000 newly displaced Central African Republic girls and boys. The emphasis here is to ensure these children have immediate access to the highest quality learning and protective services possible. Returning to the classroom, being among friends, will help limit the trauma of displacement. It will also ensure that especially girls have the best possible chance to continue their learning as we know that for each day they are out of school, they are less likely to ever return.

We must ensure these children, who are victims of conflict at home and now forcible displacement abroad, are not forgotten. Supporting the whole refugee community is essential to giving these children the best chance to thrive. We cannot leave them behind.

Cameroon hosts almost 447,000 refugees and asylum seekers, most of them being from CAR but also from Nigeria. The latest violence following elections in CAR forced some 6,700 refugees – over half are children—from CAR into Cameroon. While school attendance among CAR refugees in Cameroon has increased generally from 40 to 46 percent over the past seven years, girls attending school has not significantly increased due to the usual socio-cultural and protection barriers. ECW funding to our partners working together on the ground will provide over 6,000 refugee children and youth (3,500 girls and 2,400 boys) with access to safe learning environments. Some 1,000 host community children and youth will also be helped. Classrooms are being built, and water and sanitation facilities are being upgraded while learning materials, hygiene kits, and other school materials are provided.

Girls are disadvantaged, and we need to constantly keep this fact on top of our minds as we prioritize. Data from UNHCR’s most recent education report indicate that more than 1.8 million children -or 48 percent of all refugee children of school age—are out of school, and girls are more significantly affected. Only 27% of refugee girls go on to secondary school, and only 50 percent of all refugee girls in school will likely not return when classrooms reopen post-COVID-19.

In a world that wants nothing more than peace and security, nothing more than stability and the protection of our planet, and presumably an evolution that shows we are indeed moving forward, it is sad to see that we have not come further than this in ensuring access to inclusive quality education for every child and adolescent. These are children and youth hoping for education in the midst of climate-induced conflict, armed conflicts, protracted military occupation, and forced displacement.

Time has come when words are not enough. Now we need to overcome our fears and take action. At the end of the day, leaders who care for our shared humanity are able to see things not only from afar, but also from deep within. This is how they recognize the relationship between themselves and their leadership, the world at large, not the least the young generation struggling for survival in crisis countries, and our shared universal values. Once that insight is reached, and the connection is made, I am convinced that financing will be unleashed to give every single child and youth access to their most basic human right: the right to an inclusive, continued and safe quality education.

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Nordic Talk moderator Katja Iversen shown here with Natasha Wang Mwansa, Emi Mahmoud, Dr Natalia Kanem and Flemming Møller Mortensen during a recent Nordic Talks webinar. Credit: Shuprova Tasneem

By Shuprova Tasneem and Nayema Nusrat
DHAKA and NEW YORK, Jun 4 2021 (IPS)

Every two minutes, a girl or woman dies from pregnancy or childbirth-related complications, including unsafe abortions. Every year, around 12 million girls are married while in their childhoods. An additional 10 million are now at risk of child marriage due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In this context, the most recent Nordic Talk—a high-level debate on bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) as a cornerstone of gender equality, aptly titled “Let’s Talk About Sex” — could not have come at a better time.

Moderator Katja Iversen, Dane of the Year (2018) and former CEO of Women Deliver, kicked off the discussion by focusing on the close link between bodily autonomy, gender equality, economic growth, and a healthy planet.

In an exclusive interview with IPS, Iversen said it was clear that “bodily autonomy for girls and women—in all their rich diversity—is political, social, economic and health-related.”

Women needed to have power and agency over their “bodies, fertility, and future, living a life free of violence and coercion in both the private and public sphere. It ties into norms, structure, systems – and if we want equity and health for all, we need to address all of it.”

Emi Mahmoud, two-time World Champion Poet and Goodwill Ambassador for the UNHCR, set the tone for the Nordic Talk with her emotive poetry reflecting women’s experiences in patriarchal societies, asking: “What survivor hasn’t had her struggle made spectacle?”

The three other panellists agreed that the right to control their bodies was a fundamental aspect of women’s rights and that gender equality was an essential part of the sustainable development agenda.

As Dr Natalia Kanem, Executive Director of the UNFPA, explained that “(women’s) freedom over her own body means freedom of choice”, and that all the data points towards how investment in SRHR could be the first step to empowering women to “ultimately contribute to sustainable development.”

It was critical that SRHR was adequately resourced – but warned these would be in short supply because of the COVID pandemic recovery plans.

“Part of the financing challenge is what we abbreviate as political will. It actually does not cost a lot for the agenda for SRHR to be a reality by 2030. It would take $26 billion a year to end the unmet need for contraception and to stop mothers dying at birth, many of whom were too young to be pregnant, but resources are going to be a challenge now with Covid having affected the world economies.”

While Flemming Møller Mortensen, Danish Minister for International and Nordic Development and Nordic Cooperation, expressed optimism regarding resources for SRHR now that “the US is back on track” and the global gag rule had been revoked. He was worried about a growing conservatism and pushback against women’s rights, particularly in the pandemic’s wake.

Iversen told IPS the cuts in various countries could be devastating.

“UNFPA estimates that with the $180 million the UK wants to withdraw from the Supplies Partnership, UNFPA could have helped prevent around 250,000 maternal and child deaths, 14.6 million unintended pregnancies and 4.3 million unsafe abortions. We will need foundations and other donor countries to step up, and we will need national government step up and step in and ensure that their national budgets reflect and fill the SRHR needs.”

She expressed concern that women on COVID-19 decision-making bodies were unrepresented.

“Less than 25% of national COVID-19 decision-making bodies have women included. It is too easy to cut resources from people who are not at the decision-making tables,” she said. “We urgently need to get a lot more women into leadership, including of the COVID-19 response and recovery efforts. All evidence shows that when more women are included in decision-making, there is a more holistic approach and both societies and people fare better.”

This call for inclusivity, not just for women but for the youth, was strongly echoed by adolescent sexual and reproductive health rights expert Natasha Wang Mwansa.

“So many commitments have been made by so many countries, yet there is no meaningful progress or accountability, and young people are not involved when making these decisions,” Mwansa said. “Young people are here as partners, but we are also here to take charge. From making choices over our own bodies to choices on our national budgets, we are ready to be part of these decisions.”

To deal with challenges in providing access to SRHR, Kanem stressed the importance of gender-disaggregated data for planning. She added that despite the hurdles, she was hopeful about the future because “young people and women are not waiting to make the case and show solidarity and understanding when it comes to racism or issues of discrimination and equity that divide us.”

Iversen echoed this optimism in her IPS interview.

“It gives me hope that comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services are included in the roadmap for Universal Health Coverage, in the Global Action Plan for Healthy Lives and Well-being, and latest in the Generation Equality Forum blueprint,” she said.

“Civil society has played a key role in ensuring this with good arguments, data and a lot of tenacity. But words in the big global documents about Health For All is one thing; gender equality and women’s rights, if it has to matter, it has to manifest in concrete action.”

The conversation rounded off with recommendations and commitments from the panellists: Mwansa stressed more investments in youth-run organisations and more social accountability from decision-makers; Mortensen asked for governments to be held accountable and for youth voices to be heard; and Kanem reaffirmed the UNFPA’s goal to put family planning in the hands of women as a means of empowerment, to end preventable deaths in pregnant women and girls, and change fundamental attitudes to end gender-based violence.

In her final comments to IPS, Iversen also stressed the importance of SRHR as a means of empowerment.

“Study after study shows that it pays to invest in girls, women and SRHR – socially, economically and health-wise. But we cannot look at SRHR alone; we need a full gender lens to the COVID response and recovery and development in general,” she said.

“And if we want to see positive change, we have to put girls and women front and centre of coronavirus response and recovery efforts, just as we, in general, need to see many more women in political and economic leadership.”

The Nordic Council of Ministers supports the Nordic Talks, and “Let’s Talk about Sex” was organised in partnership with UNFPA, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Generation Equality, the Danish Family Planning Association, and Mind your Business, as a lead up to the Paris Generation Equality Forum.

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The Coronavirus pandemic is changing how we live our daily lives. The scale of the COVID-19 and its impact on our lives is unprecedented. When humanity gets past this, the world will be a very different place than the one we have known.

The changes will likely impact how we interact with each other and with family, how we work, study, eat, pray, love or play. The COVID-19 crisis has upended our lives. This novel virus is already reorienting our relationships with the outside world, our loved ones, dependence on each other, on technology, government and healthcare. What changes we might see in the future is uncertain. Global cooperation may be at stake although what we are hearing today is that we must all be together in this fight for survival against the virus. In the near future, we cannot rule out a scenario of fierce competition over resources, medicines and food.

Italy’s Ezio Mauro recently wrote in La Repubblica:
“… As we know, democracy is also a system of mutual guarantees which we take for granted because they are part of our civilisation – which is now threatened by the virus. Now we must relinquish parts of our freedom in the name of responsibility. … And even if politicians are not yet saying it openly, this is the real confirmation of the emergency.”

Mohammad Rakibul Hasan, an award winning photojournalist from Bangladesh shares with us a set of images on the lockdown across the country. Workers in the garment industry, rickshaw pullers and hourly contract labourers in Bangladesh are hit with loss of income like no other in the face of COVID-19 crisis. In the garments sector alone, Bangladesh has lost around $1.5 billion in canceled orders by foreign brands, which has impacted some 1.2 million workers. Ever since the increase of COVID-19 cases in Europe and the United States, Bangladeshi factories are losing around $100 million per day.

Gatherings, including the saying of prayers in the mosque, during the COVID-19 outbreak have been prohibited to ensure public safety. However, some religious people continue to attend mosque and say prayers.

Shops are closed, and people rarely venture onto the street.

The homeless have nowhere to go. There is no government initiative to aid the homeless in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The COVID-19 outbreak red alert has been taken seriously by the public in Bangladesh. Few venture out for anything. Roads and highways are empty, and there is no sign of life on the streets.

Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, never sleeps. Approximately 30 million people live in this mega city. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government has locked down the city, no one should be out or on the street unless it is for an emergency.

A transwoman calls her ex-boyfriend during isolation amid the COVID-19 lockdown in Dhaka.

A transgender couple kisses during the COVID-19 outbreak in Dhaka. The trans community is socially excluded, locally they are called “Hijra”, and they generally encounter socio-cultural deprivation from mainstream society. The coronavirus pandemic has meant they are unable to leave their homes, placing many in a difficult financial position as they face shortages of food and daily necessities.

Mehrunnessa lives in an ‘old age home’ in Dhaka. She has been living in a “type of isolation” away from her family, but the COVID-19 outbreak has meant that her relatives, who used to visit her frequently, no longer come to see her. She says that the whole world is suffering, and hopes “God is kind enough to eliminate the evil disease soon”.

COVID-19 outbreak has locked down one third of the population across the globe. Bangladesh is a densely-populated country and there is a high risk that the deadly virus can spread rapidly as many of the city’s homeless sleep on the streets.

Kamalapur Railway Station, the central station in Dhaka, has been shut down to prevent the virus spreading in the rest of the country.

The Dhaka City Corporation has begun spraying disinfectant in public places to reduce the risk of the spread of COVID-19.

During the COVID-19 lockdown in Bangladesh, many street people have no choice but to live in the open. The virus is airborne, according to World Health Organization, and can survive for between three to 24 hours on various surfaces.

People traveling to their homes after Bangladesh’s government instituted an emergency lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

As government and private organisations, shops, factories and all most everything was closed, people who work in Dhaka were rushing to leave the city for their home towns by public transport. Many did not use adequate safety measures, which could lead the COVID-19 spreading nationwide.

The day before the shutting down all inter-city buses, many people were returning to their home towns as Dhaka city was locked down. There was uncertainty of how long the lockdown would last.

City railways stations are always crowded with thousands of people every minute. But COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdown declared by the government has been taken seriously by the citizens of Bangladesh. Everything is closed and there is no presence of people at the stations any longer — only a few stray dogs.

Credit: Women Deliver

By Nayema Nusrat
NEW YORK, Feb 15 2020 (IPS)

In a recent report by World Economic Forum (WEF) shows women suffer a “triple whammy” in the workplace. Without drastic action, gender parity will take more than a lifetime to achieve. This is the challenge that Katja Iversen, President and CEO of Women Deliver is staring down.

“We know that achieving gender equality is not a women’s issue. It is a societal issue. To be successful … boys and men must be involved at all levels and all ages,” said Iversen.

Iversen’s involvement WEF 2020 annual meeting in Davos increased the spotlight on gender equality. She was involved in a myriad of discussions, conversations, panel debates, midnight huddles and a social media drive. As the woman who heads leading global advocate for gender equality, health and rights of girls and women her role at the annual forum was clear cut.

“We provoked discussions using our ‘gender lens’ – a small magnifying glass. We gave this to leaders and influencers to bring down the mountain and apply to their businesses, governments, and lives,” Iversen said in an exclusive interview with IPS.

“Along with our partners, Promundo and Unilever/Dove Men+Care, we released a series of recommendations on male engagement in gender equality, condensed in a catchy infographic.”

Iversen went on to emphasise how “everybody – including the men and women in Davos – must apply a gender lens to every aspect of life, from leadership, to health systems, to schools, the workplace, and at home. That is an important step to change systems, to change harmful norms, and drive progress.”

This may seem a momentous task. The WEF report, released in December 2019, highlighted the factors that fuel the economic gender gap. This included a noticeably low level of women in leadership positions, wage stagnation, labour force participation and income.

The report highlights what it terms a ‘Triple Whammy’ for women in the workplace. Women, the report said, are highly represented in many of the roles that have been hit hardest by automation.

Moreover, not enough women are entering technology-driven professions where wage growth is more profound. This puts women into the middle to low wage categories that have been stagnant since the financial crisis in 2009.

Thirdly, a lack of access to capital prevents them from pursuing entrepreneurial activities, another key driver for income.

WEF aims to close the gender gap by setting up coalitions between relevant ministries and the largest employers to increase female labour force participation, increase women in leadership positions, close wage gaps and prepare women for jobs of the future. Additionally, the global business commitment on Hardwiring Gender Parity in the Future of Work mobilises businesses to commit to hiring 50% women for their five highest growth roles between now and 2022.

Iversen said women must be involved in the development and growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ubiquitous digital technology for them to benefit.

“We know that innovation and technology hold a lot of power and can be used for good – but only if it works for girls and women and identifies the bias that holds them back,” she said.

While there was potential for digital technologies, like AI, to unlock better health access and information, new employment and leadership opportunities, and greater economic security for women – it could “just as likely leave big parts of the population behind and exacerbate existing inequalities”.

This was why the gender lens in the development and implementation of AI and other tech solutions is so critical, said Iversen. Having women involved in the growth of digital technology “can ensure technology is more representative and can eliminate unconscious bias in hiring, promotion, and recruitment”.

It is critical that women’s education, especially in the field of technology, is enhanced, enabling them to participate in future workforce equally.

“We also need to make sure we are investing in women’s lifelong education and training, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and math. It is key to their professional and financial security in the workforce of tomorrow.”

Investment in women and their participation in the economy has a ripple effect.

“Evidence and common sense confirm that when leadership and the workforce represent the population and include women, it leads to better economic, social, and political cohesion and puts us on a better, more sustainable path.”

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, noted in his speech at WEF 2020 that while problems were global, the responses were fragmented.

“If I had to select one sentence to describe the state of the world, I would say we are in a world in which global challenges are more and more integrated, and the responses are more and more fragmented, and if this is not reversed, it’s a recipe for disaster,” he warned.

Iversen explains that by putting the gender lens at the centre of the solutions, it would enhance society’s ability to achieve its Sustainable Development Goals. It would also mitigate the ‘fragmented responses’ to global challenges.

“Gender is cross-cutting, it is essential to progress and to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Conservation of our planet; eradicating poverty and ensuring health; education; peace, and prosperity for all need to be integrated. This requires putting a gender lens to the entire development agenda,” Iversen said.

“One of the reasons the world is facing so many challenges right now, including trade wars, conflict, climate change, and growing inequality, is that girls, women, and marginalised groups are prevented from accessing power, both political and financial. Big egos, narrow interests, and profit over people and planet have been, mistakenly, prioritised, and we are paying the price for that.”

Women Deliver’s President was emphatic that “development actors from across the spectrum must abandon siloed approaches. It was essential to work together to drive progress for the people and planet, including girls and women, both through financial investment and multi-sector partnerships.”

Iversen is confident. WEF was “good start to the Decade of Action for the Global Goals and the 2020 Generation Equality push, demanding women’s equal participation in political life and decision-making in all areas of life.”

Involving the younger generation was also paramount to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

“What was also clear coming down the Davos mountain is that any efforts to push the development agenda over the finish line will fail if they don’t involve young people. Because youth not only have a stake in reaching our ambitious development goals by 2030, they are also well-suited to identify solutions right now.”

To address and improve gender equality, Iversen emphasised that it required a global effort. The private sector has a vested interest and a significant role to play in advancing gender equality. “We want governments and business leaders to use the gender lens in all they do. They should complete a concrete analysis of what progress they have made and what gender gaps remain,” Iversen said.

Both should ask themselves: What policies and procedures are inhibiting or promoting progress? What gender norms are prevalent and need to be addressed? What investments in gender equality could be made?

“And once that analysis is complete – get to work!”

Women Deliver has been relentless in that message and in bringing the evidence to bear with great partners. “And in recent years we have seen that the world – including at WEF – has started to catch on. Our challenge now is to move from talking to mobilising dedicated action.”

Women Deliver continues to be serious advocates, speaking up for girls and women in every setting.

“We’ll continue to advise committees for big corporations and international agencies. We’ll continue to elevate the voices of young advocates and local organisations around the world. We will continue to push back on the pushback to protect our gains and drive further progress,” Iversen said.

“We will continue to communicate from podiums, in boardrooms and hallways of major summits, on the pages of major newspapers, on (television) screens and social media – with the clear message: In a gender-equal world, everybody wins.”

IPS asked about the trend of women participating as policy-makers at WEF. Just how prominent is women’s role? Iversen replied that “24% of the 2,700 formal WEF participants were women. While that is an improvement from previous years, it’s still way too small. WEF has pledged to double female participation by 2030, and we are ready to help to speed it up.”

“We have a long way to go, but I saw progress at WEF,” said Iversen, adding, “More and new world leaders – in business and government – are picking up the gender lens. There is still so much to be done, and progress is slow for an impatient optimist like myself. But I came down the Davos mountain more hopeful than I went up, and more ready than ever to power progress for girls, women and gender equality in the Super Year ahead.”

Iversen remains optimistic. “Ultimately, we want to work ourselves out of a job. Then sit back and see a world where gender inequality is a thing of the past, where it is something people make fun of like the ‘old days’. Where people say, ‘I can’t believe we didn’t do this sooner’.”

Credit: United Nations

By Nayema Nusrat
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 3 2020 (IPS)

“Right now, I don’t want to get married. I have a long life and a dream in front of me”, a 14-year-old young girl from Bangladesh told her parents as she was just not ready to get married.

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 5.3) has targeted to end child marriage by 2030. According to a report published last June by the UN children’s agency UNICEF, 12 million girls are married before they turn 18 every year, 650 million girls and women alive today were married before they were 18.

Nankali Maksud, Senior Advisor and Coordinator, Prevention of Harmful Cultural Practices at UNICEF, told IPS that evidence shows child marriage is not limited to particular groups or cultural norms, rather a broad combination of structural and socio-cultural drivers.

“These include poverty, lack of educational and economic opportunities, social expectations, discrimination against girls and women and restrictive gender roles, beliefs about protection of girls and low awareness of and access to alternatives”.

She also added, “In many settings, girls are perceived as a burden on household expenses, with child marriage often viewed as the best option out of a menu of poor choices.”

“In some contexts, child marriage is viewed as a path that unburdens the family and preserves its honor while protecting girls. Evidence suggests that when such structural and socio-cultural underlying causes—the drivers of child marriage—are eliminated, the practice will decline and, ultimately end”.

A spokesperson for UN Women (UNW), the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women, told IPS, child marriages may be further exacerbated by increased insecurity in settings where there is a humanitarian crisis.

“For example, the prevalence of child marriage in the Middle East and North Africa region is near the global average, with around one in five young women married before they turn 18 years of age. This marks progress in the last 25 years, though the rate of decline appears to have stalled within the past decade”.

And in certain conflict areas, progress has reversed, “such as in Syria and Yemen, (where it has) been reversed substantially as conflict often produces negative coping mechanisms particularly in dire economic situations that can increase the rate of child marriage”.

Credit: United Nations

UNICEF saw worldwide progress in child marriage reduction rates in recent years, while South Asia has witnessed the largest decline, from nearly 50 per cent to 30 per cent, in large part due to progress in India.

UNICEF’s Maksud said: “The proportion of women who were married as children decreased by 15 per cent, from one in four to one in five, in the last decade”.

Globally, “The total number of girls married in childhood is now estimated at 12 million a year. This points to an accumulated global reduction of 25 million fewer marriages than would have been anticipated under global levels 10 years ago” UNICEF and UN Women pointed out.

While talking about the progress in child bride rate in Africa, Maksud noted “Data also points to the possibility of progress on the African continent. For example, in Ethiopia – once among the top five countries for child marriage in sub-Saharan Africa – the prevalence has dropped by a third in the last 10 years”.

Countries with such harmful practices like child marriage need to prioritize their responsibilities in order to be aligned with SDG target (SDG 5.3) to end child marriage by 2030.

According to Maksud, “the accountability for achieving the SDGs lies with countries and their responsibility to prioritize ending harmful practices such as child marriage. With the right investments and accelerated progress, the SDG target is achievable”.

On the contrary, Heather Barr of Human Rights Watch (HRW) told IPS that it’s probably unlikely that the UN goal of ending all child marriages by 2030 can be achieved.

She said, “I think this target has already contributed significantly to reducing child marriage and will continue to do so. But it’s goal of ending all child marriages by 2030 probably will not be fully achieved. There is just too far to go and too many countries that continue to—legally or illegally—tolerate child marriage”.

The spokesperson from UN Women told IPS about their view on the feasibility of reaching SDG goal- despite a significant progress seen in the past decade, no region seems to be on track to eliminate the practice by 2030.

“A substantial acceleration is needed because the current rate of decline in child marriage is insufficient to meet the ambitious SDG target”.

“The annual rate of decline in child marriage has been 1.9 per cent over the past 10 years but would have to be 23 per cent to achieve the SDG target on ending child marriage by 2030. If the rate of progress since 1990 does not improve, it will take nearly a century to eliminate child marriage worldwide, and more than 150 million more girls will marry by 2030”.

“Even at the faster rate of decline in the past decade, it would take 50 years to end child marriage. Therefore, progress must be accelerated significantly”.

Maksud also pointed out, “However, to end the practice by 2030 – the target set out in the Sustainable Development Goals – progress must be accelerated 12 times faster than in the past decade. Without acceleration of progress, more than 150 million additional girls will marry before their 18th birthday by 2030 due to population growth”.

UN Women lays emphasis on the importance of improving gender equality which is one of the biggest drives according to various research. “Among the main challenges that remain is the lack of a gender-transformative approach in tackling this harmful practice. Evidence shows that delaying the age of marriage alone is insufficient.”

“Gender equality needs to be promoted holistically, including by placing stronger emphasis on promoting girls and women’s agency, addressing the inherit power dynamics in marriages and society, and shifting attitudes, norms and behaviors around gender roles”.

Barr concurs about the importance of promoting gender equality. “Our research on child marriage, in countries around the world, has left us convinced that the main cause of child marriage is simply gender inequality”.

UN Women spokesperson pointed out additional important factors “there are increasing changing marriage patterns that show that peer marriages, cohabitation and adolescent pregnancy leading to marriages exist alongside the traditional understanding of child marriage or forced marriage.”

“A proper gender approach requires that we recognize that early marriages and voluntary marriages also constitute harmful practices given the disproportionate impact it has on girls and the barriers it creates to their educational and economic opportunities”.

According to UNW, itis crucial to integrate women’s economic empowerment approaches to educational interventions responding to child marriage. Although poverty is not the only driver, poverty remains a key driver of child, early and forced marriage, which disproportionately impacts girls and young women and continues to be a deeply gendered practice.

“In order to empower girls and young women to use their voice, make their own choices and exercise their agency, it is crucial to ensure that a whole system and life-cycle approach is implemented to support the broadening of economic opportunities for young women by promoting skills and social protection for girls and young women who are at risk of child, early and forced marriages”.

UNICEF found strong correlation between the length of time a girl stays in school and the biggest reductions in child marriage. “And for adolescent girls, emerging evidence indicates that having a secondary education is much more beneficial for ending child marriage than having just a primary education”.

It is estimated that there would be 14 per cent fewer marriages if all girls had just a primary education, compared with 64 per cent fewer if girls also had secondary education.

“While just being in school can protect against child marriage, evidence shows that the quality of education has important implications. Adolescent girls who do poorly in school, do not learn well and fall behind are sometimes pulled out of school by their parents to marry”.

Ending child marriage will only be a reality if we address it through a comprehensive gender-transformative approach that tackles the root causes of gender inequality.

UNICEF’s Maksud sees potential in achieving SDG goal by 2030 if certain key steps are taken to accelerate the progress, which include “increasing girls’ access to education and particularly secondary education, proactive government investments in adolescent girls’ protection programmes as well as strong public messaging around the illegality of child marriage and the harm it causes”.

“When I think about Bangladesh, I think about everybody. Not everybody is enjoying Rabindranath and the great literature and culture that Bangladesh has. But I think everybody has got the right to have this experience”, deeply felt by late Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of BRAC (Building Resources Across Communities), a unique, integrated development organization that many have hailed as the most effective anti-poverty organization in the world; who passed away December 20, 2019at the age of 83.

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed. Credit: The Daily Star

He pioneered a new approach to development that has effectively and sustainably addressed the interconnectedness between hunger and poverty. In this regard, Sir Fazle broke new ground by melding scalable development models, scientific innovation, and local participation to confront the complex causes of poverty, hunger and powerlessness among the poor.

Sir Fazle was honored with scores of awards in his lifetime for his significant contributions in developing world; he was named as 2015 World Food Prize Laureate for his unparalleled achievements in building BRAC.

Among many of the other distinguished awards he received are, Spanish order of Civil Merit; Leo Tolstoy International Gold Medal; Lego Prize; Thomas Francis, Jr Medal in Global Public Health; Trust Women Hero Award; Inaugural WISE Prize for Education; Palli Karma Shahayak Foundation (PKSF) Lifetime Achievement in Social Development and Poverty Alleviation; David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership Award; GleitsmanFoundation International Activist Award; Olof Palme Prize; and Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership.

United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Executive Director Henrietta H Fore expressed his condolence, “All of us at UNICEF will miss his ideas and advice. We will never forget the example he set”.

Sir Fazle, founded numerous projects, including health, agriculture, and education with a vision to pull the poor out of poverty in every way. “Everything we did in Bangladesh we did with one focus: getting poor people out of poverty because we feel that poverty is dehumanising”, Sir Fazle had said to The Guardian.

For anyone growing up in Bangladesh, BRAC is a common name, almost every village kid you will meet inevitably goes to BRAC schools. BRAC’s Early Childhood Development (ECD) and Centre for Play programmes are designed to provide learning opportunities to children, especially in the early years. The play-based programmes are designed for refugee/displaced children who need help to recover from trauma. BRAC’s pre and primary schools have more than 12 million children graduated.

Dr. Muhammad Yunus, noble prize laureate, Chairman of Yunus Center noted in his tribute to Sir Fazle that how his contributions have positively touched almost everyone growing up or living in Bangladesh – “It is certainly not an exaggeration to say that there is hardly anyone among the 170 million people of Bangladesh who do not benefit in some way from Abed’s programs or enjoy products and services provided by his organizations. If she is a poor person or a village woman, then she is in contact with Abed’s activities at every step of her life – In education, health, income generation, self-Awareness and many more”.

Sir Fazle believed in gender equality, women empowerment and their role in poverty alleviation; in 1978, BRAC established ‘Aarong’, one of the biggest ethical lifestyle retail chains in the country,primarily by engaging rural artisan women who producedhandcrafts aiming at pulling them out of poverty. Today, ‘Aarong’ supports approximately 65,000 artisans impacting lives of more than 325,000 people through ‘Ayesha Abed Foundation’ and 850 entrepreneurs with fair terms of trade; giving them access to BRAC’s holistic support including mental health care, hygiene awareness and subsidized latrines, micro credit, legal aid, day care and education for their children.

Melinda Gates, co-founder of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recalled Sir Fazle’s contribution in her message saying, “We were saddened to hear of his passing and will forever draw inspiration from his work, as will the rest of the world, which he left so much better than he found”.

The first ever Sexuality and Rights conference in Bangladesh was held by BRAC School of Public Health, in 2007. It created an inclusive space for both men and women in Bangladesh. There are so many women with successful careers locally and internationally, who would not be where they are today without BRAC School of Public Health.

Nobel Prize-awarded couple Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, in their message, said, “How often do we see people like Sir Fazle Hasan Abed? His absence has left a great sense of loss in all of us”.

BRAC has distributed USD 1.5 billion in micro loans as one of many of its projects to help the poorest people in Bangladesh graduate out of extreme poverty. In order to make micro finance sustainable for the poorest, BRAC built an effective business model around micro financing which included grants known as transfer of assets which could be a cow or half a dozen of goats, or any resources that would generate an income for them; a stipend system until they start earning income utilizing the resources, and one on one counselling sessions which taught them strategies on how to best use the loans and resources to maintain sustainable flow of income and build a habit of saving money.

Former World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said, “The scale and impact of what he has done, and yet the utter humility with which he has done everything, is a lesson for every single one of us.”

Another of many of his greatest initiatives was to combat the increasing child and infant mortality rate. During the 1980’s diarrheal diseases became one of the top reasons of the premature mortality of children under 5 years in Bangladesh. BRAC introduced home-made oral saline to the mothers through various campaigning, and started immunization program for infants in village, which were revolutionary steps decreasing the rate of child death. “We went to every household in Bangladesh teaching mothers how to make oral rehydration fluid at home to combat diarrheal deaths”, the pioneer recalled as stated by The Guardian.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Sir Fazle Abed’s passion and work in alleviating poverty and empowering the poor inspired many. “My thoughts are with him and his family and friends,” he added.

BRAC now has extended its operations in 14 more countries, touching the lives of many more helpless people globally.

“His nearly 50 years of visionary leadership at BRACtransformed millions of lives in Bangladesh and beyond and changed the way the world thinks about development. Driven by an unwavering belief in the inherent dignity of all people, he empowered those in extreme poverty to build better futures for themselves and their families”, said former US President Bill Clinton in remembrance of Sir Fazle.

There are just a handful of people who change the world and impact millions of lives, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed was one of them who will continue to live on globally through his remarkable contributions. Dr. Yunus has articulated it perfectly, “Abed has left behind a confident Bangladesh. The story of his immense courage, self-confidence, and creativity will continue to inspire all generations to come. Abed will live as an icon of Bangladesh for posterity”.

Credit: United Nations

By Nayema Nusrat
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 9 2019 (IPS)

Filomena (15), a fisherman’s daughter from a village in Nampula Province, Mozambique was married to a 21-year-old from the same village.

Although her father, Antonio (50) felt that she was still too young to marry, it was very difficult for him to pass up what was offered in exchange for his daughter: 2000 Mozambican Metical (31.2 USD) and a promise to let Filomena continue her education after marriage.

Antonio had been in the fishing business since 1985; profit from his business started to decline dramatically as climate changes started to become more apparent.

In a report published by The Guardian he said “ We see that it’s too hot. We talk about that and we all agree that it’s difficult to catch enough fish because of these high temperatures.” “In the areas where we used to go, the sea level is rising, and the waves are much stronger”.

Besides Filomena, Antonio has five other kids to take care of and she firmly believes that her father would not agree on her early marriage if his fishing business was running well.

Child marriage is a global phenomenon happening for many socioeconomic reasons, but in this particular case it is evident that the already existing global trend of child marriage is further exacerbated because of climate change.

Climate change leads to rising temperature, shifting precipitation patterns and increasing extreme events; people whose livelihoods are intrinsically connected specially to natural resources, livestock, fisheries and agriculture suffer without attention to adaptation.

In Zimbabwe for example, extreme drought is one of the most common phenomena inflicted by climate change; “drought left Emmanuel struggling to feed his family. He agreed to a dowry of a few goats for his 15-year-old daughter.

It meant one less mouth to feed, and food and livestock for the family” – stated in a report by UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) , which explored different ways that climate change endangers the lives and futures of our children and how we must integrate climate risks into various policies and services.

Similarly, in Kenya, a dramatic rise in child marriage is seen due to severe droughts, diminishing the number of cattle at an alarming rate and child marriage is enforced in exchange of goats.

Roughly 82 percent of Afghan girls drop out of school before the sixth grade, partly due to early child marriages. Credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid

Workers from AMREF Health Africa (African Medical and Research Foundation), the largest Africa based healthcare non-profit organization aim to convince parents to stop child marriages and send them to secondary school -“when she is done with schooling, she will get a job and she will be able to buy you more than four goats”.

Meanwhile in poverty-stricken South Sudan, the majority of parents are marrying their daughters off in exchange for livestock using the bidding process, “Whoever bids with the highest number of cows will take the girl” said Dorcas Acen, a gender protection expert at CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere).

In South Asian countries, families who face financial difficulties from the likelihood of natural disasters like floods, droughts, river erosion, and storms resort to marry off their daughters.

Heather Barr of Human Rights Watch (HRW) told IPS that climate change is one of the reasons that is pushing girls in South Asian countries into getting married before the age of 18.

Barr shares her view about climate change and unpredictable natural disasters seen in Bangladesh and their linkage to early marriage, “Drawing a link between natural disasters and climate change is complex, of course, but we know that Bangladesh—and other countries in South Asia—are among those most affected by climate change. This is qualitative research, not quantitative, but the links were striking”.

HRW interviewed families who had been affected by three types of disasters— flooding, cyclones, and river erosion. Many of the families they interviewed had been barely surviving dealing with inadequate nutrition even before the disaster strikes; and one coping mechanism is that when a disaster pushed them from barely surviving to at risk of not surviving, they reduced their family size by arranging marriages for young daughters.

Barr says, “We saw this link most clearly in the families dealing with river erosion, and it seemed to be the combination of river erosion being both predictable and cataclysmic that created that link” adding, “Flooding was predictable and devastating but not cataclysmic”.

The families HRW interviewed were very accustomed to having to replant their crops. “Cyclones were cataclysmic but not predictable”—so families had to respond afterwards but had very little ability to plan beforehand.

“With river erosion, however, families would see the fields and homes of their neighbors closer to the river be washed away and those families permanently displaced, and they would know that within two or three or five years the river was coming for them. One of the ways they coped with the fact that they knew they would be displaced was by trying to find a marriage for their daughter that they hoped would ensure her safety and that would reduce their family size”.

Recent UNICEF data shows that 59% of girls in Bangladesh are married by 18 and 22% are married by 15. This is one of the highest rates in the world, and the highest in Asia. Globally a girl is married almost every 2 seconds, among which 21% of girls marry before 18 and 5% before 15.

However, the UNICEF report also shows that the custom of child marriage has decreased globally in the past decade. The most progress has been observed in South Asia where a girl’s risk of marrying in childhood has dropped from approximately 50% to 30%. The practice is more common among girls than boys, 4% of boys in Bangladesh marry before age 18.

Child marriage is still widespread across the globe where the total number of girls married in their childhood accounts for 12 million per year. One of the targets set in United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 5.3) is to end child marriage by 2030, but without increasing the rate of progress “more than 150 million additional girls will marry before their 18th birthday by 2030”.

Barr told IPS that child marriage issue in regards to climate change and natural disaster should be addressed by governments by ensuring the agencies responsible for addressing climate change and natural disasters participate in developing and implementing the national action plan to end child marriage by 2030.

And the plan plays specific attention to how climate change and natural disasters (and other disasters such as conflict, displacement) can increase the risk of child marriage and includes steps to mitigate that risk; she also asks for the governments to “Integrate child marriage prevention into all government planning in relation to disaster risk reduction and climate change mitigation”.

“Taking baby steps like boosting the sense of awareness among the individuals and community to exercise the common best practices to preserve the environment might dramatically increase the progress of the bigger change we want to see at the global level.”

An inspiring story from UNICEF is about a Bangladeshi young woman Smriti (19) from Barisal district, who is working with YouthNet for Climate Justice, a UNICEF-supported network, spreading awareness about global warming to her community discusses about climate change and its connection to the increased rates of child marriage.

Smriti says “It is hard to gather people to talk about this, but so often, I’ll stop in a tea shop, or stop a group of people, and engage them that way”.

While talking to IPS about child bride issue from a broad perspective regardless of the effect of climate change, Barr stressed that in terms of every other country where child marriage continues, one of the most fundamental driver of child marriage is gender inequality and valuing girls less than boys.

Research shows, secondary education for girls must continue to be encouraged; it opens up doors for their future careers with vocational advancement, making them highly likely to achieve economic empowerment; and as a result they are able to pull themselves and their family out of poverty, as well as act as an encouragement for their next generation to continue to narrow the gender inequality gap which in turn will create fewer child brides.

Credit: ILO

By Nayema Nusrat
NEW YORK, Nov 28 2019 (IPS)

Millions of Bangladeshi women are facing violence either as domestic housemaids or as migrant workers in Gulf countries. A few days ago, a video in social media, secretly filmed by a Bangladeshi housemaid employed in Saudi Arabia, caught everyone’s attention where she was helplessly crying and begging to be rescued from her abusive employer.

A large number of women from Bangladesh leave their families behind and travel thousands of miles away from home with the hope to get better earnings and ensure a better future for their children and family. While many women realize their expected hope, others face a different reality – suffering through insurmountable cruelty and mistreatment by their foreign employers and find no one to turn to for immediate rescue.

Another extremely common form of violence is inflicted by not getting their due salaries as promised despite the hours of hard labor they provide.

In the video, this young woman Sumi was hiding in the toilet, crying for help and begging to be brought back home. She said, “I might not live any longer; I think I am about to die, please keep me alive, take me back to Bangladesh quickly”, she said in “Bangla”. In the video she stated that her owners locked her up in a room for 15 days and barely gave her any food. They burned her arms with boiling hot oil and tied her down.

She also alleged that she was sexually assaulted by her employers. “They made me go from one home to another. In the first home, they tortured me and hit me repeatedly and then took me to another one where I experienced the same”. She was denied any medical treatment by her former employer.

Another very recent story of Husna, 24, surfaced in social media within just a few days of the Sumi incident, who also went to Saudi Arabia through a Bangladeshi broker agency called “Arab World Distribution”. She sent a video message to her husband Shafiullah, begging for help to free her from the abusive work conditions – she had faced physical violence ever since her arrival there.

Credit: United Nations

The contacts at the local broker agency in Saudi Arabia denied her of any assistance with derogatory words and attempted to hit her. In the video message to her husband she also describes how her owner turned crueler towards her since she expressed the urge to return home.

The recruiting agency in Dhaka demanded an additional 100,000 taka (USD 1178.11) from Akter’s husband if she is to break the two years initial contract to work abroad, as he reached out to them for help.

Most Bangladeshi workers are recruited by “Dalals” (chain of sub-recruiters connected to the recruitment agencies in the country). Women who go for work to Saudi Arabia or other Middle Eastern countries come from very poor families in rural areas and are often duped by these “Dalals”, realizing soon after they arrive for work. They often receive false promises of salaries of about 20,000 taka (USD 235) per month but rarely get written job contracts although it’s a legal requirement.

These recruiters typically charge them a large amount of recruitment fee for arranging to work abroad. These poor women arrange money either by mortgaging or selling their properties or getting loans with a very high interest rate.

Rothna Begum, a senior researcher from Human Rights Watch (HRW) told IPS, “Most of these women are already in debt before they even started to work abroad, as the recruitment fees combined with loans with high interest rates keep accumulating”.

These women workers are employed in Gulf countries under ‘Kafala’ immigration system. ‘Kafala’ is an employment framework in the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that require sponsorship from a national for migrant workers to be employed and reside in the country. The sponsor, either an individual or a company, possesses substantial control over the worker.

(The GCC is a political and economic alliance of six Middle Eastern countries— Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman.)

Begum stressed on how the ‘Kafala’ system across the gulf countries make the domestic workers more vulnerable to abuse. She noted, “in the GCC states under the restrictive ‘Kafala’ immigration rule, migrant workers’ visas are tied to their employers so they cannot change jobs without their employer’s consent. Migrant workers who escape an abusive employer can be punished for “absconding” with imprisonment, fines, and deportation”.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) interviewed hundreds of migrant domestic workers in GCC countries over the years, and almost all of them claimed that their employers had confiscated their passports, phones and restricted their communication.

Some women claimed that as they are typically already coming with so much debt, they feel trapped in exploitative situations, as they feel bound to stay to recoup their money and pay off debt.

Some brave ones risked their lives trying to escape by climbing down tall buildings or jumping off balconies. But those who escaped typically found little or no help from local police. Their employers accused them of criminal activities such as theft or absconding to the police.

HRW’s Begum said “often domestic workers dropped any claims against their employers, in exchange for their employers dropping their own accusations, just so the women could go home. Others found the process of appealing for their unpaid salaries or filing criminal complaints prohibitively lengthy and costly, as they are not allowed to work for another employer during an appeal”.

Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Program (OKUP), a Bangladeshi Migrant Rights Group released results of a study with 110 returnees, where the number shows that majority had not been able to effectively or safely make money in Saudi; 86 percent among the women interviewed said their Saudi employers didn’t pay their salaries, 61 percent said they had been physically abused, and 14 percent said their owners sexually abused them.

And returning home to Bangladesh doesn’t necessarily guarantee they will still be safe from their ‘Dalals’. Some who returned were beaten up by them for demanding the salaries as promised.

This year BRAC (Building Resources Across Communities), one of the largest Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) in the world, released new figures showing that 1,300 Bangladeshi women had returned from Saudi Arabia in 2018 because of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of their Saudi employers. They also said that this year alone, the bodies of 48 female workers were brought back from Saudi Arabia.

Nuri, another Bangladeshi woman who was tortured and worked without pay in the home of a Saudi family for two months told Thomson Reuters Foundation, “My ‘Dalal’ beat me up and broke my leg when I filed a case against him. I was in the hospital for 15 days. I stay with a friend right now, far away from my house because [the broker] lives nearby my place”.

Nuri held her ground strongly to find justice and is determined about fighting the case in the court – “After he beat me up, I am not turning back”.

Shamim Ara Nipa, a freelance social worker in Bangladesh told IPS, “most of the time these migrant workers do not have proper contact information to reach out to the country of origin agency or the embassy directly for help”.

Nipa also noted that the Saudi Government had been helpful in repatriation of these migrant workers as long as Bangladeshi Government is cooperating. The Bangladesh Government typically steps in when the story of a worker gets highlighted via social media or group protest, such as the case of Sumi who is now in a safe place thanks to BRAC, Bangladeshi Government and it’s Embassy in Saudi Arabia; but there are numbers of other similar violence cases in Gulf countries which never surfaced in mass media, therefore remained silent and unresolved due to lack of government intervention.

Although the Government admits that Bangladeshi workers face violence while working in Saudi Arabia, it rules out the idea of banning female workers going to Saudi Arabia.

Violence against Bangladeshi women workers is still ongoing at an alarming rate; Bangladesh should ensure that it provides the highest protection for its workers abroad, including by increasing oversight over its own recruiting agents, offering protection for its workers in host countries, and aiding workers in distress.

It’s understandable that there are actions and policies that are pursued by the Government of Bangladesh and the United Nations; however, better outcomes are expected while the policies and actions are being implemented and monitored closely.