Credit: Connie France/AFP

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jul 3 2026 (IPS)

Right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori has won Peru’s presidential runoff, narrowly defeating leftist Roberto Sánchez to become the country’s ninth president in a decade. She inherits a system so engineered for dysfunction that rather than making compromises, she may decide the concentration of power is her only means of survival. The constitution that created this trap was written by her father.

A system built to fail

Keiko, daughter of authoritarian former president Alberto Fujimori, has finally succeeded in her fourth consecutive runoff, having lost in 2011, 2016 and 2021. She won with a margin of roughly a quarter of a percentage point over a candidate who is a close ally of jailed former president Pedro Castillo. Both sides alleged fraud, filed claims and sent their supporters onto the streets.

Peru is often described as a democracy without parties. The party system disintegrated in the 1990s and was never rebuilt. In its place came a sequence of improvised candidacies and personal electoral vehicles that rise and fall with their founders. For the first-round vote on 12 April, the largest ballot paper in Peru’s history listed 35 candidates. Fujimori came first with just 17.19 per cent. Ultimately, most Peruvians didn’t vote for either candidate who made the runoff. A president elected on that basis has a mandate so weak that rivals can dispute it from day one, and they do.

Congressional seats scatter across dozens of parties, none of which dominates. But parties can combine to reach the two-thirds threshold needed to invoke a constitutional clause to impeach and remove a president on the grounds of ‘permanent moral incapacity’, a mechanism Peru’s constitution leaves deliberately vague. The Congress elected in 2021 removed three presidents in one term.

Authoritarian incentives

The constitutional mechanism that enables political instability is the reason Fujimori’s presidency could be dangerous. As she enters office with a razor-thin margin and no congressional majority, she faces an immediate strategic choice. She can seek compromise with her opponents, but this might signal that the threat of impeachment works, inviting it. Or she can move to concentrate power and weaken the institutions that constrain the executive, denying her opponents the tools they could use to remove her.

Everything points towards the second option. Most presidents recently removed by Congress were, at the time of their removal, attempting to govern within the rules, and the rules were weaponised against them. Pedro Castillo tried a different approach, dissolving Congress pre-emptively to forestall his impeachment. He was immediately arrested and removed. A politician who has watched this dynamic consume eight predecessors might conclude that the only way to survive is to change the game.

Keiko’s father ruled Peru from 1990 to 2000 as an elected president who progressively dismantled the institutions that constrained him. Two years into his first term, citing the simultaneous crises of hyperinflation and insurgency, he dissolved Congress and suspended the constitution. The emergency was real, but it was also an opportunity. Fujimori rewrote the constitution to entrench executive power, won re-election in 1995 and then won a fraud-tainted third term before being forced from office within months. His government became synonymous with grand corruption and human rights atrocities, including the forced sterilisation of over 272,000 mostly Indigenous women. After he was forced out in 2000, he was convicted of homicide and kidnapping, and imprisoned.

The constitution Alberto Fujimori wrote to entrench his power is still in force. The moral incapacity clause that the 1993 constitution retained – useful to Fujimori when he controlled Congress – has become the primary weapon congressional majorities have used to remove president after president. The most significant recent constitutional change, the reinstatement of a two-chamber Congress, may end up increasing congressional power. This is the system Keiko now has to deal with.

The costs of dysfunction

Peru’s dysfunction has long been sustained by a comforting fiction: that while politics is chaotic, the economy runs itself. Macro fundamentals have remained relatively stable. Inflation in 2025 ran at around 1.5 per cent, and the economy grew 3.4 per cent in 2024. But economic growth has roughly halved over a decade of turmoil. Poverty, at 27.6 per cent in 2024, remains above pre-pandemic levels. Homicides stand at 10.7 per 100,000 people, alongside an epidemic of extortion.

Freedoms are deteriorating and those who protest pay the highest price. In 2025, attempts to change the pension system triggered Gen Z-led protests that quickly expressed broader anger at corruption, insecurity and political dysfunction. Security forces responded with violence. In December 2024, the CIVICUS Monitor, which tracks civic space conditions globally, downgraded Peru to repressed status, its second-worst rating, citing years of escalating state violence and the systematic harassment of human rights defenders and journalists, who political figures routinely smear as terrorists and traitors.

In March 2025, Congress passed a law giving the Peruvian Agency for International Cooperation extensive powers to control, censor and persecute civil society organisations that receive foreign funding, threatening fines of up to US$720,000 and criminalising any use of foreign funds to support legal action against the Peruvian state. It is, in effect, a law against accountability.

Danger ahead

Keiko Fujimori ran a law-and-order campaign under the slogan ‘Fujimori returns, order returns’, casting the fight against organised crime as a sequel to her father’s 1990s war against insurgency and promising mass deployments of police and military forces. Her party championed a 2025 amnesty law shielding security forces and civilian armed groups from prosecution for disappearances, killings and torture during that conflict, in direct defiance of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Keiko has been evasive about her father’s atrocities and has recast human rights as a matter of access to basic services rather than accountability for past abuses. Her record offers no grounds for optimism about civic space or democratic norms.

Keiko’s father justified breaking the rules that constrained him by pointing to insurgency and economic collapse. Keiko faces no insurgency and no hyperinflation, so if she moves to concentrate power, she will have to find her own justification, perhaps in a crime wave, a security emergency or a conspiracy of her enemies. The Fujimorist playbook could come back with a vengeance.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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CIVICUS discusses Mexico’s enforced disappearance crisis with Angélica Orozco, a member of Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desaparecidos en Nuevo León (FUNDENL), a collective of relatives of disappeared people and people who support them. Since 2012, FUNDENL has been searching for the disappeared and documenting the human rights crisis.

Angélica Orozco

What are your demands?

There are over 133,000 people missing in Mexico. To put this into perspective, the disappeared would fill the stadium where four World Cup matches are being played in Monterrey almost two and a half times over. You could put together over 5,100 football teams, and it would take 107 World Cups to see them all play. The UN warns that only about two in 10 of these crimes are reported, so the actual figure could be much higher.

We have been searching by every means possible for nearly 15 years, with almost no support, using our own resources. We have written books, occupied public squares, organised protests and taken part in conferences. The World Cup is yet another opportunity to raise global awareness of the humanitarian crisis caused by enforced disappearances. As the world’s attention is now focused on Canada, Mexico and the USA, we want everyone to know about our struggle.

We are not against football. We are simply asking that the authorities search for our loved ones, bring them home and ensure that no one else is disappeared. For this to happen, prevention is key. When FUNDENL detects recurring cases in an area, we issue alerts to the public. It’s a simple step that the authorities, who have first-hand information, should be taking but are not. They should also enforce the laws and protocols we already have, thanks to the struggle of families and campaign groups. The law mandates a national register of missing persons, but the existing one is incomplete, with misspelt names and duplicate entries. The law also requires search and investigation plans to be drawn up, yet these do not exist.

We simply want the government to do its job. Instead, it’s investing millions in the World Cup to give the impression that everything is fine, while the search for the disappeared continues to receive neither the attention nor the necessary resources. It should work to find the disappeared with the same dedication it has put into organising this tournament.

To this end, we are holding various protests in the host cities. We have translated our slogan, ‘Where are they?’, into 10 languages: the eight languages of the countries visiting Monterrey, plus English and Chinese. Using AI, we have dressed 21 missing people in the Mexican national team’s shirt and called them ‘Mexico’s national team’, because that’s the team the authorities don’t want to see. We’ve also played street football matches in solidarity and put up over 150 photographs of missing people outside the stadium in Monterrey.

How have authorities responded?

The response has been deplorable. Instead of addressing our demands, the state criminalises and stigmatises victims. In Mexico City, there was a heavy police presence to contain the marches. The Secretary of the Interior cast doubt on the funding for the families’ journey from Jalisco to the capital and announced she would investigate the source of the funds. It was an absurd insinuation. We have always organised ourselves using our own resources, precisely because the state has never supported us.

President Claudia Sheinbaum also played down the significance of the protests. She even went so far as to say, amidst laughter, that there were more staff from the search commissions and victim support services than protesters. For us, it’s not about numbers, but about our 133,000 loved ones who are no longer with us. These are people with families, homes and lives that were snatched away from them.

We’d hoped that this government, which prided itself on being progressive, would be different. It wasn’t to be. The first sign was clear. In her inaugural speech, President Sheinbaum made no mention of the disappeared or their families. She’s said so herself: what’s not named doesn’t exist. She’s never met with the families. Like previous governments, it seems she prefers to ignore this humanitarian crisis.

The determination to conceal this reality is evident. Here in Nuevo León, the governor put up tarpaulins in poor neighbourhoods to hide the poverty. He placed giant planters in front of the Square of the Disappeared, which we occupied in 2014, so the faces of our loved ones couldn’t be seen from the street. We protested and stuck their photographs on the planters, and the next day we got the government to remove them.

On that square, we had written a sign on the pavement that read ‘130,000 disappeared’. Against the backdrop of the World Cup, we went back to refresh the paint and update the figure to include a further 3,000 who have gone missing since. The effect was immediate. Some people from Sweden who were visiting the city came over to ask us for more information.

What makes these enforced disappearances?

For a disappearance to be considered enforced, there must be state involvement, whether direct or indirect. And such involvement exists, even if Sheinbaum wishes to deny it.

There isn’t always a video proving it was a public official who took a person away, but there are omissions that prove it. An official who fails to request call records in time, for example, becomes an accomplice, because that information is key to the search, but it’s only kept for two years, and if it isn’t requested before the deadline, it’s lost forever.

In many cases, there’s direct involvement. There have been instances where men wearing municipal police vests have taken people away and cases where traffic police intervened in a road accident and the people involved subsequently disappeared. The constant is that the evidence implicating them always vanishes.

Added to this is the state’s refusal to acknowledge the crisis. It’s like with illnesses. If you don’t recognise you have one, you can’t cure it. That also makes them responsible.

We are not the only ones saying this. The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances has recognised the gravity of the situation and referred the case to the General Assembly.

Who are the victims and who is responsible?

Anyone can be made to disappear, in everyday circumstances. Some people have disappeared on their way home, or while popping out for a soft drink, or following a road accident.

Nuevo León is the state with the fifth-highest number of missing persons in Mexico, with over 7,000. Between January and May this year, a further 433 people went missing – an average of three a day – and around 70 per cent have still not been found.

If we are disappeared, it’s because the conditions for this to happen exist. The main one is impunity. Out of over 133,000 missing people, only 3,869 have an investigation file open, according to government figures. That’s almost absolute impunity.

Nor are there any consequences for officials who fail to investigate. They are simply moved to a different post. The official who currently heads the Local Search Commission spent three decades in the public prosecutor’s office and is repeating the same practices in her new role. The current mayor of Monterrey was the state attorney-general during the most violent years. Instead of being punished for their failure to act, they appear to have been rewarded. The same applies to criminals. We have come across people responsible for crimes in 2010 and 2011 who are still at large and committing the same crimes years later.

As the state fails to take responsibility, we have taken it upon ourselves to search for our missing loved ones, and what we have found is appalling. In Nuevo León, we have reported the existence of 10 extermination camps. In one of them, Las Abejas, we found over 250,000 fragments of human remains and more than 100 DNA profiles. This means 100 people haven’t returned home. There are also over 3,000 unidentified bodies and remains in mass graves in Nuevo León and over 70,000 across Mexico. Figures like these cannot be reached without a system set up to make people disappear with the complicity of the authorities.

What are you asking of the international community?

We ask our international visitors to turn their attention to this crisis, learn about our missing loved ones, show solidarity and help us search for them, because we don’t know whether any of them have been taken out of the country. We also ask them to take this demand to their governments, so they can add to the pressure on the Mexican authorities.

Pressure matters. That’s why we welcome the decision of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances. When it was made public, the Mexican state rejected it and treated it as an attack, rather than engaging with it.

Enforced disappearance is a crime against humanity. When someone is disappeared, they are torn away from their family and their entire community. That’s why we appeal to humanity: no person, anywhere in the world, should be made to disappear. As long as disappearances continue, we will not live in complete peace or democracy.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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The disappeared: Mexico’s industrial-scale human rights crisis CIVICUS Lens 22.Apr.2025

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The UN Peacebuilding Commission Celebrates 20 Years of UN Peacebuilding Architecture. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 1 2026 (IPS)

From June 22 to 26, the United Nations (UN) commemorated its first annual Peacebuilding Week, marking the 20th anniversary of the UN Peacebuilding Commission’s inaugural session. Featuring discussions among world leaders, policymakers, civil society, and advocates, the event explored how collaboration among governments, international organizations, and the private sector can enhance the visibility and effectiveness of peacebuilding efforts worldwide.

The goals of the Peacebuilding Week are particularly critical today, as increasing geopolitical tensions fracture international cooperation and severe financing shortfalls deplete resources, hindering relief efforts for civilians trapped in conflict. Despite a historic surge in active armed conflicts worldwide recorded over the past two years, peacebuilding and relief funding suffered a severe 40 percent decline between 2024 and 2025, leaving millions of people around the globe in a state of extreme insecurity.

“Peace does not occur automatically. It is built through persistent diplomacy, collective action and political will,” said Annalena Baerbock, President of the UN General Assembly. “Wars that never happen because of peacebuilding, conflict-prevention or sustainable-development efforts rarely make headlines. Yet, like everything else, peacebuilding is only possible when properly resourced.”

On June 26, the Peacebuilding Impact Hub—part of the Peacebuilding and Peace Support Office (PBPSO) within the UN Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations (DPPA-DPO)—launched its inaugural Peacebuilding Overview, titled Investing in Peace When the World Pays for War. This report analyzes data gathered from governments, civil society, scholars, and UN field operations across numerous, diverse contexts.

By addressing the root causes of conflict and encouraging the implementation of digital technologies—alongside active participation from youth and the private sector—the report aims to forge new paths for peacebuilding that are resilient, inclusive, and globally supported. Aiming to identify structural gaps in data sharing that prevent vital information from being shared internationally and from being fully utilized by policymakers and the public, the report was launched alongside a side event titled Building Peace in a Changing World.

At the event, Paul Fargues, one of the report’s authors and a Political Affairs Officer for the UN Department for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA), told reporters that the world is currently at a “crossroads, where conflict is on the rise, good governance is declining, and civic space is shrinking.” He noted that this is compounded by severe budget cuts and disproportionate investment in military expenditure rather than civilian protection and prevention efforts, making humanitarian relief operations increasingly difficult.

According to the report, over the last two decades, the world has invested only one dollar in peacebuilding efforts for every 100 dollars spent on military expenditure. Fargues added that the world’s most vulnerable populations are projected to suffer the most, particularly in dire contexts where aid constitutes more than 60 percent of all external funding and acts as a vital lifeline. Additionally, the DDPA found that roughly two-thirds of the countries whose economies are most dependent on UN aid are also the ones most adversely affected by the funding cuts.

Fargues argued that some of the central obstacles in advancing peacebuilding efforts today are the persistent structural gaps in the dissemination of evidence and data, which is critically underdeveloped when compared to the development and humanitarian sectors.

“Peacebuilding has no underlying framework to create shared data practices, to generate insights at the global level to enhance evidence-based decision-making, or simply to communicate its value to broader non-technical audiences,” Fargues said. “Peacebuilders and those who support them must do a better job at measuring, proving, and communicating this. Given the incredibly challenging contexts, producing more robust data and evidence of impact is a bare minimum.”

Katherina Ahrendts, the Director-General for Global Order, United Nations and Humanitarian Assistance of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany, stated that although the case for investing in protection and prevention efforts is clear, political and financial contributions lag significantly behind. According to figures from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for every dollar invested in preventive macroeconomic policies, up to 103 dollars could be generated in returns. DPPA also estimated that with adequate investment in prevention and protection measures, humanitarian needs could be reduced by approximately USD 3.6 billion annually.

Despite these potential gains, the economic case for peacebuilding efforts has not sufficiently influenced global investment priorities.“We are indeed at a critical moment when violent conflict is increasing while budgets are under strain and multilateralism as a whole is increasingly challenged,” said Ahrendts. “From a domestic policy standpoint, we need a much stronger business case, more compelling narratives, and better evidence. We need to showcase that peacebuilding is a smart, strategic, and cost-effective instrument that prevents much higher costs later on.”

“This means framing peacebuilding not only as a moral imperative, but as a matter of security, stability, mutual interests and sound investments. In particular, we need to make clear that peacebuilding and investment are an integral component of an effective security strategy,” she added.

Ana Escobar, the UN Representative for Peace Direct, an organization that empowers local peacebuilding efforts and supports community-driven approaches, remarked that peacebuilding must be grounded in a community-based approach and tailored to match the specific needs of vulnerable communities. Peace Direct defines meaningful impact as seeing communities become safer and more resilient long after external support has ceased.

Rather than implementing a pre-established peacebuilding agenda, Peace Direct works with local peacebuilders and community leaders to define what success looks like to them and identify the changes that they want to see. “That means asking different questions,” Escobar said. “Are communities resolving disputes without violence, and how do we measure that? Do women, youth, and marginalized groups have greater influence in decision-making? Is trust increasing between communities and institutions?”

“Peacebuilding is most effective when power, resources, and evidence flow in the same direction, towards the communities that live with conflict every day…. For local peacebuilders, prevention means that children go to school instead of joining armed groups, farmers return to their lands, markets reopen, women move safely, families remain together. Those are the returns communities measure every day,” added Escobar.

Dr. Cedric De Coning, a Senior Researcher in the Peace, Conflict and Development Research Group at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), underscored the importance of adaptive peacebuilding. This approach calls for the continuous monitoring of data and updating of peacebuilding measures, acknowledging that a community’s dynamics are constantly shifting. Rather than framing peacebuilding as a rigid structure being “built”, Dr. De Coning argues that it is more of a continuous process that is “nurtured”.

“What adaptive peacebuilding says is that we cannot know that beforehand; it has to emerge from people affected by conflict or people in societies struggling to achieve peace themselves,” said Dr. De Coning.

“As peacebuilders, we have to accompany these societies, and we have to learn together with them constantly and adapt our understanding of what it is that we can support. But we should be careful not to measure peace as something that only makes sense for donor-funded projects…. Peace is something much broader, and we need to measure that broader social transformation: how societies are experiencing peace, how they are living the things they look at, is what we need to look at rather than measuring projects to please donors.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

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A protester holds up a placard thar reads ‘Resist, don’t compromise’ at a mass march held under the slogan ‘The people are hungry, the prisons are full’ through popular neighborhoods in Tunis, Tunisia, on 16 May 2026. Credit: Chedly Ben Ibrahim/NurPhoto via AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Jul 1 2026 (IPS)

In May, Tunisian lawyer and journalist Sonia Dahmani was handed her second conviction of the year. Her latest sentence, a two-year jail term, came in reaction to her criticism of poor prison conditions. She previously received an 18-month sentence for calling out the government’s anti-migrant policies. Dahmani faces five more charges under a 2022 cybercrime law that criminalises the spreading of what it calls ‘false information’.

Dahmani is one of many victims of President Kais Saied, who continues to steer Tunisia in an ever more repressive direction. Saied won a free and fair election in 2019, but in 2021 he removed the prime minister and parliament, ruling by decree instead. The following year, he rewrote the constitution to give himself near-absolute power, approved in a low-turnout referendum held after key opposing voices had been jailed. When he won his second term in 2024, credible opponents had been criminalised and barred from running. It’s all a long way from the democracy that sprang into life after the 2011 Jasmine Revolution.

Growing criminalisation

Saied’s repression operates behind a facade of legality, with the criminal justice system serving as a tool of presidential control. In 2022, Saied sacked judges who disagreed with him and gave himself the power to control judicial appointments. Courts now do his bidding and jail opponents. At least nine staff of civil society organisations have received prison sentences so far this year.

Journalists Borhen Bssais and Mourad Zeghidi received three-and-a-half-year sentences on trumped-up money laundering and tax evasion charges in January. In 2025, 37 journalists, lawyers, opposition politicians and other dissidents were found guilty of terrorism and plotting to destabilise Tunisia. Following a mass trial, some were given decades-long jail terms. A November 2025 appeal court hearing that defendants weren’t allowed to attend upheld almost all convictions and increased some sentences.

The latest phase of the crackdown is targeting anti-racism campaigners. Since 2023, Saied has deployed the populist strategy of attacking Black African migrants to distract from the economic problems he’s failed to address. He’s repeatedly accused migrants of being responsible for crime and disorder, fuelling violence against them from security forces and the public.

Saied has branded organisations that stand up for migrants’ rights as traitors and foreign agents. Vilification prepares the ground for incarceration. In March, Saadia Mosbah, president of Mnemty, a Tunisian association that fights against racism, received a staggering eight-year sentence on bogus illicit enrichment and money laundering charges. Five of her colleagues were convicted alongside her.

Mnemty faces the threat of being closed down, part of an assault on associational freedoms that has seen dozens of other civil society organisations suspended. Hundreds more could face the same treatment. In 2024, courts ordered the closure of the Tunisian Council for Refugees. Last November, two of its leaders, Mustapha Djemali and Abderrazek Krimi, received two-year sentences for offences under a 1975 law on passports and travel documents.

No one appears to be beyond the state’s reach. In March, a judge ordered the pretrial detention of seven people on money laundering charges for their involvement in the first Global Sumud Flotilla, which last October attempted to take humanitarian aid to Gaza’s besieged population. Meanwhile being one of the organisations that won the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize offered no protection for the Tunisian League for Human Rights. The group was slapped with a one-month suspension in April.

For civil society organisations, suspension marks the start of a process that can lead to dissolution. Civil society organisations also face asset freezes, lawsuits and tax investigations. The combination of criminalisation, legal harassment and top-down vilification results in a pervasive chilling effect.

Judges that don’t do Saied’s bidding are also at risk. Anas Hmedi, President of the Association of Tunisian Magistrates, has been subjected to criminal proceedings since 2022, with a summons on fresh charges issued in January.

Europe says little

Tunisians continue to protest. Hundreds marched in the capital, Tunis, on 6 June to demand media freedoms and the release of political prisoners. Protesters in May also called out Saied’s failure to address the economic crisis. But they need international support.

Last October, Saber Ben Chouchane was handed a death sentence for criticising Saied on Facebook. Authorities interpreted his posts as constituting crimes of attempting to change the form of government, insulting the president and spreading false information. But this time the repression backfired. The severity of the sentence caused such an international outcry that Saied was forced to pardon and release him. This shows that international criticism can make a difference.

The European Parliament spoke up last November, passing a resolution calling for the release of political prisoners and the repeal of the false information provisions. But such gestures have limits, as shown by Saied’s dismissal of the resolution as ‘blatant interference’.

Resistance to autocratisation takes more than words, but the EU isn’t acting. It’s in a weak position towards Saied because it pays the Tunisian government to help prevent migrants crossing into Europe, and in April 2025, it classified Tunisia as a safe country of origin. This means it believes migrants can be deported there on the basis that they won’t be at risk of persecution, a claim that rings hollow for the many from civil society now in jail.

EU policies have contributed to the rising number of migrants in Tunisia, since people can make it there but no further. This makes them a ready target for Saied’s scapegoating. The EU must acknowledge its responsibility and change course. It must recognise that migrants’ rights in Tunisia aren’t being protected and that, in the current situation, only civil society can do that. In its dealings with Tunisia, it must insist that civil society freedoms are respected and people are free both to defend migrants’ rights and criticise the government’s decisions. Continuing silence will make it complicit in the consolidation of a dictatorship.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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A UN Peacebuilding Week Event held in Egypt’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, New York. Credit: Maximilian Malawista

By Maximilian Malawista
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 30 2026 (IPS)

As the United Nations held its first-ever Peacebuilding Week (June 22-26), UN officials and developmental partners gathered at Egypt’s Permanent Mission on June 23 to hold a dialogue on the main question that emerged from the 2025 Peacebuilding Architecture Review (PBAR): “How can global commitments to peacebuilding translate into tangible results on the ground?”

This event, hosted by Egypt at the sidelines of Peacebuilding Week, titled “Strengthening National Peace Infrastructures in Africa: Lessons Learned and the Way Forward,” brought together representatives from African governments and regional organizations, as well as members of the UN system, to discuss how nationally-owned institutions can mitigate and prevent conflict, manage effects and sustain peace long after such situations have ended.

To open the event, Egypt’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ihab Moustafa Awad Moustafa, emphasized that the 2025 PBAR negotiations repeatedly asserted a fundamental concern: ensuring that policy discussions in New York produce measurable impact on the ground, whether in Africa or in any other peacekeeping sites.

“One of the clearest answers that emerged during those discussions was the need to strengthen national capacities and institutions,” Moustafa said. “We are serious about peacebuilding, sustaining peace, and primarily prevention. We must invest in national peace infrastructure.”

The PBAR, which was adopted in November of 2025, reaffirmed that nationally led and nationally owned endeavors remain at the core of sustainable peace. The PBAR actively calls on Member States, regional organizations, development partners, international financial institutions, and the UN system to strengthen the institutions capable of preventing conflict, fostering social cohesion, and managing risk.

Throughout the discussion, speakers agreed that contemporary conflicts are rooted in security threats but also pointed to institutional fragility, governance deficits, and declining trust of public institutions between citizens as an additional threat.

Brian James Williams, Chief of the Peacebuilding Fund at the Peacebuilding and Peace Support Office (PBPSO), explained that the review provides a clear mandate for the international community to follow nationally identified priorities.

“Prevention and sustaining peace need stronger national capacities, stronger institutions and better alignment of international support behind those national priorities,” Williams said.

Williams detailed the UN Peacebuilding Fund’s increasingly important role in helping governments operationalize existing national mechanisms, rather than creating new parallel structures. Williams cited examples such as support for peace and reconciliation committees in Chad and local peacebuilding mechanisms in the Central African Republic.

“These committees bring together administrative authorities, traditional and religious leaders, women, young, and marginalized groups,” Williams said, relaying the efforts to connect national peace architectures with local institutions and provincial actors.

Participants of the dialogue repeatedly emphasized that national ownership must extend beyond central governments. Effective peace infrastructures require civil society organizations; participation of local authorities, women, youth, religious leaders, and representatives of the community; and capability of identifying tensions or risks before they can escalate into violence.

Permanent Representative of Nigeria to the United Nations, Ibrahim F. Jimoh, highlighted his country’s model to strengthen peacebuilding through institutions such as the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution and through reintegration, demobilization, disarmament, and reconciliation programs tailored to specific local conditions.

“Such infrastructures provide the framework through which countries can anticipate risks, address grievances, and support recovery,” Jimoh said. “Their effectiveness depends on inclusive participation, institutional resilience, and strong national ownership.”

Sierra Leone, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and The Gambia also shared examples where local mediation structures, national peace councils, reconciliation commissions, and traditional institutions of justice have contributed to conflict prevention and social cohesion.

Jacqueline Seck, Chief of Staff, Office of the Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA), pointed to Ghana’s Peace Council as an example of nationally owned institutions providing trusted platforms to have dialogue, mediation, and electoral conflict prevention. Similarly, in The Gambia and Sierra Leone, the role of dedicated peace institutions in helping support post-conflict reconciliation and manage political tensions was discussed.

Among the major challenges, financing emerged as a recurring topic throughout the duration of the dialogue. While the catalytic role of the Peacebuilding Fund was praised by the speakers, many emphasized that sustained peace ultimately requires a long-term political commitment to peace as well as continuous domestic investment.

Williams warned that developing institutions often takes a lot of time and is a gradual process.

“Institutions take time to develop,” he said. “Results often require support at a certain scale, across the country, and across different parts of an institution to make meaningful impact.”

Throughout the discussion, participants pointed to a broader shift in peacebuilding strategy, from responding to crises after violence has already erupted to investing in preventative institutions designed to address risks before conflict happens.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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CIVICUS discusses Ghana’s anti-LGBTQI+ law with Leila Lariba, Executive Director of One Love Sisters Ghana, a community-driven organisation that advances human rights, social inclusion and wellbeing for Muslim LGBTQI+ people in Ghana.

On 29 May, Ghana’s parliament approved the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, which imposes prison terms of up to three years for people who identify as LGBTQI+ and three to five years for anyone deemed to promote, sponsor or support LGBTQI+ activities. With it, Ghana joins a growing group of West African states, including Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Senegal, that have recently passed anti-LGBTQI+ laws.

What does the new bill do, and how different is it from the version parliament approved in 2024?

Parliament approved the new anti-LGBTQI+ bill on 29 May and it now awaits President John Dramani Mahama’s signature. The bill criminalises LGBTQI+ people and anyone perceived to support, advocate for or provide services to them. It reaches far beyond identity and relationships into the freedoms of association, education, expression, healthcare and human rights advocacy. I have worked directly with LGBTQI+ communities across Ghana for years and I see this not as a legal document but as a tool that legitimises discrimination.

The version parliament approved in 2024, which former president Nana Akufo-Addo left office without signing, was already one of the continent’s most restrictive. The new text keeps most of its harmful provisions. It comes at a moment when LGBTQI+ people already face heightened fear, insecurity and stigma, and it makes simply existing, seeking support or speaking about human rights a potential crime.

Why is the bill being pushed now, and who’s behind it?

The bill is being pushed by anti-rights groups that have increasingly turned LGBTQI+ people into a political target. As many Ghanaians struggle with economic hardship, unemployment and governance concerns, public attention is being redirected towards a small and already excluded community.

Behind it stands a coalition of political figures, conservative religious groups and traditional leaders who frame LGBTQI+ rights as a threat to culture and family values. This narrative ignores Ghana’s long history of diversity and the fact that LGBTQI+ people belong to every family, community and faith group in the country and the world.

Do you expect President Dramani to sign the bill, and what would the consequences be?

It’s uncertain whether President Dramani will sign. But the damage is already done. The prolonged public debate has fuelled fear, encouraged discrimination and left many people feeling less safe. Even before it becomes law, the bill has emboldened hostility.

At One Love Sisters Ghana, we have documented rising reports of blackmail, evictions, family rejection, mental health crises, online harassment and workplace discrimination. People are now afraid to seek healthcare, legal help and psychosocial support in case they are exposed or targeted. When fear becomes institutionalised, people stop seeking help precisely when they need it most.

The law would threaten fundamental rights and deepen the stigma, isolation and vulnerability of people who already face daily barriers. As a queer Muslim activist, I know what it means to navigate many layers of exclusion. Many LGBTQI+ people are balancing identity, faith, family and safety. This law would make that even harder.

The impact would reach beyond individual people. Community organisations, healthcare providers, human rights defenders and support networks would also face risk, making it harder for vulnerable people to reach essential services and protection.

How are LGBTQI+ groups, including your organisation, responding?

Ghana’s LGBTQI+ communities are remarkably resilient. Across the country, people are supporting one another, sharing information, strengthening their safety and keeping community ties alive.

At One Love Sisters Ghana, we focus on community care, protection and wellbeing. We have tightened safety and security measures, expanded psychosocial support, documented rights violations and kept referring people in crisis to the help they need.

We work closely with activists, community leaders, health professionals, lawyers and regional partners to track developments and keep people informed and supported. Through our national support systems, we keep hearing from people worried about their safety, livelihoods and future.

We also hold on to hope. Our communities have survived hard times before, and we keep building solidarity, caring for one another and advocating for dignity and human rights.

What further restrictions could follow, and what support do you need to prevent them?

Our greatest fear is that this law lays the groundwork for broader restrictions on civil society, free expression and human rights work. Organisations could face tighter scrutiny, activists greater risk and excluded groups even harder access to services.

To prevent further harm, we need sustained support from national, regional and international allies for community safety initiatives, emergency response, legal assistance, mental health services and the protection of human rights defenders.

International solidarity should be led by local communities and grounded in human rights. Allies should amplify local voices, back grassroots organisations and keep advocating for fundamental freedoms.

This is bigger than LGBTQI+ rights. It’s about the kind of society we want to be. Respect for human rights can’t be selective. When the rights of one group are restricted, it creates a precedent that can affect everyone.

As a queer Muslim feminist and human rights defender, I believe that dignity, freedom and safety belong to all people. The conversations happening today will shape the future of our democracy. I hope Ghana chooses compassion over fear, inclusion over exclusion and human dignity over discrimination.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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SEE ALSO
Gender rights: rollback and resistance CIVICUS | State of Civil Society Report 2026
Senegal: ‘The new law criminalises not only LGBTQI+ people but also anyone offering support’ CIVICUS Lens | Anonymous interview 21.May.2026
Ghana: ‘The anti-LGBTQI+ law enshrines prejudice and discrimination and perpetuates inequalities’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Solomon Atsuvia | 01.May.2024

Credit: Jaime Saldarriaga/AFP

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jun 26 2026 (IPS)

On 21 June Colombians made their choice. By the narrowest of margins, Abelardo de la Espriella, a far-right criminal lawyer who’s never held elected office, became president-elect. Climate activists, human rights defenders, Indigenous communities and peace advocates have the most to lose from the incoming government’s agenda.

The election results follow the logic of a decade of deepening polarisation. Since the 2016 Peace Accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia began a contested and incomplete transition away from armed conflict, Colombian society has divided into two mutually hostile blocs. The election further revealed that no middle ground remains between them. The mainstream right is gone, its candidate receiving a humiliating 6.3 per cent of the first-round vote, and a new right, harsher and less constrained by institutional norms, has taken its place.

Peace agreement in trouble

Nothing divided the two runoff candidates more starkly than the 2016 Peace Accord. Iván Cepeda, the candidate backed by outgoing leftist President Gustavo Petro, is a long-time human rights advocate and senator, and chairs the Senate’s Peace and Post-Conflict Commission. He ran on a ‘comprehensive peace’ platform focused on addressing the structural roots of violence, including land access, inequality and the absence of state services in rural areas.

In contrast, De la Espriella said there would be no peace process under his watch, proposing instead to resume aerial bombardment of armed groups and reinstate herbicide fumigation of coca crops, a practice with well-documented environmental and public health consequences.

According to figures from Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office, the six-decade conflict caused over 1.1 million killings and more than 200,000 enforced disappearances, while over nine million were forcibly displaced. That record, and the significant progress made since 2016, will now be judged expendable by a government that regards the accords as illegitimate.

For the communities living in territories where armed groups overlap with extractive industries, this is no abstract policy debate. Human rights organisations have warned that a return to a full military offensive will be devastating for civilian populations, particularly the environmental defenders and Indigenous communities who already face lethal threats. Colombia is the world’s deadliest country for environmental and land rights defenders. It’s likely about to get worse.

Cutting the human rights lifeline

De la Espriella also proposes to part ways with the international human rights architecture that has provided Colombia’s victims with a path to justice. On the campaign trail, he announced his intention to withdraw from ‘useless’ international organisations including the UN and the Organization of American States, and denounced the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as ‘a farce’ that has served only to ‘support the left and persecute our security forces’.

In Colombia’s conflict-ridden territories where Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities continue to experience massacres and displacement, international monitoring bodies are often the only source of independent verification that violence is happening. The American Convention on Human Rights, which Colombia ratified in 1973, is embedded in the country’s constitutional framework, shaping the interpretation of fundamental rights across the legal system.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has hundreds of cases involving Colombia. In December 2024, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the state responsible for the 1995 enforced disappearance of two human rights defenders. Their families waited almost three decades for closure, and only got it because they turned to the regional system when domestic institutions failed them. Now that route could be closed.

What the results mean

Colombia’s change of direction could have global repercussions. Just weeks before the election, Colombia hosted the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, bringing together 57 states alongside civil society and scientists frustrated by the repeated failure of UN climate summits to deliver binding commitments on fossil fuel phase-out. Under Petro, renewable energy grew from two per cent to around 16 per cent of the energy mix, and Colombia issued no new contracts for fossil fuel exploration.

That era ends when de la Espriella takes office on 7 August. He frames fossil fuel expansion as a fiscal imperative and calls for the immediate legalisation of fracking, currently banned by judicial moratorium. Since the country includes significant parts of the Amazon rainforest, the climate impacts won’t be limited to Colombia.

Ultimately, De la Espriella did not win for his positions on peace, climate or human rights. He won on security and the promise of order. Calling himself ‘The Tiger’, he modelled his campaign on the populist template of Argentina’s President Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, vowing to shrink the state, build megaprisons and combat corruption with tools normally reserved for organised crime. The movement he founded, Defenders of the Homeland, carried Donald Trump’s public backing. The combination proved effective in a country exhausted by decades of violence where many are deeply sceptical of the left’s ability to deliver safety.

The far-right candidate converted legitimate grievances about insecurity into a mandate to dismantle the peace process, reverse climate commitments and withdraw from the international human rights architecture. The consequences will be felt most acutely by those his campaign never meant to speak to.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Shifra Ainomugisha from Uganda receives the 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year award from the Commonwealth Secretary-General, Shirley Botchwey. Credit: Commonwealth

By Kizito Makoye
LONDON & DAR ES SALAAM, Jun 25 2026 (IPS)

Before anyone called her an innovator, before artificial intelligence entered the conversation, before solar-powered cold rooms, before the language of sustainable development, Shifra Ainomugisha knew food loss in its painful form.

At dawn, she would grab a bucket and walk into rows of tomato plants on her family’s farm in Western Uganda to collect what had already been lost.

The tomatoes looked healthy from a distance. But many had softened, burst, or spoilt before reaching the market – the true meaning of food loss.

“I used to wake up every morning to collect rotten tomatoes and throw them away while trying to save whatever remained,” she recalled.

Almost half the family’s harvest disappeared this way.

Yet the labour never stopped.

Her parents worked relentlessly. Seasons came and went. Fields produced food. But income remained painfully uncertain.

“Meanwhile, we struggled to pay school fees,” she said. “Some children dropped out of school even though we worked very hard during holidays on the farm. We were producing food but could not earn enough money to support our education.”

Shifra Ainomugisha poses beside a solar-powered irrigation system in Uganda. She was named the 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year. Her contribution includes combining renewable energy and AI-enabled agricultural support to help smallholder farmers increase productivity and reduce post-harvest losses. Credit: Solafam, Uganda

Mission Accomplished

Those childhood memories – of abundance turning into loss and hard work failing to translate into opportunity – would eventually shape a mission that has now earned Ainomugisha recognition as the regional winner for Africa under SDG 2: Zero Hunger in the 2026 Commonwealth Youth Awards.

Selected from almost 1,000 applicants across the Commonwealth’s 56 member states after a two-stage adjudication process involving 57 judges, Ainomugisha joined 19 finalists recognised for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals through innovation and community impact.

But the award was not her only accolade.

Today, the Ugandan farmer and innovator earned the prestigious title of 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year at the 2026 Commonwealth Youth Awards ceremony in London.

The Commonwealth Secretary-General, Shirley Botchwey, presented the award to Ainomugisha.

In her remarks Botchwey congratulated all the finalists.

“You are already winners. To be selected from across 56 nations is a testament to your courage and your creativity. You embody the very best of our family. You have shown resilience in the face of challenge and innovation in the face of constraint.”

She continued, “Today is not about recognition alone – it is about momentum. It is not about isolated excellence — it is about collective advancement. Together, we will continue to strengthen the Commonwealth Youth Programme as a flagship vehicle for youth development in the Commonwealth.”

A Journey That Began With a Big Question

For the young Ugandan entrepreneur, however, the journey did not begin with awards.

It began with a question she carried since childhood:

How can people who grow food still remain hungry?

“Nobody should die of hunger,” she tells IPS.

“Because we are here to help. Farmers are doing agriculture, and we are solving food waste, which means we are fighting hunger. That is one of the SDGs we are working on.”

Today, Ainomugisha serves as co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of  Solafam, Uganda Ltd, a social enterprise using solar-powered technologies and artificial intelligence to help smallholder farmers reduce food losses, improve yields and increase incomes.

Her work combines three interconnected interventions: solar-powered cold storage, solar irrigation systems and an AI-enabled advisory platform known as Lean AI – a WhatsApp chatbot designed to guide farmers on planting decisions, irrigation timing, pest management, post-harvest handling and market access.

Together, the technologies aim to solve one of Africa’s challenging agricultural paradoxes: producing food but losing too much of it before it reaches consumers.

According to regional agricultural estimates, post-harvest losses continue to absorb a huge share of food production across sub-Saharan Africa, undermining incomes, nutrition and rural resilience. Smallholder farmers – who form the backbone of food systems – are particularly vulnerable because many lack access to storage, irrigation and agricultural extension services.

For Ainomugisha, those statistics have faces.

Her mother’s face.

Her father’s.

Her neighbours’.

And her own.

“I come from a tomato-growing family,” she said.

“Growing up, we experienced food wastage and low returns despite all the hard labour we invested in farming.”

Her father became one of her earliest inspirations.

Although he never had the opportunity to pursue formal education, he constantly experimented with solutions.

“He tried solving it by buying a diesel irrigation pump to increase yields because we only have one major farming season,” she explained.

“If you don’t make enough money during that season, the whole year becomes difficult.”

He attempted to preserve produce in improvised storage spaces.

But tomatoes continued spoiling.

Years later, after gaining access to education and exposure to technology, Ainomugisha began thinking differently.

“First of all, it wasn’t simply my decision alone,” she reflected.

“It began with my father. My father did not get the opportunity to go to school, but I did. I felt I had a better chance to solve the problem than he did.”

That conviction followed her into university.

Shifra Ainomugisha (centre, in reflective vest), co-founder and CEO of Solafam, Uganda Ltd, stands with farmers and community members beside a solar panel installation that supports climate-smart agriculture initiatives. Through renewable energy and farmer-centred innovation, the project seeks to reduce food loss and improve rural incomes. Credit: Solafam, Uganda

Solar to AI to Filling Knowledge Gaps

Together with colleagues, she founded Solar Farm while still studying.

Initially, the concept was straightforward: cold-chain storage.

Support from entrepreneurship initiatives – including LEAP Africa – helped transform the idea into a functioning enterprise.

But customers quickly changed the direction.

People arriving at the cold rooms often revealed a deeper challenge.

Some had little produce to preserve.

Storage alone was not enough.

The team expanded.

Solar irrigation came next.

The goal was to help farmers reduce dependence on expensive diesel fuel and enable year-round production.

Farmers could access irrigation systems through a flexible financing model – paying 20 percent upfront and then making weekly payments of approximately USD 1.60 until ownership.

“We wanted to create a solution that farmers could actually afford,” she said.

Then came the next leap: artificial intelligence.

Ainomugisha says the AI component emerged from another observation.

Many farmers lacked access to agricultural training.

Knowledge gaps were driving losses.

“Many people are farming, but they are not always doing it the right way,” she explained.

“You might find a tomato farmer irrigating in the morning, yet tomatoes are better irrigated in the afternoon or evening.”

The team launched Lean AI – a chatbot accessible through WhatsApp that provides real-time agricultural guidance.

Farmers can ask questions and receive recommendations on farming practices, pest control, irrigation and post-harvest management.

The system is now being adapted to work via real-time messaging protocol known as USSD to reach users with basic mobile phones.

“We use AI to continue training farmers even when we are not physically present,” she said.

“We believe this will improve yields, increase incomes and eventually change the narrative that farming is only for the poor.”

Shifra Ainomugisha poses beside a solar-powered irrigation system in Uganda. She is combining renewable energy and AI-enabled agricultural support to help smallholder farmers increase productivity and reduce post-harvest losses. Credit: Solafam, Uganda

Changing the Narrative

That narrative matters deeply to her.

“In Uganda, there is a narrative that agriculture is for poor people,” she said.

“That is sad.”

She pauses.

“People believe that because despite hard work, they cannot escape poverty.”

One of the defining moments came in 2023.

After struggling to convince local markets to host their first cold room, the team installed it at her family home.

Her mother became the first customer.

Then came neighbours.

Then more farmers.

Initially, usage was free.

People needed proof.

One woman – a friend of Ainomugisha’s mother who traded fruits and vegetables – became an unexpected validation.

She stored produce for a month.

Fresh vegetables that once spoilt within days remained viable for nearly two weeks.

That extra time allowed her to wait for better prices instead of selling under pressure.

“She later realised how much it was helping her,” Ainomugisha said.

“Now she earns more from farming than she did before.”

Solafam eventually introduced a pay-per-use model.

The impact, Ainomugisha says, became measurable.

“What makes us proud is that we have increased farmers’ incomes by 28 percent.”

“We have also reduced post-harvest losses by about 30 percent.”

Commonwealth Deputy Secretary-General (Programmes), Tanmaya Lal, Commonwealth Secretary-General, Shirley Botchwey, and Commonwealth Deputy Secretary-General (Corporate), Tania Baumann, pose with the 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year and Africa Regional Winner, Shifra Ainomugisha, at the Commonwealth Youth Awards ceremony in London. Credit: Commonwealth Secretariat

Winning Reaction

Those outcomes helped propel Solafam onto the Commonwealth stage. The Commonwealth Youth Awards are an initiative of the Commonwealth Youth Programme, which has supported youth development work in member countries for over 50 years.

“I am honoured to be named the 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year.  This recognition is not only personal but also represents the farmers and communities in Uganda whom we serve.  It also affirms that solutions built from lived experience can create real impact. I cannot wait to continue this journey with the support of the Commonwealth and its remarkable network of partners.”

The Awards recognise young leaders advancing development solutions across member states.

For more than a decade, the programme has provided visibility, networks and funding opportunities to support youth-led initiatives.

This year’s finalists span sectors ranging from climate action and health innovation to entrepreneurship and communications.

For Ainomugisha, being selected is an honour.

“I’m glad to be a finalist for the Commonwealth Youth Award and a regional winner for Africa,” she said.

She believes three things contributed most to the selection.

Sustainability.

Impact.

Accessibility.

“First of all, our project is sustainable. We have maintained it from 2022 until now.”

“Secondly, we are creating meaningful impact.”

“Also, our technology is affordable for smallholder farmers.”

But perhaps what distinguishes her work most is who it centres.

Women.

“Because this problem is personal to me,” she said.

“I did not hear someone else’s story and decide to solve it.”

“I am a woman, and I saw how my mother worked every day on the farm, yet our lives were not improving.”

Across much of Africa, women form a large share of the agricultural workforce while often facing unequal access to land, financing, technologies and extension services.

Ainomugisha says designing with women in mind is not a strategy.

It is lived experience.

“Of course, we also work with men, but the majority of our beneficiaries are women.”

As global conversations increasingly focus on artificial intelligence, her message is clear.

Technology alone is not enough.

It must be accessible.

Affordable.

And designed around people’s realities.

Her next ambition is expansion—making agricultural intelligence available even to farmers without smartphones.

The larger vision is not simply digitising agriculture.

It is restoring dignity to farming.

The memory of rotten tomatoes remains.

So does the memory of school fees that almost went unpaid.

But today, those memories no longer represent failure.

They represent the beginning of a different harvest.

One where innovation is measured not only in algorithms or solar panels but also in whether families who grow food can finally afford to eat, learn and dream.

And for Ainomugisha, that future has already started.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Excerpt:

Cécile Koffi and her colleagues collect salt from concrete pans on the beach in rural Benin. Credit: Neha Banka/IPS

By Neha Banka
OUIDAH, Benin, Jun 25 2026 (IPS)

It is barely noon, and a group of women sit near the beach on the outskirts of Djégbadji village, in West Africa’s Benin, sifting through mounds of salt harvested from the Gulf of Guinea’s ocean.

Large concrete vats covered with black tarpaulin show traces of white salt sediment as the seawater slowly evaporates under Benin’s midday sun – except that instead of using fire, the group uses solar energy.

The women have been working as part of a grassroots project called ProSEL Benin, a collaborative effort of the governments of Benin along with India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) that focuses on strengthening local salt-producing communities to access sustainable energy sources and create medium-sized enterprises for the production and marketing of local iodised salt.

Salt production is one of the main income-generating activities for the populations living in and around southern Benin.

Generations-Old Traditions

“In Benin’s coastal areas, women skim the salt from the coastal marshes… they put up their little huts and boil salt water in massive vats over an open fire inside the hut. They then sell the ‘cooked’ salt at the markets and on the roadsides. It’s an unhealthy practice for various reasons,” says Robina Marks, who served as South Africa’s ambassador to Benin and Togo from 2021 to 2024 and was closely involved in the implementation of the IBSA-backed project.

The traditional method of collecting and cooking the salt has been practised in Benin since at least the 15th century, primarily by women, and involves collecting saline soil, evaporating the water and filtering brine by burning chopped mangrove wood to produce salt.

The practice harms women’s health due to how they collect the salt and the conditions in which it is prepared.

“It takes a very long time and is very labour-intensive,” Marks says.

The ProSEL Benin project attempts to change this traditional practice and make the process of collecting salt healthier and cleaner.

Salt-making is an important source of income for communities here, relying heavily on the cutting down of mangroves.

ProSEL Benin’s research estimates that approximately 20,000 cubic metres of mangrove wood are cut down annually in coastal Benin for use as firewood in Indigenous salt-making.

The UNDP and the Benin government discussed the new method about five years ago.

“But the idea came from the people on the ground, who had the needs. The Benin government came up with the project and wanted to work with UNDP,” says Aoualé Mohamed Abchir, who served as the UNDP Resident Representative in Benin from 2020 to 2024 and was instrumental in its development.

ProSEL Benin, Abchir says, is an attempt to advance three out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: gender equality; decent work and economic growth; and responsible consumption and production. This project aims to help rural women in Benin make and sell clean salt and become self-reliant.

In 2021, the Board of Directors of the India, Brazil and South Africa Facility for Poverty and Hunger Alleviation Fund awarded USD 1 million to the UNDP to implement the salt project.

IBSA is an example of collaborative efforts between the three developing countries, as well as a South-South cooperation initiative within the United Nations that focuses on development cooperation among developing countries in the Global South.

When 60-year-old Cécile Koffi was first introduced to the salt project, it took some time to convince her to switch from the traditional method of making salt.

“There are a lot of things the salt does. Salt is intrinsic to the community’s women,” Koffi says, examining the day’s salt collection.

Salt is culturally important to Benin, and its uses go beyond culinary applications.

“It is not only used as food, but it also has a cultural aspect to it. It is regarded as sacred and is used in many of the vodoun practices,” says Marks.

“When we go to the market to sell our produce, we sprinkle salt on the ground and sweep it up before setting up our spot. It is believed that every bad spirit will go away if we do that. Salt is very important. We use it in a lot of rituals,” says Koffi.

Julienne Dekon collects saline water using the traditional method to make salt in rural Benin. Credit: Neha Banka/IPS

These deep-rooted cultural beliefs were one reason why it was difficult to get the women to change and adapt to the ProSEL Benin project, even though it was backed by the Benin government, explains Abchir.

Traditionally salt production is a cultural activity carried out by the Xwla populations of the coastal zone in Benin. The traditional production of salt by the salt farmers in the villages is subject to many prohibitions related to working days, village deities, and so on.

“The name Xwlajè is also intimately linked to the Xwla ethnic group,” says Luc Obale, national project director of ProSEL Benin. The Benin government has been working to certify the salt so that it can be sold with the label ‘Xwlajè’ to identify its cultural origin.

“The old method is their ancestral way of producing salt, so it has significance. Sometimes when you change the way you produce something, some people believe it may have negative implications. The women could have got the salt directly from the sea, but there is a reason why they weren’t doing that before the project,” says Abchir.

The ProSEL Benin project targeted five areas in coastal Benin where people have traditionally harvested salt: Sèmè Kpodji, Grand Popo, Ouidah, Kpomasse, Comè and Lokossa.

“In those other areas, people have been more open to using sea water to make salt, but Ouidah is Ouidah. It is very special. They believe that the best salt can only be cooked, not dried. They believe that they have to cook it,” explains Abchir.

Ground-Level Interventions

The ProSEL Benin project is not the first intervention programme that has attempted to make local salt cleaner and more environmentally sustainable, but it has been successful because caseworkers managed to get it off the ground, says Cessi Marlene Capo-Chichi, who works with UNDP as a project coordinator.

“Organisations have struggled to convince the local community to change their ways,” she says.

Some 500 metres from where the ProSEL project is ongoing by the beach, within the limits of Djégbadji village, is a coastal lagoon where women work inside a network of thatched huts, making salt in the traditional way.

“The traditional way of making salt is more laborious,” says 45-year-old Julienne Dekon, lifting a cane basket heavy with saline soil collected from the marshy land that surrounds her.

These days, the Benin government prevents the chopping down of mangroves for wood, and women are encouraged to use dried palm leaves and coconut shells for fuel instead.

Dekon says that she wants to continue working using the traditional method, although many of her friends have now switched to the modern method of salt making using seawater after joining the ProSEL project.

As she begins boiling the saline water inside her hut, smoke fills the small space.

“When I have to work a lot, I do get tired. But I don’t know much about how this affects my health,” says Dekon.

Dekon doesn’t remember when she started making salt, but it has been a very long time, and she is now accustomed to preparing using the traditional methods.

“The method on the beach (ProSEL project) is easy to do. But when it is raining, it is not possible to do it outside. But I can continue to make salt even in the rain, because I collect the soil and start cooking indoors. The two systems are too different,” says Dekon, referring to the open-air concrete salt vats by the sea that are susceptible to the vagaries of the weather.

However, the wet weather also affects the women using traditional methods.

From April to August, Benin experiences its rainy season, with short spells of rain between September and November, and the low-lying marshes near the lagoons are prone to flooding.

“We are pushing them to switch to the ProSEL system because during the rainy season the area where the salt is produced traditionally is inaccessible. It is completely flooded, and so for more than half the year, there is no production of salt. We needed to give them alternatives,” says Abchir.

While it is easier for the women to avoid the rains by tracking the weather, it is harder to bypass the persistent floods, he says.

Abchir says the project focused on giving the women access to seawater to make sure they could make salt and have steady income through the year.

“Using the seawater to make salt is less painful. You just get the water and let the sun evaporate it. You don’t have to cook it, and it is safer. You can also make more money,” says Abchir.

Just down the unpaved road from where Dekon works, a woman stands by the highway selling salt.

The difference between the salt produced by women like Dekon, who have been working using traditional methods and those engaged with ProSEL Benin is clear: the traditional salt is visibly yellow-brown with streaks of grey, colours that come due to the lack of a filtration process. The ProSEL Benin salt is clean and white, fortified with iodine that the women mix into the salt just before filling it into bags.

A one-kilogram bag of salt produced by women using the traditional method, sold in local marketplaces and by the road, would cost approximately 800 West African CFA franc (approx. USD 2), while the same amount produced by ProSEL Benin would sell for 1,000 CFA.

For Public Consumption

ProSEL research indicates there are about 4,000 women harvesting salt in Benin. The country imports most of its salt from countries like Ghana, Senegal and India because its Indigenous salt farming covers only a small fraction of the country’s actual needs.

Stakeholders realised that it was not enough to teach the women how to make cleaner salt; they also had to be given access to markets to sell it. One market that the project aims to tap into is the World Food Programme (WFP) under the UN’s Benin office, which helps feed over 1 million children annually with daily school meals. The WFP has been undertaking research to understand the feasibility of purchasing and using salt through these cooperatives led by women under ProSEL.

The Benin government has ambitious plans for the harvested salt.

In December 2025, Benin’s food safety agency, ABSSA, the Agence Béninoise de Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments, certified the salt for public consumption, after which the salt was prepared to be sold under the label Xwlajè.

Presently, the Xwlajè salt is sold in seven different supermarket chains across Cotonou, as well as in standalone shops located in the municipalities of Porto-Novo, Cotonou and Comè.

“In addition, steps are underway to market Xwlajè salt in the duty-free shops at Cotonou International Airport,” says Obale.

Abchir adds that a process that would take the women six hours now takes them two. Bringing about change has been difficult, he says, because it involved convincing people who were accustomed to working in a specific way for generations.

He admits that they wouldn’t have been able to do much without winning the trust of the women, their husbands who still oversee their lives, the mayor and the local community leaders.

“The local team went down to the women and understood their needs so that sensibilities could be understood and it would be accepted. It is very difficult in Benin when outsiders come in and tell them what to do.”

Abchir says that there is a high risk of undoing all that work if there is mistrust in the community towards the project.

“They are accepting the changes. Now we are trying to build construction for storage, keeping machines, etc. It is a sensitive phase, but we are hopeful that it will work.”

Benin’s government has prioritised tourism over the last few years, and its Indigenous salt farming practices are a key part of its plans to introduce tourists to Beninese culture.

The ProSEL project does not aim to fully remove the traditional method of salt farming, says Obale.

“The modern salt production unit is located not far from the traditional production site to allow tourists to see the difference between the two production methods,” he says.

Mireille Adjovi, a new mother in her 20s, has come to work at the ProSEL site with her infant sleeping on her back.

“With the money I get, I am able to take care of my children. I will be able to send them to school. I think about myself last: my husband and children come first. Maybe the men give money for the household, but women still suffer a lot. If women need something, husbands give the amount of money they want to give you, not what you need. The men don’t think about the women. So the project helps me earn my own money,” says Adjovi.

For women like Adjovi, making salt is not just about following the jobs women before her have done for generations.

She doesn’t know what the UN’s SDGs are or even what IBSA means, but the work at ProSEL Benin allows her to prioritise her own health and well-being while working collectively in a women-led cooperative.

When she talks to other women working at the site, she also thinks about the hard-earned independence and self-reliance she now has.

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Farmer-turned-fishermen from the local indigenous community are fishing in the Dumboor lake in north-eastern India. At the Eighth Global Environment Facility Assembly, a project was approved involving three communities across India, including Dumboor Lake. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
DUMBOORNAGAR, India and SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan, Jun 24 2026 (IPS)

At dawn, when the waters of Dumboor Lake lie still under a pale grey sky, Santo Chakma, 63, nudges his narrow wooden boat into a reservoir that swallowed his childhood.

The lake is a growing attraction for tourists who come here in search of beauty and tranquillity, with dozens of islands scattered across a vast expanse of water. But for Chakma, the lake reflects a past erased.

“Once, these were rice fields. My father and my grandfather cultivated rice,” he says quietly. “But now we catch fish because there is no land.”

Spread across 41 square kilometres in Tripura’s Gomati basin, Dumboor Lake is now known for its 48 small islands and a growing tourism economy. But beneath its surface lies the submerged Raima–Saima valley – once a fertile agricultural landscape that sustained indigenous communities for generations.

That landscape disappeared in 1974, when the Gumti Hydroelectric Dam transformed the Gomati River into a reservoir, displacing thousands of people, mostly from indigenous tribes such as the Chakma, Reang, and Tripuri.

From Farmers to Fishers

In villages like West Gandecherra – a lakeside village – elderly people carry the memories of their old days in their hearts.

“The Gumti (Gomati) River was our lifeline,” recalls Phulorani Tripura, an elderly resident. “We used to sail bamboo rafts.”

Across the region, communities tie bamboo in large bundles and throw them upstream. The river carries the bundles down and people travel on them using these bundles as their rafts. For days, they live on these bamboo rafts, sleeping on them and selling produce from their farms, such as homemade butter and peppers, until they reach a market where the bamboo is sold.

“Water was not our livelihood – it wasn’t our way of living,” Chakma reminisces.

That world collapsed after the dam was built as farmland, homes, and markets were submerged. Families were relocated to uplands, where agriculture proved unreliable. Many eventually returned to the lake – not as traders or farmers, but as fishers.

Today, nearly 5,000 families depend on the lake’s fisheries, navigating livelihoods born out of displacement rather than choice.

An Increasingly Fragile Livelihood

Every morning, lines of small boats move out across Dumboor. By afternoon, they return with their catch, which is often smaller than in previous years. Fish diversity has declined due to overfishing, reduced stocking, and ecological stress.

“Earlier, fish were plentiful. We caught big fish like rahu (Labeo rohita), katla (South Asian carp) and gojal (channa marulius). If we sold one fish weighing 4-5 kg, it would be enough money for a whole week. Now we catch more small fish, which sell for less and also don’t stay fresh for long, which brings even less. So, now we work harder for less,” says Sushil Chakma, a fisherman, untangling his net.

Economic pressures add another layer of strain. Fishing licences cost up to ₹10,000, while government-fixed prices can be lower than 1 dime (US) per kilogram, leaving fishers dependent on middlemen.

“The government charges us, but the benefits don’t reach us,” Chakma says.

There are also constant safety risks due to erratic weather, fluctuating water levels, and fragile bamboo fishing platforms – known locally as ‘mancha’ – which have led to repeated fatalities.

“We call these platforms ‘mancha’, and we often hear that one has broken and fishermen have drowned,” says Bryn Tiprasa, a youth originally from East Gandecherra village near the lake, now living in Agartala, about 120 kilometres away.

“In fact, only last month, a fisherman died like that. Two years ago, four fishermen died in a single incident. Will this project consider addressing these kinds of problems? We don’t know yet.”

Tourism Grows, but Locals Miss Inclusion

Dumboor has increasingly been promoted as a tourism destination, with sites like Coconut Island attracting visitors for boating and festivals.

The Government of India has invested significantly in developing tourism infrastructure around the lake. But locals say these efforts prioritise visitors over indigenous communities whose livelihoods depend on the lake.

“The big businesses are not ours,” says a local boat operator. “We build boats ourselves, take loans, and earn only during the season.”

Some residents also report losing access to land and resources because private aquaculture or tourism ventures lease parts of the reservoir.

For communities already displaced once, these developments revive a familiar fear: marginalisation in the name of development.

Environmental pressures are also compounding these challenges. Invasive species such as Mikania micrantha (locally referred to as ‘Pichash’) due to erratic rainfall and changing water levels have disrupted fish breeding cycles and degraded ecosystems around the lake.

Despite supporting thousands of livelihoods, Dumboor Lake still lacks a comprehensive management plan.

“We depend on the lake, but no one manages it properly,” says a cooperative member. “How long can this continue?”

A New GEF-Backed Project Enters the Picture

Amid these overlapping pressures, a new biodiversity initiative supported by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) is drawing cautious attention.

The project – Conservation of Biodiversity, its Sustainable Use, and Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits in India (CONSERVE) – was approved at the 6th Global Biodiversity Framework Fund Council meeting, held under the framework of the Eighth GEF Assembly.

Backed by USD 13.8 million and implemented by the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank, the project aims to strengthen community-led conservation while ensuring fair sharing of benefits.

At its core is a shift toward recognising Indigenous communities as key custodians of ecosystems – a long-standing demand in regions like Dumboor.

However, details of how the project will work on the ground and what it will specifically deliver for Dumboor’s fishers are not yet clear.

This uncertainty shapes local reactions: hopeful, but cautious.

Potential – and Unanswered – Questions

The initiative is expected to involve at least 25,000 people across project areas in governance and decision-making, including women.

For communities in Dumboor, this could mean,

• recognition of traditional knowledge
• participation in resource management
• access to financial support and new livelihood models
• improved ecosystem sustainability.

It also reflects the GEF’s growing emphasis on blended finance approaches – combining public and multilateral funds with other sources – to support environmental outcomes alongside community development.

Some, however, say the project needs greater transparency.

“How will local women be integrated into this project? What will be the means and level of women’s access to finance and opportunities to play a leadership role? These are some of the questions,” says a member of the CBD Woman’s Caucus who participated in the GEF global council.

According to the GEF, several gender-specific targets are included in the project design, ensuring that women will make up 50% of the estimated 25,000 beneficiaries and at least 40% of the beneficiaries of an Access and Benefit-Sharing financial mechanism that will be implemented as part of the project.

For residents, the real test lies in implementation.

“Most of this money might just go into big pockets and not to the locals,” says Tiprasa. “A lot of projects are launched in the region, but few bring actual benefit.”

He adds that many interventions fail because they do not account for local realities.

“The projects do not always consider the local challenges, so not all solutions help improve their conditions.”

Despite scepticism, some residents see promise in the project’s stated focus on community participation.

“We have always lived with this lake,” says Santo Reang, a local resident. “But no one asked us how to manage it.”

“This time, if they involve us properly, things can change,” adds Niranjan Debbarma, a fisher cooperative member. “We understand this lake better than anyone.”

The GEF noted that the GBFF recently developed one of the most stringent and progressive guidelines to ensure that Tribal Peoples and local communities are in the driver’s seat when designing and implementing every project and will act as bona fide partners in identifying priorities and implementing the project.

A Fragile Turning Point

For decades, Dumboor’s indigenous communities have adjusted to realities imposed from the outside – shifting from land to water and from stable agriculture to precarious fishing.

Now, with a new GEF-backed project on the horizon, change is possible – one that could finally recognise both the lake’s ecological importance and the people who depend on it.

But in Dumboor, hope is never uncomplicated.

For those who have lost land once before, the question is not just whether change will come but whether it will finally include them.

Note: This feature is published with the support of the GEF. IPS is solely responsible for the editorial content, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of the GEF.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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CIVICUS speaks about the climate impacts of the 2026 World Cup with Frank Huisingh, founder of Fossil Free Football, a fan-led group that campaigns to end fossil fuel sponsorship in football and make the game more sustainable.

Frank Huisingh

What makes this the most polluting World Cup ever?

The 2026 World Cup is probably the most polluting event humanity has ever staged. It is bigger than any edition before it, with 48 teams and 104 matches played across 16 host cities in Canada, Mexico and the USA.

In past tournaments, much of the pollution came from building stadiums. Qatar built its venues almost from scratch in 2022, and Saudi Arabia will pour enormous amounts of concrete into constructing new stadiums for 2034. This World Cup can at least rely on existing infrastructure. Instead, the main driver of pollution is travel. The host cities are so far apart that the only way to get between most matches is by plane, and fans are effectively forced to fly to follow their team.

Another factor is that the tournament is a giant billboard for polluters. Its sponsors include airlines such as American Airlines and Qatar Airways, carmakers like Hyundai-Kia, and Bank of America, a major financier of fossil fuels. This advertising adds significant emissions, because advertising drives up consumption.

The most concerning announcement of all was that Aramco, the Saudi state oil company and the world’s biggest oil producer, would become the World Cup’s biggest sponsor. Fossil fuel advertising works differently from the rest. It is not really about selling us our next product, since we don’t make those choices consciously, but about building influence and soft power. Aramco is using the largest platform on earth to spread its message.

This soft power matters. At the COP climate talks, Saudi Arabia is widely regarded as the worst blocker of climate action, rivalled only by Russia and now the USA. That unpopularity is exactly why it builds soft power elsewhere, by sponsoring huge events like this or fronting ads with figures such as former player Rio Ferdinand and former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger, which will be highly visible throughout the tournament.

What’s the impact of extreme heat?

Because of climate change, summer football is now threatened by extreme temperatures it was never designed for, and FIFA has not adapted.

Fans may spend the whole day outside and then sit in the sun inside the stadium, which is dangerous for anyone, young or old. FIFA is doing little to help them stay hydrated. If anything, it is making things worse, having recently announced that people will no longer be allowed to bring their own reusable bottles into stadiums. A basic precaution would be to guarantee that fans can refill their bottles whenever they need to.

For players it can be just as serious. Teams will try to prepare for the heat, but the first reports are already coming in of players left exhausted by it in the USA. And the three-minute cooling breaks FIFA has introduced, which will be applied in every match regardless of conditions, are too short to bring players’ body temperature down or let them rehydrate properly. Experts say they should last at least six minutes.

We worked with a group of over 20 medical, climate and sports-science experts on an open letter warning that FIFA’s heat standards are genuinely dangerous, even impossible to justify. The way to measure how the body actually experiences heat is the ‘wet bulb globe temperature’, which combines air temperature, humidity, sun radiation and wind speed.

The experts, in line with the players’ union, say measures should begin at 26°C wet bulb and matches should be postponed at 28°C. Yet FIFA only takes any precaution at 32°C, and even then, postponing a match is not mandatory. That threshold is extreme. A 32°C wet bulb reading can correspond to 45°C in dry air or 35°C in high humidity, conditions in which no one should be playing sports outside at all.

So FIFA is promoting the causes of the crisis, exposing players to extreme heat and then failing to protect them. It could do so much better.

How does all of this sit with FIFA’s climate commitments?

In 2021, FIFA signed up to United Nations commitments to cut its emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 and reach net zero by 2040. It was a moment when the climate movement had real momentum and every organisation felt it had to put something down. But since then, the strategy has done little more than sit on paper, while FIFA has moved in the opposite direction.

Net zero by 2040 is a fantasy. The world won’t be net zero by then, so a travel-dependent tournament certainly won’t be either. The 50 per cent target, by contrast, is difficult but achievable. It could be reached by hosting the tournament in a smaller territory, using existing stadiums, encouraging fans to use public transport and prioritising local supporters rather than relying so heavily on international travel. International fans should absolutely be there – they are part of the experience – but it is also wonderful when the World Cup comes to town and local fans get the chance to attend.

Yet FIFA has taken no steps towards this target. Since signing up, its tournaments have only become more polluting. Politically and economically, FIFA has placed itself on the side of the fossil fuel industry and petrostates, not on the side of everyone else on the planet.

What can fans and civil society do?

Fossil Free Football is a tiny organisation, but we make as much noise as we can to hold FIFA accountable and force it to answer questions, which you can already see happening in the media. But we need many more players and fans alongside us.

Football can only survive if people can still go outside and play. So, if you love the game and care about its future, the first thing to do is speak up. Men’s football is often seen as conservative, but if you ask fans anywhere, they are as worried about the climate crisis as everyone else. That is why even talking about it with friends can make a difference, and it is where civil society activism begins.

From there, fans can call on their football associations and local clubs to act on climate. That might mean challenging a polluting sponsor, putting solar panels and a battery at the clubhouse or serving more plant-based food.

The same pressure is already working at the city level. A growing number of cities are banning fossil fuel advertising, much as we once did with tobacco when its impact on health became impossible to ignore. Amsterdam and Edinburgh have done it, and it can be replicated almost anywhere. Now football must do the same.

What lies ahead for the next World Cups?

I hope this tournament will be a wake-up call, and I fear the extreme heat and its toll on players may be what forces FIFA to change course. This summer might open the debate about moving the World Cup to winter, something that until now has only happened for Qatar.

The next event is the 2027 Women’s World Cup in Brazil, which Aramco is also set to sponsor. Tellingly, far more female players than male players have spoken out against the deal. We are campaigning to get it dropped before the tournament. It would be a shame for a country like Brazil, which has lately played a fairly positive role on climate, to host a tournament sponsored by the biggest polluter.

The 2030 World Cup will be hot too, with the tournament taking place mainly in Morocco, Portugal and Spain and with three opening matches in South America. Southern Europe and Northern Africa in summer are no place to play football. Meanwhile, stadium construction in Morocco is already drawing protests from locals and its emissions will be huge.

As for the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia, eight years is a long time, especially as we are in the middle of a fossil fuel energy crisis driven by the war Israel and the USA are waging on Iran. Many Saudi infrastructure projects are already being scaled back, and the country and the world economy could look very different by then.

The risk, though, is that nothing changes politically at FIFA and the tournament goes ahead in Saudi Arabia, almost certainly in winter. That would mean yet another World Cup driving enormous emissions from construction, in a country that already imports a staggering share of the world’s concrete.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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People hold electronic candles during a vigil at Liberty Square in Taipei on the anniversary of China’s 1989 crackdown on democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, 4 June 2026. Credit: Cheng-Chia Huang/AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Jun 19 2026 (IPS)

When performance artist Sammu Chen tried to tie a red thread to a streetpost, plainclothes police stopped him before he could finish. Chen has twice been detained for his symbolic acts of commemoration of the 4 June 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, when Chinese authorities killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, to crush democracy protests.

The day used to one of commemoration in Hong Kong. Tens of thousands used to attend the mass vigil. But authorities banned it during the COVID-19 pandemic and haven’t permitted it since.

Chen’s attempted act of commemoration took place near the former site of the banned vigil. Close by, police moved on another artist marking the anniversary by holding a question mark-shaped balloon. In recent years, other symbolic acts, such as silently holding candles or flowers, have led to arrests. The organisation that used to hold the vigil closed itself down in 2021 following police investigations and prosecution of its leaders.

China’s campaign to stamp out demands for democracy in Hong Kong doesn’t stop at its borders, as events in the UK recently made plain.

UK spy network

Last month, two men with dual British and Chinese nationality were found guilty of spying on Hong Kong democracy activists in the UK. The case showed how far the Chinese state is prepared to go to silence Hong Kong’s diaspora.

Chi Leung Wai, who worked for the UK’s Border Force, and Chung Biu Yuen, who worked for the Hong Kong Economic Trade Office in London, were found to have carried out shadow policing operations to gather information on exiles. The spies also targeted UK politicians critical of China.

One of their targets was Nathan Law. Law was a student leader and politician active in Hong Kong’s democracy movement, which mobilised in mass protests in 2014 and again in 2019. Having spent time in jail in 2017 for his role in protests, he headed into exile in 2020 when the authorities introduced a draconian National Security Law.

In 2023, Law was one of eight activists the Hong Kong police targeted with arrest warrants, with a bounty of around US$130,000 offered as a reward. Hong Kong police took Law’s parents and brother in for questioning, and in 2024, authorities revoked his passport and those of other exiled activists.

Escalating transnational repression

Such is the level of repression China exerts in Hong Kong that activism can only be sustained among the diaspora. But while many states are exerting transnational repression against diasporas and exiles, the spy case shows that China remains the world leader in this field.

Hong Kong police issued a further round of arrest warrants and bounties against six more exiled activists in December 2024 and announced bounties on another 19 in July 2025. Hong Kong authorities have also started targeting exiles with spurious tax demands and may be gearing up to weaponise international anti-money laundering cooperation agreements against them.

Exiles’ families in Hong Kong aren’t spared. In February, Kwok Yin-sang, father of exiled activist Anna Kwok, was handed an eight-month sentence for violating national security laws after he tried to cash in her education savings insurance policy.

Around 100,000 people have fled Hong Kong to the UK, which controlled the territory before handing it over to China in 1997. That makes them a particular target. In 2024, addresses of Hong Kong citizens living in the UK were published online and anti-migrant protesters were encouraged to attack them, in a move that showed all the signs of a Chinese influence operation.

Intensifying domestic repression

As a new CIVICUS report documents, repression has intensified further within Hong Kong. In 2024, authorities introduced the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, which allows them to criminalise simple acts of dissent by claiming they constitute secession, sedition, subversion and other major crimes. They’ve used this latest law’s sweeping provisions and the 2020 National Security Law to prosecute activists, dissidents and journalists. Since 2020, Hong Kong authorities have arrested at least 365 people and convicted 174 under the two laws. People have been convicted for such trivial offences as wearing T-shirts with protest slogans.

The authorities’ determination to silence dissent was on display again in the aftermath of a horrendous apartment complex fire in November 2025, in which over 160 people died. People were arrested for social media posts calling for accountability . Student Miles Kwan Ching-fung was detained and expelled from university after starting an online petition urging an independent investigation. China’s national security office in Hong Kong warned foreign journalists about negative coverage of the government’s response.

Hong Kong once had one of Asia’s most vibrant media environments, but now it ranks 140th out of 180 on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index. In February, media owner Jimmy Lai, whose Apple Daily newspaper championed democracy, received a 20-year sentence under the National Security Law. Lai has been detained under multiple charges since 2019, often in solitary confinement. At 78 years old with diabetes and other reported health problems, he faces dying in jail. Despite Lai’s British citizenship, China has refused international appeals for his release.

The campaign against Lai continues, with four bookshop staff arrested in March on suspicion of selling copies of his biography, deemed a seditious publication. The authorities’ attempts to suppress the book are part of their wider cultural censorship, which extends to banning films, barring publishers from book fairs and demanding the blocking of YouTube videos of the protest anthem ‘Glory to Hong Kong’. In the face of this repression, many civil society organisations, media outlets and political parties have concluded that their only option is to close down.

In these circumstances, it will continue to fall on the diaspora to keep shining a light on the suppression of basic civic freedoms in Hong Kong. States where Hong Kong’s exiles live must be alert to the threats of China’s transnational repression and defend and protect exiled activists. They must confront the full scope of this repression, or be complicit in it.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Opening ceremony of RightsCon 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan. Credit: Equality Now

By S. Mona Sinha and Mrinalini Dayal
NEW YORK, Jun 19 2026 (IPS)

RightsCon, the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age, has served for over a decade as a vital global gathering, bringing together civil society, academics, technologists, policymakers, and the private sector in cross-border collaboration. The abrupt cancellation of RightsCon 2026, following intervention by Zambia’s government just days before the convening was due to commence in Lusaka, should concern us all.

Worryingly, this is not an isolated disruption. It reflects a deeply troubling global pattern of shrinking civic space alongside a rapidly growing, well-resourced, and increasingly networked transnational anti-rights movement. We are calling on civil society, donors, the media, and democratic governments to take a strong stand against these coordinated efforts to undermine human rights and the forums that uphold them.

S. Mona Sinha

On May 1, RightsCon organiser and host Access Now released a statement announcing the summit, scheduled to run between May 5 and 8, could not proceed after Zambia announced it was postponing the event to ensure it “aligns with Zambia’s national values, policy priorities, and broader public interest.”

Access Now reported that on April 27, one day after the Zambian Ministry of Technology and Science had endorsed RightsCon, government officials told organisers that diplomats from China were pressuring Zambia because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to attend. Zambia’s new conditions for allowing the conference to proceed included select topics being moderated and the exclusion of some participants, including Taiwanese civil society representatives.

Access Now has called this interference “transnational repression” and a deliberate effort to project authoritarian preferences across borders and shrink civic spheres.

Mrinalini Dayal

Digital rights advocacy is essential to advancing gender equality. That is why Equality Now co-founded the Alliance for Universal Digital Rights (AUDRi), a global campaign working toward a digital future where everyone can enjoy equal rights to safety, freedom, and dignity.

Equality Now and AUDRi were looking forward to returning to RightsCon to reconnect with allies and forge new relationships. Over 500 sessions were scheduled, including two by Equality Now on co-creating solutions to online safety and privacy challenges, and addressing the exclusion of women from artificial intelligence development and other emerging technologies.

Activists have spent months preparing, from developing proposals and collaborating with partners to organising funding, travel, and logistics. Significant time, energy, and resources have been invested that cannot be recouped.

RightsCon is one of the few annual, in-person opportunities where smaller frontline organisations meet potential funders. Locally led groups, particularly those in the Global Majority already grappling with funding cuts and rising competition for limited resources, will be hardest hit by the lost networking, visibility, and donor engagement that sustains their work.

Beyond this substantial loss is the deeply troubling shutting down of a vital locus for dialogue and collective action, alongside a growing anxiety that this will not be the last such disruption of an essential global forum.

RightsCon: a unique mix of diverse voices

RightsCon is the only global, civil society-led convening focused on the intersection of technology and human rights. Other international gatherings on the internet, emerging technologies, and digital governance are generally complex, exclusionary multilateral processes dominated by governments and the tech companies whose products and power are meant to be scrutinised.

Discussions about digital harms, inequality, and the future of our online world are often relegated to the margins or excluded completely, despite their far-reaching consequences. In contrast, RightsCon is where activists set the agenda, and lived experience is central.

Participants working towards safer, inclusive digital futures can share insights and learn from others’ successes and challenges across diverse contexts. The summit’s activist spirit prioritises voices often excluded elsewhere: women and girls, LGBTQI+ communities, Indigenous peoples, and those resisting surveillance and authoritarian rule.

Holding RightsCon in Zambia was a deliberate choice by Access Now intended to lower barriers to participation. For people from Global Majority countries, visa requirements and travel costs to Europe or North America are routinely insurmountable, and increasingly restrictive visa policies are making access evermore difficult. Equality Now staff have been unable to attend UN gatherings in New York for exactly this reason.

The impacts of widespread exclusion from attending consultative and decision-making settings cannot be overstated. That Zambia’s government sought to justify postponing RightsCon on visa grounds, saying some speakers and participants were “subject to pending administrative and security clearances”, is a stark illustration of how bureaucratic levers can be wielded to stifle dissent.

Tech-facilitated gender-based violence

In an increasingly digital world, women and girls face distinct and escalating threats to their rights, safety, privacy, and freedom. The rapid advance of technologies is opening new frontiers for human traffickers, coercers and abusers, but existing legal systems everywhere are ill-equipped to handle these multi-jurisdictional harms.

At RightsCon 2026, we were going to jointly explore legal solutions to the explosion of tech-facilitated gender-based violence. Online violence is rarely, if ever, confined to a ‘virtual’ space; it follows women and girls into their homes and workplaces, and often involves real-world harm including physical violence.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence risk deepening existing inequalities and amplifying misinformation and bias, while expanding surveillance and online exploitation and abuse place fundamental rights and freedoms at risk.

Without civil society-led convenings that centre human rights in digital technologies, it becomes harder to build the intersectional, integrated, responsive movements needed to defend online rights, especially for marginalised communities.

That is precisely why losing this moment hurts so much, and why the issues that RightsCon sought to elevate, including those that governments seek to suppress, must be debated in the global spotlight. At Equality Now and AUDRi, we are planning alternative ways to hold conversations with even wider audiences than a conference format allows. We will not be deterred.

Standing against the pushback on human rights

Equality Now has been tracking the pushback against human rights advocates globally, particularly those working on gender equality and against misogyny and gender-based violence. Even knowing how organised that pushback has become, it is devastating to watch RightsCon become a casualty of it.

The cancellation and the speed of it set a worrying precedent for future international human rights convening. No forum is truly safe from political scrutiny, interference, or silencing.

This is the moment for a coordinated response. Funders must step up to prioritise digital rights and engage with organisations at the convergence of human and digital rights and development. Regional gatherings and alternative spaces need resourcing to replace this year’s RightsCon.

Democratic governments need to defend the right to assemble across borders and scrutinise international pressure that may have shaped RightsCon’s cancellation.

To our peers across the digital rights community: we stand with you. Silencing one convening will not silence the movements behind it. We will continue to organise, collaborate, and defend the freedoms and human rights at stake, because the price of allowing authoritarian pressure to determine who gets to participate, speak, and assemble is simply too high.

S. Mona Sinha, Chief Executive Officer, Equality Now, and Mrinalini Dayal, Global Coordinator of the Alliance for Universal Digital Rights (AUDRi)

IPS UN Bureau

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A rare glimpse of a snow leopard prowling through the high-altitude wilderness of Kangchendzonga National Park, captured by a trail camera. Credit: WWF/Sikkim

By Diwash Gahatraj
SIKKIM, India, Jun 17 2026 (IPS)

The tea arrives before the conversation starts. Jayanta Mukhia sets two cups on the wooden table and pulls up a chair across from the couple who arrived that afternoon with trekking poles and rucksacks. They have come to walk the Goechala trail into the heart of Khangchendzonga National Park in India. They will leave in two days. Before they go, she has something to tell them.

Jayanta asks if they know what happens to the garbage they carry in. Some of it comes back out. Some of it does not. In the high pastures above Yuksom, a town in West Sikkim, the trail climbs toward the glaciers, and plastic bags caught in the rocks stay there through winter. Army camps, tourists, and trekking groups – they all leave something behind. That waste feeds dogs that follow the trails running through the same corridors where snow leopards move at night.

Jayanta Mukhia outside the Chungda Hidden Family Homestay in Yuksom, West Sikkim. Credit: Diwash Gahatraj/IPS

Her husband, Chungda Sherpa, started the Chungda Hidden Family Homestay in Yuksom in 2012, when he was still a trekking guide who knew every switchback on the Goechala route. Today he handles the bookings, the outreach, and the digital presence that brings guests from cities they have never visited. Jayanta runs everything else, the kitchen, the guests, the conversations at the wooden table, and the quiet insistence that every person who sleeps under her roof leaves the park cleaner than they found it.

“The homestay earns between eight and ten lakhs (about USD 8,400 to 10,500) a year. That income exists because the park exists,” she says.

According to Tshering Uden of the Khangchendzonga Conservation Committee, Yuksom has 15 hotels, 25 homestays and more than 21 travel agencies registered under the local Panchayat, all of whose income depends directly on Khangchendzonga’s ecological health. Their collective livelihood runs on the same high-altitude corridors where Sikkim’s 21 snow leopards live.

A hiker admires the view in the Khangchendzonga National Park. Credit: Tshering Uden, KCC.

Guardian of the High-Altitude

Known locally as Saagey, the snow leopard is revered as a sacred guardian of the high-altitude ecosystem in Sikkimese Buddhist tradition, its conservation inseparable from the beliefs and pastoral lifestyles of the communities that share its landscape. Khangchendzonga National Park, inscribed as India’s first mixed natural and cultural UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016, sits at the heart of this landscape.

India’s first national snow leopard population assessment surveyed the Trans-Himalayan region between 2019 and 2023, deploying camera traps at nearly 2,000 locations across about 120,000 square kilometres and counting 718 snow leopards across six Himalayan states and union territories. Sikkim recorded 21, a modest figure in a rugged landscape where the cats share space with herders, trekkers and Dzo transporters. The SECURE Himalaya project, supported by the Global Environment Facility, helped make that count possible by building community-based monitoring capacity across the high mountains, demonstrating that conservation works best when local communities are invested in it.

This is a hyperlocal account of what that investment built in one corner of a much larger effort.

Buddhist stupas covered in flags serve as a spiritual landmark on high-altitude trekking trails, such as those leading to Mount Kanchenjunga. Credit: Tshering Uden, KCC

SECURE Himalaya ran for nearly seven years across four Himalayan states: Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and the Union Territory of Ladakh. In Sikkim, it focused on the Khangchendzonga-Upper Teesta landscape – roughly 4,000 square kilometres from Khangchendzonga National Park down to the upper catchment of the Teesta River. Backed by a GEF grant of USD 11.5 million and over USD 60 million in co-financing from the Government of India, the funding went into four interconnected areas: conserving key biodiversity zones, securing sustainable community livelihoods, reducing human-wildlife conflict, and building knowledge systems for long-term landscape management.

In Sikkim, this translated into camera trap networks, community patrol volunteers, women’s handicraft enterprises, and waste management systems all designed around a single argument: that communities with an economic stake in a healthy landscape will protect it.

The project received a Highly Satisfactory rating from independent evaluators for results, relevance and efficiency. Khangchendzonga National Park recorded one of the largest improvements in management effectiveness across all project sites.

One of the project’s most practical interventions targeted feral dogs, which had become a dominant predator in North Sikkim, chasing snow leopards from their kills and hunting the blue sheep and pika the cats depend on. “The project worked with army establishments in Sikkim to set up biodigester facilities in strategic locations to manage food waste from army camps, which helped directly address the feral dog problem,” says Ruchi Pant, who oversaw SECURE Himalaya’s reporting at UNDP India. “The army subsequently scaled up these biodigesters using their own resources.” The initiative has continued independently, one of several project interventions that continues even though the project’s funding has ended.

Young volunteers were trained as Himal Rakshaks, protectors of the Himalaya, to set camera traps, patrol Khangchendzonga National Park and report sightings. The Sikkim Forest Department has since integrated them into its regular operations, with volunteers supporting fire line management and routine monitoring alongside forest guards. The State Biodiversity Board has constituted 196 Biodiversity Management Committees across Sikkim, many of them women-led, operating under the Biological Diversity Act 2002.

Nedup Bhutia’s dzo loaded with trekking supplies at the Yuksom trailhead, West Sikkim, ready for the Goechala trek into Khangchendzonga National Park. Credit: Diwash Gahatraj/IPS

In Yuksom, the results were visible in ways the community could measure. The KCC trained trekking guides, porters and tourism operators to monitor trails, manage waste and report wildlife sightings. The project’s midterm review cited its zero-waste management model as a national best practice. In 2022, the programme was formally handed over to the Yuksam Gram Panchayat Unit and now runs under the Block Administrative Centre, according to Tshering Uden — a concrete example of the institutional transition the project was designed to achieve. Blue sheep, rarely seen in the national park before the project, are now a regular presence on the slopes. More blue sheep means a more reliable prey base for snow leopards, and fewer reasons for the cats to come down and take livestock.

“Before the project we only heard about snow leopards in our area,” says Tshering Uden. “Now we have picture evidence.”

Tents in the valley of the Khangchendzonga National Park. The zero-waste aspect of its zero-waste management model, including from visitors to the park, has been cited as a national best practice. Credit: Tshering Uden, KCC

A Shift in Mindset

Udai Gurung of the Sikkim Forest Department says the project changed the department’s fundamental orientation. “The biggest shift was conceptual,” he says. “The forest department moved from a protection-centric model to a landscape-level, coexistence-based approach.”

The project ended in 2024. GEF funding was always designed to be temporary and not a permanent handhold but a spark for something that continues under its own momentum. By that measure, the terminal evaluation rated the project highly satisfactory for results, relevance and efficiency, while assessing sustainability as moderately likely, noting that targets were met in full and, in some instances, exceeded.

The long-term expectation, consistent with how all GEF projects are designed, is that technical capacity and systems developed under the project are handed over to the government to carry forward.

In Sikkim, that transition is underway. Gurung identifies the slow release of funds as the single biggest structural challenge throughout implementation, not a shortage of money, but a bureaucratic delay in releasing funds already allocated. In high-altitude Sikkim, where the working season is a matter of weeks, entire field seasons were lost waiting for approvals. “Capacity exists,” he says, “but long-term sustainability will require consistent financial and institutional support.”

That support now rests primarily with local and state authorities. The Himal Rakshaks operate within the Sikkim Forest Department. The BMCs sit under the State Biodiversity Board. The zero-waste programme runs under the Yuksam Block Administrative Centre.

Jayanta Mukhia outside the Chungda Hidden Family Homestay in Yuksom, West Sikkim. Credit: Diwash Gahatraj/IPS

Women in North Sikkim continue weaving nettle fibre and accessing premium markets independently.

In May 2023, Sikkim announced its first biodiversity heritage site – Tunkyong Dho – a sacred lake in Dzongu supported by the local biodiversity management committee. UNDP remains involved at a smaller scale through the German IKI ICCA programme, a portion of which continues to support the Himalayan landscape.

The most concrete unfinished work is the compensation system for herders. Pema Yangden Lepcha, a researcher and project associate at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment’s Himalaya Initiative in Gangtok, has spent months talking to yak herders in North Sikkim.

Herders there recently told her they had lost five yaks to snow leopard predation. An adult yak costs between 80,000 and 100,000 rupees. Government compensation is a fraction of that, and most predation happens on Forest Department land where herders are often told the department cannot help.

“They have a very negative attitude toward snow leopards,” Pema says, “and often feel a strong urge to retaliate.” Closing that gap so that herders who bear the cost of coexistence are fairly compensated is the single most urgent task for the local authorities now responsible for this landscape.

Nedup Bhutia’s dzo loaded with trekking supplies at the Yuksom trailhead, West Sikkim, ready for the Goechala trek into Khangchendzonga National Park. Credit: Diwash Gahatraj/IPS

Carrying it Forward

On the trail, Nedup Bhutia has walked the Goechala route for twenty years with his eleven dzo. He earns between one and one and a half lakhs each trekking season, porting visitors into the park. He has never seen a snow leopard. But three years ago, a two-year-old ox was found dead in the open in Jhamtong village on the park’s periphery, killed by a snow leopard overnight. For Nedup, it is proof of a landscape still alive.

In Yuksom, at the wooden table in Chungda Hidden Family Homestay, Jayanta Mukhia is refilling two cups of tea. Her guests leave tomorrow. They will carry their garbage out. She has made sure of it.

The 21 snow leopards are still there. The communities are still working. The project succeeded by every measure the evaluators applied. What happens next depends not on outside funding but on whether the institutions and communities that inherited this work choose to build on it. That is where the responsibility now sits and where the real test of SECURE Himalaya’s legacy begins.

Note: This feature is published with the support of the GEF. IPS is solely responsible for the editorial content, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of the GEF.
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CIVICUS discusses a proposed United Nations (UN) tax treaty with Jenny Ricks, General Secretary of Fight Inequality Alliance, a global movement that organises to counter the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a small elite.

Jenny Ricks

Why do we need a global tax treaty, and what would an ambitious one look like?

Every year, trillions of dollars are drained from public services through tax avoidance, tax havens and sweetheart deals negotiated by and for the wealthiest corporations and people on the planet. This is a system designed by a powerful few, and it’s working exactly as intended. Countries across the global majority are losing money they urgently need for climate adaptation, hospitals and schools while billionaires park fortunes in jurisdictions that ask no questions.

An ambitious treaty must set minimum effective tax rates on corporate profits and extreme wealth, make automatic information sharing a baseline rather than an aspiration, and put in place binding commitments rather than voluntary frameworks that elites can walk away from when the political heat rises. The goal has to be redistribution at scale. Anything less is rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.

How does the UN Convention compare to the OECD’s approach, and where might it fall short?

The OECD process was built by rich countries, for rich countries. The global majority had only observer status in negotiations that fundamentally shaped their economic futures. That’s the original sin of the existing framework and no amount of technical refinement changes the underlying power imbalance baked into it.

The UN Convention changes the venue and potentially changes the power balance. When every country has a voice and a vote, the interests of the majority of the world’s people have at least a fighting chance of being reflected in the outcome.

The shortcomings are real, though. Ambition gets negotiated down. Large economies drag their feet, threaten opt-outs or simply refuse to ratify. The convention’s potential is significant, but potential and outcome are very different things, and we have seen promising processes hollowed out before. Without a fundamental rethinking of the international system, including the UN itself, to put power firmly in the hands of the global majority, enforcement will remain elusive.

Who’s pushing the treaty forward, and who’s standing in the way?

States with the most to gain have shown the most political courage, while those that have profited most from the existing architecture are throwing sand in the gears. This pattern is not coincidental. Governments protecting the interests of their wealthiest people and most powerful corporations are the obstacle. The barriers are political, rooted in elite self-interest, and naming that clearly matters.

The negotiations are ongoing and fast-moving. For the latest developments, the Tax Justice Network database is the best place to look.

How is civil society influencing the treaty process?

The movement to tax the super-rich has to be built from the national to the global level. Movements shape what’s considered possible before politicians decide what’s acceptable. When we mobilise people in Kenya, Malaysia and Peru, in the streets and in people’s assemblies, we change the political cost calculation for decision-makers domestically and internationally. We demonstrate that there’s a constituency demanding this change, that it’s a matter of survival for millions of families, not an abstraction debated in Geneva conference rooms.

Fight Inequality Alliance and our allies have worked to surface frontline voices and lived experience in spaces that tend to run on position papers and spreadsheets. We have supported national alliances to bring their governments to the table with clear demands. We have made visible who benefits from the status quo, and that visibility increases accountability. Civil society doesn’t win these fights alone, but without sustained pressure from organised movements, the political space to win them simply doesn’t open.

What do civil society and states need to do to ensure equitable global taxation?

States that have pushed hardest for an ambitious convention must hold firm. Dilution always comes in the final stages, when powerful interests feel threatened. They should ratify promptly, implement genuinely and resist pressure from wealthier governments to hollow out enforcement mechanisms.

For civil society, the task is sustained pressure and political education. People need to understand the connection between tax justice and the hospital that closed, the school that’s crumbling, the debt that their governments cannot escape. That connection is real and it’s political, and once people see it, they don’t unsee it. That’s how movements grow and how the terms of debate shift. We need more of that, faster and bigger, and we need organisations with resources and reach to invest in building those connections alongside us, rather than commenting on the process from a distance.

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Global governance: power politics tests global rules CIVICUS | State of Civil Society Report 2026
UN at 80: a struggle for renewal in a time of crises CIVICUS Lens 19.Sep.2025
Trillions at stake in quest for tax justice CIVICUS Lens 31.Mar.2025

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Overcoming political divisions between Pro-France Loyalists and the Pro-Independence movement is a major challenge in ongoing negotiations between the French Government and leaders in New Caledonia to define the territory's future political status. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, Jun 17 2026 (IPS)

The French overseas territory of New Caledonia in the Pacific will hold elections on 28 June in the wake of the latest agreement on its political status with France being rejected. The representatives elected in the three provincial assemblies and territorial congress will then determine a new round of negotiations as the mission of achieving consensus on New Caledonia’s future continues.

New Caledonia is one of 17 non-self-governing territories due for decolonisation according to the United Nations. However, its highly divided politics is a major obstacle to reaching a unified agreement on its future. An estimated 41 percent of New Caledonia’s population of about 265,000 people are Kanak islanders, of whom most are Pro-Independence supporters, and about 24 percent are European, predominantly Loyalist voters.

“Our people are entitled to the exercise of their inalienable right to self-determination… with a cycle of inclusive dialogues open to all components of our society, including youth, women, customary authorities and economic actors,” Pierre Chanel Tein Tutugoro, President of the Pro-Independence UC (Caledonian Union) Party in the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) coalition, stated last year.

It is a view that resonates widely across the Pro-Independence movement. “Whatever the outcome [of the election], the state must play a strictly neutral role, working towards the emancipation of the Kanak people,” Maurice Sitrita, an Independence supporter in Noumea, told IPS. And in any future agreement, “the inclusion of Kanak sovereignty in the French constitution must not be called into question so that we can build the country together.”

Doriane Nonmoira of the Union of Francophone Women of Oceania, in New Caledonia, told IPS that there are currently five women candidates vying for primary seats in the June vote, including three Kanak women. “The upcoming elections will be the scene of a significant political transition for the country,” she said, emphasising that “decolonisation from France” was essential.

Meanwhile, the Pro-France Loyalists bloc is campaigning to strengthen security, the economy and unity while defending their place in the French Republic.

New Caledonia is considered a wealthy territory. Its GDP per capita is USD 29,213, compared to USD 6,425 in the nearby Melanesian state of Fiji, according to the World Bank, but there is deep inequality. A high standard of living, most visible in the capital, Nouméa, is supported by major annual funding of about 1.5 billion euros (USD 1.7 billion) by the French Government. Despite efforts to bridge the development gap, the poverty rate is still 30 percent higher in the outer Loyalty Islands, where the population is mostly Kanak, compared to the central Southern Province.

The last pact with France was the Noumea Accord, signed in 1998, following Kanak protests about dispossession and disenfranchisement in the 1980s. It stipulated the right of New Caledonia to hold referendums on its future. And following indigenous opposition to France’s policy of encouraging European migration to the islands, the territory’s electoral roll was restricted to Kanaks and long-term settlers only.

Kanaks are now better represented in the territory’s politics. From 2004 to 2014, the number of Loyalist seats held in the 54 seat New Caledonia Congress diminished from 36 to 29, while those held by Pro-Independence members increased from 18 to 25. And the current representative of New Caledonia in the National Assembly in Paris, Emmanuel Tjibaou, is a Pro-Independence Kanak leader from the rural North Province.

But three referendums on Independence have not led to a political solution. The first vote held in 2018 resulted in Loyalists securing 57 percent of votes, followed by 53 percent in the second 2020 referendum. The third vote in 2021, boycotted during the pandemic by the majority of Kanaks, saw an overwhelming 96.5 percent oppose Independence, an outcome that has never been accepted by the Independence movement.

Today a new strain of activism for self-determination is driven by the younger Kanak generation. They were a major presence in street protests that erupted in May 2024 following the French Government’s plan to expand the territorial electoral roll to include thousands of recent settlers. The electoral reform bill was then suspended after unrest resulted in loss of life, the destruction of homes, infrastructure and a shattered economy.

Last year, Manuel Valls, Minister for Overseas France, led new talks with both political camps to work toward a new pact on relations. The outcome was the Bougival Accord, an agreement of compromises, signed on 12 July 2025. It offered a New Caledonian ‘state’ within the larger nation of France with a further devolution of powers, such as foreign affairs, although France would retain defence and security. However, after further consultations, the UC party rejected the agreement in August. ‘As far as we’re concerned, Bougival, it’s over,’ Mickaël Forrest, UC Vice-President, told local media, claiming that ‘the document is perceived as a project for an agreement to integrate (New Caledonia) into France under the guise of a decolonization.’

France is unwilling to severe ties with New Caledonia, which represents a major strategic asset in the Pacific. It expands France’s exclusive economic zone, provides an important military and naval base in the region and inclusion in Pacific leadership forums.

However, Dr Pierre-Christophe Pantz, a researcher at the University of New Caledonia, told IPS that “the trauma of the events of 2024 has also played an important role [in negotiations], producing a coercive effect on national political leaders, who are often led to seek a rapid stabilisation of the local political system” rather than a sustainable long-term solution. But he added that “it is questionable whether there is any likelihood of an agreement that will have the unanimous support of all New Caledonian political forces.”

Yet the final failure of the Bougival Accord occurred in the French National Assembly, when parties across the political spectrum, legal experts and New Caledonia’s representative rejected the constitutional reform bill on 2 April.

Final preparations are now being made for this month’s election in which, despite protests two years ago, there will be an increased number of voters. In May, the French Constitutional Council approved the voter roll to include an extra 10,500 residents, both Kanak and non-Kanak, who were born in New Caledonia after 1998. French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said the reform was imperative to recognize the democratic rights of all people living in New Caledonia, with the restricted roll now denying 17 percent their right to vote.

The vote “should contribute to reshuffling the cards of the political balance of power in New Caledonia”, Pantz predicted, and “future negotiations will depend very directly on their updated electoral weight, which could strengthen or weaken certain political lines.”

At the same time, Nonmoira stressed there was a need for women’s voices, especially Kanak women’s, to be heard in political discussions, with their current absence leading to their exclusion in the territory’s future. “In a future agreement, France should be committed to legal and institutional decolonisation; New Caledonia should be accountable to CEDAW (Committee on Elimination of Discrimination against Women) and it should be stated that gender equality is an essential lever for building a peaceful future,” she declared, adding that “there will be no decolonisation without gender justice.”

After the election, all parties have committed to resume talks with France in July. But they will occur in an environment of uncertainty until the outcome of the next French Presidential Election in 2027.

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The Russian state has, through legislation and stigmatising rhetoric, systematically worked to isolate the LGBTQ+ community. Graphic: IPS

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Jun 16 2026 (IPS)

LGBTQ+ people in Russia are being forced to increasingly use self-censoring strategies in their daily lives as they struggle with systemic vulnerability, one of the largest surveys of the LGBTQ+ community in the country has shown.

The latest annual survey of more than 6,000 people across Russia by the Coming Out and Sphere Foundation organisations showed that, in 2025, the situation for the community had neither improved nor significantly worsened.

But it showed a reinforcement of existing adaptive strategies among LGBTQ+ people, including selective approaches to coming out and avoidance of situations in which their gender identity or sexual orientation could be revealed.

There was also an increase in some forms of abuse, particularly in online spaces, and threats of violence, extortion, denunciation, and pressure from close circles continued to contribute significantly to the everyday vulnerability of LGBTQ+ people.

The groups say the findings reinforce the perception that LGBTQ+ people in Russia – where a series of repressive laws demonising and persecuting the community – are likely to face persistently high levels of vulnerability and threats to their safety, health, and quality of life for some time to come as they come under attack simply for being who they are.

“Our data shows that repression of LGBTQ+ people has moved from persecution for specific actions to persecution for their identity, for who a person is, not what they do. There are more and more legal cases against people who are living their lives, not doing anything against the government or trying to promote human rights,” Denis Oleinik, Executive Director at Coming Out, told IPS.

“What we have seen in 2025 is a “normalisation” or “routinisation” of catastrophe. LGBTQ+ people now just live with [the situation], with these things happening. It’s as if this has become normal life. It’s absolutely horrible,” he added.

Russia’s LGBTQ+ community has faced increasing discrimination and marginalisation for more than a decade.

While there has historically been a degree of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in Russian society, this has deepened significantly with the introduction of a series of laws and increasingly hostile government policies against the community.

In 2013, not long after Vladimir Putin had returned to power as president, a law was implemented banning “the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” to anyone under the age of 18.

The start of what critics say has been a decade-long campaign by the Kremlin to marginalise and vilify the LGBTQ+ community in the country, the law was extended in 2022 to cover all public information or activities supporting LGBTQ+ rights or displaying non-heterosexual orientation, regardless of age.

A ban on same-sex marriage was also written into the constitution, and in 2023, legislation was passed banning transgender people from officially or medically changing their gender.

The same year also saw a ruling by the Supreme Court, which outlawed the non-existent ‘international LGBT movement’, declaring it ‘extremist’ – allowing people to be fined or prosecuted for anything that could be construed as promoting “non-traditional sexual relations”.

At the same time, homophobic political discourse has become increasingly normalised, as the Kremlin has looked to promote ‘traditional family values’ in society and cast LGBTQ+ activism as a product of a degenerate West and a threat to Russia.

This has fuelled a growingly virulent and often violent rejection of LGBTQ+ people in large parts of society and has left many in the community fearing for their physical and mental health.

Grigory*, an LGBTQ+ student from a major city in Russia, said they were selective in revealing their sexuality and gender identity and that while they do not live in permanent fear of physical attacks, they have adjusted their behaviour to avoid certain locations.

“Sometimes in the evenings I avoid certain places because I could be considered stereotypically gay, perhaps because of my voice or the way I walk. I don’t hide my sexuality in public, but I don’t manifest it either,” they said, adding that this was easier for them than for some other members of the LGBTQ+ community.

“Transgender people suffer the worst problems. It must be very hard for someone to be transgender in Russia. They are so brave and strong. I’m astonished they can keep going,” they said.

The Coming Out and Sphere Foundation showed the situation for transgender people in the vast majority of indicators for quality of life, including specific measures of discrimination and well-being, was worse than for other members of the LGBTQ+ community. Notably, they were significantly more likely to face physical threats and experience actual physical violence, including sexual and domestic violence, more frequently than other LGBTQ+ people.

“A lot of trans people right now live their whole lives at home without even going outside to the shops if they have access to courier services or some relatives or friends who can help them buy what they need. We’re seeing this more and more,” said Oleinik.

Grigory said they felt, along with many others in the community, if not fear of physical attacks, a specific sense of aggression towards them.

“I feel it indirectly. It comes through government narratives in the media and in the public sphere, or in something an acquaintance might say. Queerphobia in Russia is mainly government-induced. Of course it existed before all these awful laws, but it wasn’t that strong. The laws have made it much worse,” they said.

LGBTQ+ rights campaigners say the patterns of behaviour among the community in Russia described in the report are unsurprising given the years of growing repression against them.

“When marginalisation and criminalisation on any grounds are a long-term feature of daily life, people develop ways of managing their daily exposure to harm,” Anastasia Smirnova, Deputy Director and Director of Programmes at rights group ILGA-Europe, told IPS.

She added, though, that LGBTQ+ people in Russia were facing a very specific challenge, as the Russian state has, through increasingly harsh legislation and stigmatising rhetoric, systematically worked to isolate LGBTQ+ human rights defenders and then LGBTQ+ people from each other and from everyone around them as part of a broader dismantling of the conditions for free association and dissent.

“This is what makes it different from social prejudice: it is not a reflection of society, it is a project of the state, and its target is civic life. For many people living through this, the daily acts of self-censorship described in the report are the lived reality of that project,” Smirnova said.

The potential harms of such actions on individuals and the wider community are severe, with impacts on both mental and physical health as individuals are left isolated and in some cases afraid to access healthcare.

“The impact on children is particularly severe. State propaganda targeting schools, the absence of age-appropriate relationship and sex education, and the climate of fear surrounding LGBTI topics leave young people exposed to extreme harm and isolation, especially children who are themselves LGBTI or have LGBTI family members, but also any child who might be perceived as LGBTI,” said Smirnova.

While the report did not show a significant deterioration in a number of indicators compared to previous years – in fact there was a slight improvement in some areas – its authors warn this could be misleading, highlighting that the report relied on the willingness of respondents to “share sensitive information in an increasingly oppressive environment” and that real levels of discrimination and violence could be higher.

Whatever the true levels of discrimination against the community are in Russia, many people are suffering gravely in the current environment.

Grigory said they are currently in therapy, partly to help them deal with the challenges of being LGBTQ+ in Russia.

They said that among the community, “thoughts of killing oneself and suicide attempts are pretty common.”

LGBTQ+ people and activists in touch or working directly with members of the community who spoke to IPS said substance abuse, or self-medication through unsupervised use of anti-depressants, was not uncommon either.

Trying to get help for such problems is difficult though amid mistrust of state health institutions because of widespread homo- and transphobia and concerns over staff potentially breaching patient confidentiality about sexuality.

As the pressure on LGBTQ+ people continues, many feel they have had no choice but to leave the country.

The annual report included responses from hundreds of people who had emigrated, both in 2025 and in the last few years before that.

Severe anxiety and psychological discomfort were the most commonly cited reasons for emigration (66%), while other major reasons included intensified censorship (59%), personal safety risk (57%), and increased homophobia and transphobia in Russian society (57%).

Tellingly, the majority of participants who had emigrated (63%) did not consider returning to Russia an option – a rise of 8 percentage points on the previous year.

This is perhaps unsurprising, given that many in the community see little or no prospect of the situation in Russia improving for many years.

“Many things have changed in the last few years, not just in Russia but all around the world – the far right is winning everywhere, and LGBTQ rights are under attack all over the world. I’m not expecting anything good to happen inside Russia in the next five to ten years,” said Oleinik.

But others say that despite, or perhaps because of, the report’s findings, there is an even greater need now for LGBTQ+ people in Russia and groups both inside and outside the country to do whatever they can to resist the state’s ongoing repression of the community.

“There is an important distinction to draw between acknowledging that a democratic reversal in Russia is not on the near horizon and concluding that nothing can or should be done in the meantime. The power of the Russian state, backed by resource wealth and a willingness to use every available instrument of repression, is real and cannot be minimised. And yet what we see from our position, working in support of human rights organisations, defenders, organisers, and activists, is not resignation, but realism paired with determination,” said Smirnova.

“People are continuing to organise, even though the time horizons are long and murky and the measures of ‘value’ of the organising are different from what they might be somewhere else. But keeping the lights on for the possible forms of civic engagement, critical thought, and solidarity is a form of resistance that does have long-term value,” she added.

Oleinik vowed his organisation would not be giving up on LGBTQ+ people in Russia.

“We need to continue our work, our support, because we know that LGBTQ+ people in Russia need us. Right now it might look like there is little hope of positive change, but that does not mean we should stop what we are doing,” he said.

*Name changed for security reasons

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Thousands gather outside Istanbul City Hall to mark one year since the arrest of Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on 18 March 2026. Credit: Yasin Akgul/AFP

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jun 15 2026 (IPS)

When Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lost by a landslide to a unified opposition in April, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was watching. The lesson he drew was not that he should be more moderate; it was that he needed to crack down harder. He had already arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP)’s leading presidential contender, in March 2025. After Orbán’s defeat, he has accelerated his campaign to fracture the opposition and rewrite the rules before the next election in 2028.

Electoral autocracy

Erdoğan has been in power since 2003. After surviving a coup attempt in July 2016, he used emergency powers to purge the state at scale. Over 150,000 people were detained, fired or suspended from their jobs. Emergency decrees expanded the government’s power to shut down organisations and remove elected officials. A 2017 constitutional referendum, narrowly approved in a campaign that independent observers found deeply flawed, replaced Turkey’s parliamentary system with a hyper-presidential one.

Independent media has been systematically dismantled. Turkey now ranks 163rd out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 World Press Freedom Index. Yet elections have continued, and the opposition has continued to win at the municipal level, most strikingly in Istanbul in 2019 and again by an even wider margin in 2024. That residual competitiveness is what Erdoğan is now moving to close.

İmamoğlu had beaten Erdoğan’s candidate in Istanbul twice, was formally nominated as the CHP’s 2028 presidential candidate and polled strongly against Erdoğan nationally. Authorities arrested him on charges of corruption and links with terrorism as his nomination was under way, triggering Turkey’s largest wave of protests in over a decade. A 4,000-page indictment filed in November 2025 sought to sentence him to over 2,000 years in prison. Espionage charges followed in February 2026. His trial began in March amid continuing protests. He remains in prison, and in the 14 months since his arrest, over 500 more people have been detained, including 16 CHP-affiliated mayors.

With İmamoğlu imprisoned, Erdoğan’s next move was to prevent the CHP from consolidating around anyone else. On 21 May, an appeals court annulled the outcomes of the CHP’s 2023 national congress, ejecting the party’s elected leader Özgür Özel, who had raised the CHP to rough parity with Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in national polls, and reinstating his predecessor Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, a divisive figure who lost the last presidential election. Özel condemned the ruling as a judicial coup and refused to leave the party’s headquarters. Three days later, riot police stormed in, firing rubber bullets and teargas. The government denied any involvement, implausibly claiming the judiciary had acted independently. The operation was legal in form and political in substance.

Turkey’s constitution limits presidents to two five-year terms, and Erdoğan’s second expires in 2028. In May 2025, he appointed a legal team to draft a new constitution. It seems clear the goal is to extend his eligibility. The AKP and its nationalist allies fall short of the parliamentary threshold required to change the constitution or call a referendum on it. Some analysts believe the government’s recent initiative to end the decades-long conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party is at least partly designed to attract enough parliamentary votes to clear that threshold.

There is a structural reason the stakes are so high. Turkey’s hyper-presidential system means that, unlike Orbán, Erdoğan would have no safe path back from electoral defeat. For him, losing power could mean political extinction. His crackdown is a response to this threat.

Civil society resistance

Turkey’s civil society has, however, not submitted. Huge protests followed İmamoğlu’s arrest. A mass rally marked his 100th day in jail, and people marched again when the CHP headquarters were raided. Most recently, when Erdoğan ordered the closure of Bilgi University, one of Turkey’s oldest liberal academic institutions, students and staff immediately gathered outside to protest. Within two days the government reversed the closure. This illustrated both the extent of Erdoğan’s repressive urges and their limits when met with swift resistance.

The government has responded to protest with blanket bans on public gatherings, social media restrictions and mass arrests. Four days after İmamoğlu’s arrest, at least 1,879 people had been detained. Police repeatedly intervened forcefully, using teargas and detaining protesters and journalists.

Orbán’s downfall has frightened Erdoğan as much as it has inspired the Turkish opposition. He is moving to eliminate the conditions that made it possible. He has got rid of the most credible and unifying opposition candidate, neutralised the main opposition party and is in the process of dismantling what’s left of an electoral architecture that, however tilted, could still allow the opposition to win.

Turkey’s democracy now depends on whether enough people keep showing up, and on whether they can keep resisting Erdoğan’s campaign to dismantle democracy.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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CIVICUS discusses Botswana’s decriminalisation of same-sex relations with Faith Gunda, a Botswana-based law student and human rights defender, a member of the CIVICUS Protest Lab and co-founder of Sisterhood Chain International, a solidarity initiative that supports grassroots groups and amplifies young women’s voices.

Faith Gunda

What does repeal mean for LGBTQI+ people?

The formal repeal is symbolic, but symbols matter because they tell people whether they belong. For years, criminal provisions sent a message to LGBTQI+ people in Botswana: you are criminals. Even after the courts ruled these provisions unconstitutional in 2019, they remained on the books, a constant reminder that the state saw their identities as a threat. Their removal aligns written law with constitutional values of dignity, equality, liberty and privacy. But more importantly, it says that LGBTQI+ people are not criminals.

This changes everything for young people. When the law no longer criminalises your identity, it has positive impacts on mental health, belonging and civic participation. It lets LGBTQI+ people report violence, seek healthcare and live openly without fear. People can breathe a little easier. They can imagine futures they couldn’t before.

This progress didn’t come from above. It came from years of relentless advocacy by LGBTQI+ activists, LGBTQI+ organisations such as Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals of Botswana and everyday people willing to risk everything to challenge entrenched stigma. The formal repeal is not the end of a struggle. It’s a foundation for the next phase. The work continues.

Why did it take so long to remove provisions courts declared unconstitutional?

Legal victories and political change don’t move at the same pace. The courts were clear in 2019 that the law was unconstitutional. But court rulings cannot implement themselves. Colonial-era laws remain embedded in statute books because removing them takes political will and politicians fear backlash. For six years, LGBTQI+ people lived with a law the courts had already called unjust.

What finally made change happen was sustained pressure. Civil society organisations, human rights defenders and lawyers refused to let this go. The Court of Appeal upheld the judgment in 2021, and activists kept speaking up, organising and demanding implementation. In March, the law finally changed. So, this is the lesson: court rulings matter, but it’s sustained civic action that turns them into real protection.

What barriers remain, and what comes next?

Decriminalisation isn’t the same as equality, but it’s the foundation for it. Real equality means marriage rights, family recognition and anti-discrimination protections. The marriage equality case due to be heard in court in July will test whether constitutional protections reach beyond private intimacy into full citizenship and whether same-sex couples can access the dignity and legal recognition marriage provides.

But legal barriers are only a part of the story. Social barriers persist too, including stigma in families, healthcare systems, schools and workplaces. Legal reform creates protection, but it cannot instantly change rooted attitudes. Young people in Botswana increasingly believe everyone should be able to live authentically without fear. They are organising, speaking openly, refusing the silence previous generations endured. This generational shift is becoming the most powerful driver of change.

The journey is not linear, but the direction is undeniable. Meaningful reform takes continuous civic engagement. This means activists documenting and defending civic space, grassroots organisations amplifying youth leadership and people refusing to accept anything less than full humanity.

Is Botswana an example for Africa?

Botswana’s progress shouldn’t be romanticised. The country still faces social conservatism and discrimination, and its gains will be vulnerable unless they are continuously defended. But it offers a model to follow.

Botswana stands out on the continent because it succeeded through civic advocacy, constitutionalism and judicial independence. This matters all the more now, when several African governments are passing harsher anti-LGBTQI+ laws and dismissing these rights as ‘un-African’, even though the laws banning same-sex relations were colonial imports.

Botswana’s path challenges that narrative. It shows that African constitutional democracies can interpret dignity, equality and liberty inclusively, without abandoning local legal traditions. For human rights defenders across the region, Botswana is proof that civic engagement, sustained advocacy and strategic litigation can produce meaningful change even in difficult political climates.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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Botswana: criminalisation of same-sex relations off the books CIVICUS Lens 21.May.2026
Gender rights: rollback and resistance CIVICUS | State of Civil Society Report 2026
Namibia: LGBTQI+ rights victory amid regression CIVICUS Lens 05.Jul.2024

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Chaff being loaded for cutting in a machine for fodder. Credit: Supplied

By Rina Mukherji
PUNE, India, Jun 10 2026 (IPS)

Dharashiv is one of the poorest districts in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Located in the semi-arid region of Marathwada, it has no major river and is not blessed with good reservoirs.

The soil quality is poor and unable to retain water, even during heavy rainfall. Farmers depend on borewells and wells. Farm ponds go dry beyond February, leaving farmers bereft. The groundwater level is always low for most of the year. Generally rural, with agriculture as its mainstay, Dharashiv is mostly made up of landholdings averaging 4-5 acres. Rural unemployment is high, and large numbers of able-bodied men and women migrate to towns during the lean seasons.

But the last two years have seen a ‘Tool Bank’ initiated by a social and educational organisation – Jnana Prabodhini – in Harali village gradually reversing the tide.

The Indian government first mooted the idea of an implement or tool bank some years ago. A couple of state governments also initiated it.

However, it did not catch on, owing to many reasons.  To understand the need and importance of a tool bank, it is imperative to understand the general scenario in the Dharashiv district, particularly in the Lohara block, which houses Harali village.

Scenario in Lohara block

Harali village in the Lohara block of Dharashiv district is located around 70km from both Sholapur and Latur towns and is close to the Karnataka-Maharashtra border.

There are no big rivers in the vicinity; the only sources of water are rivulets like Benitura, which is a tributary of the mighty Godavari River, which flows several kilometres away.

The literacy level is quite low, and the population comprises some nomadic tribes as well.

The local population, most of whom depend on agriculture, faces difficult living conditions due to a lack of good schools and colleges, inadequate water, poor soil quality, and a fluctuating electricity supply.

Even otherwise, the entire Lohara block, comprising 25 villages, is semi-arid and drought-prone. The average rainfall is around 735 mm. However, with climate change, the last few years have seen it receive (as high as 147 percent) above-normal monsoon rains and high pre-monsoon rains, causing floods and crop losses for farmers.

It was following the Latur earthquake in the ‘90s that Jnana Prabodhini, a Pune-based organisation, moved to Harali for relief and rehabilitation work.

Keen to make a difference, Jnana Prabodhini set up a school here. In 1996, the school moved into permanent premises. Soon after, a nursery section was added, and by the 2000s, an agricultural college – the Krishi Tantra Vidyalaya and its demonstration farm – was established on the premises.  To facilitate hands-on learning for students, several farming implements had to be purchased.  And thus, the idea of starting a Tool Bank for local farmers came up.

Chaff cutter at work on a farm. Credit: Supplied

“Rural unemployment is a huge concern here. We, hence, thought of training our students, who are local youth, in the handling of implements.  We also popularised the course among farmers. We now have a tool operators group. Youngsters now hire the tools and work for the farmers during the sowing and harvesting season, earning a steady income in the process,” says Jnana Prabodhini Harali (youth cell) Coordinator and Tool Bank head Suresh Margale.

Take the case of Maruti Badgir, who is currently studying for his higher secondary-level exams at a local college.

Badgir completed a diploma in operations and basic maintenance of farm implements at the Krishi Tantra Vidyalaya. He now rents tools from the implement bank and works for farmers in the area during the planting and harvesting seasons.

Farm labour shortages are common in the region, and an operator from the nearby town charges Rs 5500 (about USD 59) to operate a harvester.

A local youth trained to operate the machine, on the other hand, charges only Rs 3000 (USD 32). Similarly, charges for a Chaff Cutter or any machine from town are as high as Rs 1200 (USD 13) per hour, while local charges are only Rs 150 (USD 1.61) per hour. The Tool Bank charges Rs 20 (USD 0.22) per hour as rental and, hence, Rs 60 (USD 0.65) for three hours. Some farmers who own tractors and have undergone training, such as Iqbal Sheikh, hire implements from the Tool Bank and render their services, supplementing their income.

After paying the rental and fuel costs, an operator can earn Rs 800-2000 (USD 8 to 22) per day during the peak farming season, since a minimum of Rs 800 (USD 8.61) is earned for 8 hours of work. “During the kharif and rabi sowing and harvesting seasons, these operators can make a neat Rs 30,000 to 40,000 (about USD 322 to 430) a month, given the labour shortage and the demand for their services,” Jnana Prabodhini Harali Centre in-charge Abhijit Kapre says.

Farmers like Kondiba Pandhre and Shankar Deokar directly borrow and use the implements on their farms, since they have undergone training.

“It saves us a lot of money,” Pandhre and Deokar tell me. It has also helped them expand their farming operations. Deokar, who owns nine acres of land and a tractor, seeder, rotavator, and other equipment, now hires Broad Bed Furrow (BBF) machines, power tillers, cutters, trolleys, and furrowing attachments.

“Farm labour is hard to find nowadays. With these machines, I save a lot on labour charges as well as time. I only need to hire one labourer to operate a manual seeder now,” he says. Deokar’s lush farm grows a wide variety of vegetables besides millets, soybeans, onions and black gram. He has also put up a biogas plant which runs on farm waste.  Pandhre, who owns six acres of land and was earlier cultivating urad (black gram), mung (green gram), soyabean, onion, and carrots, has planted 1600 moringa (drumstick) trees on two acres of his land this year. Since Moringa has commercial value, Pandhre hopes to earn handsomely from his initiative.

Farmers are particularly fond of the BBF machine, which makes raised beds that are 90-150 cm long, with furrows that are 45 cm wide and 30 cm deep. Operating as a seed-cum-fertiliser planter, it brings enhanced aeration and better root development and can help in soil and water conservation in rainfed zones that suffer from irregular rainfall, moisture stress, and waterlogging. Farmers who cultivate sugarcane can avail themselves of Harvesters and Power Tillers too, which are particularly useful for the crop.

The other advantage is the saving of seeds. Deokar especially cites the case of soyabean. “Earlier, I needed 30 kg of soyabean seeds for planting and got eight quintals per acre. Now, I need only 25 kg of soybean seeds, and I can ensure yields of 10 quintals per acre. Furthermore, deep furrowing removes pests and helps us save on pesticides, too.”

Besides rentals being lower than in adjoining cities and towns, availability is guaranteed. “During the harvest and sowing seasons, even if we travelled to adjoining Sholapur, Umargaon, or Latur, availability was never guaranteed,” Vaijnath Kashinath Gavare of Sayyad Hipparga village tells me.

And buying was hardly an option for most farmers, with most implements ranging around Rs 2 lakhs and Rs 4 lakhs (USD 2400 to USD 4800)

A BBF machine also helps ensure that a natural disaster does not ruin a farmer.

Farmer Somnath Vinayak Bairajdar, who owns a 12-acre farm in Sayyad Hipparga village in Lohara block of the district, tells me, “Beds made by a BBF machine ensure that water is held by the soil in dry weather, while during untimely and very heavy rain, water easily flows out. The last two years saw this region experience heavy rainfall and flooding.

Many farmers lost all their crops. But my crops survived.”

A power tiller can help lighten the soil and aerate the roots, while a weeder removes pests, ensuring a better yield, Bairajdar says. “Earlier, I could have 5 to 6 tonnes of tomatoes per acre. But now, it is as high as 8 to 9 tonnes per acre.”

His pigeon pea yield has also climbed up from 6 to 7 quintals per acre to 9 quintals per acre,  while green beans have risen from 2 quintals per acre to 4.2 quintals per acre, “thanks to my use of the power tiller”.

Certain tools can also help farmers supplement their income.

Sharad Patil, for instance, who owns a 25-acre farm, has been able to expand his dairy business. “Earlier, I could only keep four cows, since I only owned a manual cutter to prepare the fodder for my animals. Now, I hire a chaff cutter, which is attached to my tractor, to do the job.”

Patil now has 34 cows in his shed; hiring a Chaff Cutter for three to four days provides him enough fodder to feed his cattle for six months.

Another popular item at the Tool Bank is the electrical armature machine, given the erratic electricity supply in Dharashiv. “Farmers need uninterrupted electricity for their pumps, especially in summer,” Margale tells me. “The government had started a scheme for solar-powered pumps. But it is currently not in operation.”

In the two years of its existence, the Tool Bank has seen rising popularity, especially among farmers in villages in and around the taluka and beyond.

“We are planning to set up a couple of more depots in adjoining villages,” Margale tells me.

Meanwhile, inspired by the progress and well-being of their peers, farmers like Pandurang Haren and Ballu Hakke are keen to start hiring tools from the Tool Bank and enrolling in a skill training programme.

The Tool Bank is breeding hope and positivity in Dharashiv while helping farmers fight the worst effects of climate change.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese presents her latest report before delegates at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland on 23 March 2026. Credit: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Jun 10 2026 (IPS)

For a few days in May, Francesca Albanese could live more easily. On 13 May, a US federal judge ruled that sanctions the Trump administration imposed on her violated her right to free expression. The government was forced to remove the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories from its sanctions list. But the reprieve lasted barely a week. On 27 May, after an appeals court suspended the ruling, the US Treasury restored sanctions.

The sanctions have been punishing. Due to the dominant role US institutions play in international financial transactions, Albanese can no longer use credit and debit cards. Her apartment in Washington DC has been seized, while Georgetown University ended her affiliation as a scholar. Her offence is to call out Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the occupation policies that preceded it.

An Italian citizen with a legal background, Albanese was appointed in 2022 and began her final term in 2025. She’s consistently been critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. In 2024, she presented her Anatomy of a Genocide report to the Human Rights Council. The report found reasonable grounds to conclude that Israel was committing genocidal acts in Gaza, and called for an arms embargo. Her 2025 report, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, set out the complicity of major companies in Israel’s human rights atrocities.

Albanese’s demands for justice have brought a fierce backlash from Israel and its allies. Israel called for her to be removed from her post and banned her from visiting Israel and Palestine. The Trump administration followed suit in calling for her sacking. When it imposed sanctions on Albanese last July, it was the first time these had been applied against a UN independent human rights expert.

Sanctions politicised

Albanese isn’t the only target. Democratic states have long applied sanctions against dictators, terrorists and human rights abusers, but the Trump administration is increasingly using them as a weapon against people who defend human rights.

This month, Israel received widespread international condemnation for its actions against the Global Sumud Flotilla, a civil society-led initiative to defy Israel’s chokehold on aid for Gaza and bring vital humanitarian supplies by sea. Israel intercepted the boats in international waters, abducted those on board and subjected them to sickening abuse. When Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a video of himself taunting the abducted activists, democratic states including Canada, Italy and the UK deplored his behaviour, and France and Poland banned him from their countries.

But the US government has done the opposite, imposing sanctions on four activists involved in organising the flotilla. The politicisation of sanctions is evident, given that one of Donald Trump’s first acts on returning to the presidency was to lift sanctions on violent Israeli West Bank settlers.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is also a target. Last year the Trump administration sanctioned nine ICC officials. The measures came after the ICC issued arrest warrants on crimes against humanity and war crimes charges against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ex-Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and in retaliation for the court’s investigation into potential US war crimes in Afghanistan.

Trump sanctioned two ICC officials in his first term and has repeatedly attacked the ICC, with reports last year that his administration was threatening further sanctions to try to force revisions of the court’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute, to explicitly prevent it having jurisdiction over non-member states such as the USA. Early in his second presidency, he issued an executive order threatening sanctions against anyone who participates in the ICC’s investigations. This sweeping order enabled the sanctions against Albanese.

Trump has also weaponised sanctions to block climate action. Last year the International Maritime Organization was about to finalise a deal to limit the shipping industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. At the last minute, adoption of the new rules was postponed when Trump threatened sanctions against states that supported the emissions curbs.

Chilling effect

Beyond their immediate effects, sanctions help repressive states smear human rights advocates as criminals and terrorists. For Albanese, sanctions form part of a broader campaign to restrict her right to speak out. She has received death threats, which have also been levelled against her daughter.

A broader chilling effect on civil society is visible. Concern about being penalised for sanctions violations caused two US-based human rights groups to pull out of the ICC’s annual meeting last year. For the Trump administration, sanctions are part of a wider onslaught on the rights of people and institutions to demand justice for Israel’s many human rights violations. They’ve come alongside violence against US protests in solidarity with Palestine, deportations of activists and threats to throw young people out of university and defund education institutions.

The misuse of sanctions also forms part of a broader assault on the institutions and rules of global governance. At the same time that the Trump administration is twisting international norms about how sanctions are used and who they’re applied to, it’s also choosing which organisations to participate in and which rules to follow depending on what it sees as the US national interest, and lashing out at international bodies and processes that bring human rights scrutiny.

A single ruling, now suspended, was never going to be enough against the Trump administration’s increasing use of sanctions as a tool to try to silence people. The democratic states that condemned Israel’s abuses against the flotilla activists must show the same resolve when the world’s most powerful state turns sanctions against people whose only offence is to insist that human rights apply everywhere, including in Gaza.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

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CIVICUS discusses the interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla on its mission to bring humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza with Musa Roshdy, a humanitarian activist who took part in the flotilla.

Musa Roshdy

What’s the Global Sumud Flotilla and why is it important?

The Global Sumud Flotilla was the second civilian maritime mission launched by a coalition of Palestinian solidarity organisations advocating for aid delivery to Palestinians in Gaza and the end of Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza. While it was the Global Sumud Flotilla’s second mission, this was the 39th sea-based attempt to break Israel’s illegal blockade. The Spring 2026 flotilla was organised in direct response to a call for aid put out by civil society organisations on the ground in Palestine.

On 15 April, we sailed from Barcelona with several hundred activists from dozens of countries including Brazil and Spain, determined to deliver aid to Palestinians facing severe deprivation. Our mission highlighted a crucial reality: if everyday civilians from all over the world can mobilise and get this close to establishing a humanitarian corridor, then governments can certainly do it. What’s missing is not ability or infrastructure, but political will. The flotilla represents civilian solidarity with Palestinians and a direct challenge to the illegal blockade. We were prepared for interception after Israel arrested the previous flotilla last year, but not for the scale of violence that followed.

How were you kidnapped?

I was kidnapped by the Israeli navy in the interception that occurred on 29 April, when we were sailing in international waters over 600 miles from occupied Palestine, off the coast of Crete. They attacked us in the middle of the night. We had little warning before military motorboats approached us at high speed. They pointed rifles at us and announced on a megaphone that they were the Israeli navy, they were boarding our vessel and we needed to go inside immediately or they would shoot us.

That night, the Israeli military stopped 22 of the 54 boats in the flotilla en route to Gaza. There’s no legal precedent for military action so far from Israel’s sea borders. We were in the European Union’s search-and-rescue zone, under Greek jurisdiction. But instead of protecting us, Greek coastguard ships observed Israel’s raid and then received us after we were tortured for two days.

Israel’s legal claims were absurd. They accused us of illegal entry into Israel when we were sailing to Gaza and were kidnapped en route. Most of the 180 activists were released in Greece, but two of us were abducted and brought before Ashkelon Magistrate’s Court in Israel on charges with no legal basis.

This violated fundamental principles of international law. You cannot take military action in international waters so far from your territory. You cannot abduct foreign nationals without due process. You cannot torture detainees. Yet all this happened.

Israel acts with impunity because the international community has failed to hold it accountable.

What did you endure in detention?

It was clear from the start they were trying to denigrate us for standing with Palestinians. I was forced onto my hands and knees and held in uncomfortable positions for hours. Soldiers stole my shoes, then stomped on my feet with their combat boots. I was left in just leggings and a tank top. We were held in makeshift prisons built from shipping containers. The soldiers deliberately manipulated the temperature, wetting the floor to freeze us at night, then forcing us outside under intense heat during the day. I experienced hypothermia both nights, as confirmed by a doctor who was imprisoned with me. When comrades tried to give me sweaters, soldiers took them away. At one point, a soldier pointed a rifle at my comrade and threatened to kill him for offering me a jacket in the cold.

Soldiers banged on containers and shone huge lights while we slept to keep us awake. They threw flashbangs and used force to drag people into solitary confinement. On the last day, they shot activists at point-blank range with rubber bullets. They took photographs and videos that showed us collecting our medications when they kidnapped us, but then denied us access to our medications once we were on the prison boat. Sixty-one people went on hunger strike. The food they provided, mostly bread, was insufficient to feed the rest of us, even with a third of us not eating. This cruelty is consistent with what Palestinians experience in Israeli detention, though what we experienced pales in comparison with the cruelty they face.

The Israeli military intended to deter the humanitarians sailing to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, but they were unsuccessful. People around the world recognise that Palestinians in Gaza still have an overwhelming need for aid, legal protection and solidarity. Many activists who were detained with me on 29 April set sail again a few weeks later on 14 May and were intercepted off Cyprus just days later on 18 and 19 May.

What must change internationally?

What governments must do is clear but consistently absent. They must condemn the kidnapping of their citizens. They must impose targeted sanctions against Israeli officials, not humanitarian activists. They must denormalise diplomatic relations with Israel. For instance, Croatia’s leader just refused to approve Israel’s new ambassador to Croatia due to Israel’s current policies.

The most fundamental step is an arms embargo. If we stop supplying weapons to Israel, it cannot do what it is doing. Last year, civil society in Belgium won a court case preventing the transit of military equipment to Israel. France recognises Palestine but still supplies weapons. Governments know these mechanisms exist but lack the political will to prioritise Palestinian lives over strategic interests.

Western states are also complicit in other ways. Some of our torturers had US accents. Another had a German accent. Western governments allow their citizens to join the Israeli military, which commits war crimes and kidnaps and tortures their nationals, then lets them return home without consequence.

Instead of holding Israel accountable, many western states are restricting the space for pro-Palestinian activism. In the UK, Palestine Action faced an absurd terrorism designation for blocking weapons manufacturing. In Germany, authorities banned the watermelon symbol as antisemitic.

On 19 May, as the Israeli military was kidnapping humanitarians in international waters, the United States Department of the Treasury sanctioned four leaders of the Global Sumud Flotilla, calling humanitarian aid delivery ‘pro-terror’, and blocking all access to financial institutions in the USA. The mechanism used by the USA to sanction humanitarian activists was recently deemed illegal by a federal judge when applied to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It criminalises support for Palestine and conflates it with support for terrorism.

What lies ahead for activism for Palestinian rights?

Our detention and torture were intended as a deterrent, but they failed. In practice, they had the opposite effect. Frontline work exacts a real human cost and people need time to recharge. But activism will continue because Palestinians in Gaza are still facing genocide.

What this moment teaches is that rights exist because we enact them. When everyday people learn from Palestinian courage how to stand up, call atrocities atrocities, and demand basic decency and access to life itself, movements spread across borders. People will continue to pursue humanitarian work, join future flotillas and resist authoritarian restrictions on civic space. Tactics will adapt, new symbols will emerge – as when the watermelon was adopted because Palestinians couldn’t display their flag – but the work won’t stop.

Credit: D.V. Bakke

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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Global Sumud Flotilla/Instagram
Humans of the Global Sumud Flotilla/Instagram
Musa Roshdy/Instagram

SEE ALSO
USA: sanctions weaponised against human rights CIVICUS Lens 01.Jun.2026
Gaza: ceasefire an illusion CIVICUS Lens 16.Mar.2026
Palestine: ‘The EU cannot position itself as a defender of human rights while being one of Israel’s primary arms markets’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with 7amleh 26.Mar.2026

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Credit: UN News

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Jun 5 2026 (IPS)

Ahead of World Environment Day, the UN General Assembly made a vital commitment to protect people from climate impacts, adopting a resolution on the climate change obligations of states. The resolution follows up on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion issued last year, which found that states have a legal duty to prevent activities that cause environmental harm. Most states voted for the resolution despite a concerted campaign by the Trump administration to block it.

From ruling to resolution

The ICJ ruling was a landmark moment. It made clear that climate change is a human rights issue, because the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is essential for human rights as a whole. Its ruling means that if states breach their climate obligations, it’s an intentionally wrongful act, opening them up to legal challenges.

The ICJ case was brought by the government of Vanuatu, but it was a victory for civil society, because the campaign to seek a ruling was started by law students who formed an organisation, Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change, to pressure their governments to go to the court.

ICJ advisory opinions aren’t legally binding, but their reasoning often plays a part in litigation efforts, strengthening the climate lawsuits civil society is increasingly bringing against states and corporations. It’s already being referenced in court hearings. Last year, a Brazilian judge cited it when he ordered a coalmine and thermoelectric plant to cease operations, although his ruling is currently on hold pending an appeal.

However, at the latest global climate summit, COP30, the Saudi Arabian government vetoed any reference to the ICJ ruling. Vanuatu therefore pushed for the General Assembly resolution to recognise the international legal standing of the judgment and encourage greater implementation.

Approval was far from unanimous. The Trump administration urged its allies to pressure Vanuatu to withdraw the resolution, part of its extensive campaign to defend the interests of fossil fuel corporations. It has also renounced the Paris Agreement and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, withdrawn from an array of international climate and environmental bodies and blocked an agreement on global shipping emissions. It was one of eight states that voted against, alongside Belarus, Iran, Israel, Liberia, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, a roll call of petrostates, countries that routinely ignore international rules and their close allies. The Trump administration continues to dispute the resolution, having issued a statement questioning its legality.

Momentum and resistance

States that backed the resolution have made clear that action on the climate crisis isn’t a question of political convenience, but a matter of respecting international law.

The resolution further contributes to the growing momentum behind climate action, despite attempts by a handful of powerful states to drag the world backwards. Renewables now provide around 30 per cent of global electricity, and renewable energy investments in 2025 were more than double those in fossil fuels. The First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, held in April, brought together 57 states to commit to developing national roadmaps to phase out fossil fuel production and consumption. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil supplies flow, has brought further recognition of the reality that fossil fuel dependence benefits only a handful of petrostates and leaves everyone else vulnerable.

These shifts are having an impact. In May, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dropped its worst-case scenario for the possible effects of climate change, under which global temperatures could have risen to 4.5 degrees above preindustrial levels, because emissions cuts are making a difference.

Activists in the crosshairs

The ICJ case offers just one example of how civil society is making a crucial difference in pushing for climate action. Activists are urging ambition and resisting new fossil fuel projects. But they’re paying a heavy price. The Business and Human Rights Centre found that in 2025, three quarters of almost 800 attacks it documented against people who spoke out against businesses targeted those who mobilised on climate, environmental and land rights issues.

Ten activists from the Mother Nature Cambodia environmental group remain in jail, having been handed heavy sentences in 2024 in retaliation for their work to raise public awareness about the impacts of extractive and infrastructure projects. In Mexico, Kenia Hernandez, leader of the Zapata Vive peasant movement that protects land rights, is serving a ten-and-a-half year sentence on fabricated charges.

In Uganda, last year authorities arrested 11 activists for protesting against the construction of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline. In January, police raided the home of Harjeet Singh, one of India’s most prominent environmental activists and a vocal campaigner for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. In Chile, where the government has weakened environmental laws, Indigenous women activists are experiencing intimidation, judicial harassment and violent attacks for opposing large-scale projects.

Last year the German government launched an inquiry into public funding of environmental groups, the Dutch parliament adopted a motion declaring Extinction Rebellion an ‘unlawful, society-disrupting and vandalistic organisation’ and the Portuguese government listed environmental groups in a section on terrorism of its annual security report. Authorities in Australia and New Zealand have arrested numerous people at climate and environmental protests, including in opposition to coal mining.

The UN resolution makes clear that criminalisation and violence are incompatible with states’ obligations, and everyone has a part to play in climate action. It calls on states to ‘ensure the full, meaningful and equal participation of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, people of African descent, women and girls, children and youth, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations in decision-making on climate action’.

States that backed the resolution are attacking the people it demands they work with. They can’t meet their climate obligations unless they stop repressing civil society. The resolution should give fresh impetus to civil society’s calls to replace repression with partnership.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

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CIVICUS discusses the outlook ahead of Peru’s runoff presidential election with David Hidalgo, journalist and executive director of OjoPúblico, a Peruvian digital investigative journalism outlet.

David Hidalgo

What were the first round results?

The Peruvian electoral system requires a candidate to secure over 50 per cent of the vote to win. The first round, held on 12 April, produced no clear winner, as none of the parties took over 20 per cent. Consequently, on 7 June there will be a runoff between two candidates who did not secure strong support but have merely cleared the minimum threshold to reach the runoff.

The contest between Fujimori of Fuerza Popular and Sánchez of Juntos por el Perú promises a difficult and polarised election. Meanwhile, Rafael López Aliaga of Renovación Popular, who came third trailing by some 20,000 votes, has persisted with an intense campaign alleging fraud.

It was an unusual election, as over 30 presidential candidates stood and, for the first time in over 20 years, voters also elected a bicameral parliament. The recent constitutional changes that reintroduced the Senate granted it considerable power, including the final say on whether to vacate a president by removing them via a parliamentary mechanism. In a country that has had eight presidents in 10 years, the composition of the new Senate will be just as decisive as the result of the presidential runoff.

Who are the candidates?

Keiko Fujimori is the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, who came to power in Peru in the 1990s and, two years after taking office, staged a coup and ruled autocratically throughout the decade. Fujimori left a legacy of corruption and serious human rights violations, for which he was sentenced to prison. His daughter defends his government and has built her campaign on the promise of a return to order, a message that may resonate with an electorate affected by historic levels of public insecurity.

However, she carries political baggage. She was the subject of a judicial investigation into the alleged illegal financing of her 2021 campaign, a process that made significant progress but was ultimately quashed. She is surrounded by figures who uncritically defend and recycle a hardline rhetoric that includes the passing of laws to grant amnesty for past human rights violations.

Sánchez built his campaign around the figure of ex-president Pedro Castillo, a former schoolteacher who channelled popular frustration and won the 2021 election, but lacked political preparation and ended up attempting a coup. Castillo is now in prison. Sánchez, who served as minister of trade in his government, has indicated that should he come to power, he could use presidential powers to pardon him.

His candidacy also raises concerns due to his closeness to Antauro Humala, a former military officer who spent almost 18 years in prison for leading a revolt in which four police officers were killed, and who holds radical views on various issues.

López Aliaga, a business leader and former mayor of Lima, has an equally controversial profile. Following a contentious tenure as mayor, he ran on a far-right platform that polarised the presidential campaign. He called for an insurgency when the results went against him and suggested the murder of a critical journalist. He constantly invokes conspiracy theories about an alleged state takeover by a supposed left-wing mafia and dismisses anyone who doesn’t share his views, from human rights organisations to Keiko Fujimori.

Was the first round election free and fair?

Although it was a turbulent electoral process, with incidents relating to the distribution of electoral materials and the opening of polling stations, the election was conducted within parameters that have been validated by various observation missions. There’s no evidence of a concerted effort to commit electoral fraud.

The irregularities that occurred are under investigation. The problem is that these gave rise to allegations of fraud put forward by López Aliaga and his party. Distorted versions of events were circulated to give the impression of significant impacts. For example, in some polling stations in southern Lima, electoral materials didn’t arrive on time, which led to false claims that, for this reason, a million people had been unable to vote. False information also circulated that electoral tally sheets were allegedly tampered with. It’s true there were incidents and irregularities, but there’s no evidence of fraud. This was acknowledged by the European Union’s observation mission.

The narrative of fraud is not new. Since the 2021 election, Keiko Fujimori’s party has maintained that she lost due to fraud, and has repeated this in every election since. López Aliaga adopted the same strategy this time and called for the election to be annulled.

What role have civil society and independent media played?

Disinformation and polarisation have reached historic levels, and the media have had to contend with them in situations of hostility and inequality. The landscape has been marked by constant attacks on independent media from the usual political figures and also parts of the press aligned with powerful corporate structures and others within the ecosystem of content creation for social media, which has emerged as the new arena for public debate.

At the same time, an authoritarian political alliance currently controlling the government and the main public institutions has consolidated a sort of legal stranglehold on independent media, which operate as non-profit organisations. The law on the Peruvian Agency for International Cooperation extends state control over civil society organisations working with international funding and requires their projects to be registered in advance with the state and subjected to coercive oversight, with disproportionate and unconstitutional sanctions. This law undermines editorial independence for independent media and creates risks incompatible with international press freedom standards.

On top of this, there’s a practice where some political groups accuse those who denounce state abuses, corruption and anti-rights practices of terrorism. This was particularly brutal following the social unrest that erupted after Castillo’s downfall in December 2022, when state repression of protests left around 50 people dead in southern Peru. The attacks targeted organisations supporting victims.

To tackle disinformation, used as a political tool in the electoral context, OjoPúblico, with the support of CIVICUS and in partnership with 26 organisations, launched an election coverage initiative using verification methods, in partnership with digital media outlets, radio stations and organised groups from different regions of Peru. The aim was to give the public verified information and show how disinformation undermines democracy. In six months, we generated almost three million views and over 180,000 social media interactions.

What’s the cause of instability in recent years?

The current crisis began in 2016, when Keiko Fujimori rejected the election results and pursued a sustained strategy to weaken the elected government, which culminated in it being removed from office by Congress. Since then, polarisation has deepened and Congress has taken on an increasingly destabilising role.

In this context, an unusual dynamic took hold, when parties at opposite ends of the political spectrum began acting in unison to benefit one another, halt investigations against them and advance their control over key state institutions such as the Constitutional Court, the Ombudsman’s Office and the Public Prosecutor’s Office. By appointing like-minded officials, they weakened the mechanisms of democratic control.

Added to this is the infiltration of illegal economies into politics. One example is that, according to revelations by independent journalists, 28 parties included people linked to illegal mining on their lists. This is an activity with an economic weight comparable to that of drug trafficking in past decades.

The combination of polarisation, institutional capture and the infiltration of criminal interests has sustained a system that reproduces itself election after election. Forces change and adapt, but they don’t disappear and instability persists.

What’s at stake in the runoff?

What’s at stake is democratic stability. This is regardless of who wins. Neither of the two candidates has provided sufficient guarantees that they will respect democratic principles and the rule of law. For 20 years, Peruvian voters have had to choose the lesser of two evils.

If Fujimori wins, she will seek to revive her father’s heavy-handed approach under the banner of law and order, one very much in line with the hard-right wave sweeping through Latin America. If Sánchez wins, his alliances with left-wing groups with a history of violence will open up an equally uncertain scenario.

Neither has presented a solid and convincing programme for the next five years. Their proposals rely more on slogans and spending pledges than on structural solutions to urgent problems such as record levels of insecurity, out-of-control illicit economies, and a fiscal situation undermined by disproportionate tax breaks.

But it’s also true that, given this complex scenario, this is not a choice between two equivalent risks. The dilemma facing Peruvian voters lies in understanding which candidate, if elected, will have greater power to pursue their authoritarian impulses without checks from the institutions that should restrain them.

In recent years, various international analyses have ceased to classify Peru as a democracy and now regard it as a hybrid regime. Depending on who wins, this trend will continue or intensify.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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SEE ALSO
Peru: ‘If authorities once again ignore the popular will, accumulated discontent could trigger a new outbreak’ CIVICUS Lens | Anonymous interview 26.May.2026
Peru: ‘The adult public and the mainstream press ridiculed our protests’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Jackelinne Ponce Paredes 07.May.2026
Peru: ‘Young people have lost their fear and realised change requires constant participation’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Wildalr Lozano 21.Oct.2025

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Deborah Nyokabi speaking at the 81st African Commission on Human & Peoples' Rights

By Deborah Nyokabi
NAIROBI, Kenya, May 25 2026 (IPS)

The theme of Africa Day 2026, “63 years of unity, integration and development,” offers a stark reminder of the gap that often exists between rhetoric and reality. While commendable regional legal frameworks have advanced legal protections for millions of women and girls, injustice remains written into the fabric of national family laws in many African countries, entrenching gender inequality in the home.

Such is the reality for the young woman in Kampala whose marriage was never legally registered and who, in the eyes of the State, does not exist as a wife.

For the woman in Lagos whose husband took their children after a divorce she did not want, and the law backed him.

For the Muslim widow in Nairobi who cannot inherit the home she shared with her husband for thirty years because property passes to his male relatives.

How the global anti-rights movement is targeting women’s rights in Africa

African countries have made laudable advances in legal rights for women and girls, but many laws governing marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance remain stubbornly unequal.

Deborah Nyokabi

Reform remains slow, uneven, and increasingly obstructed by a coordinated anti-rights movement that includes transnational ultra-conservative Christian organisations, populist political actors from the Global North, billionaire-funded conservative foundations, and right-wing think tanks and legal advocacy groups. They have found fertile ground in Africa, forging alliances with conservative organisations, religious leaders, and politicians who promote illiberal agendas.

Operating in plain sight and dressed in the language of culture, tradition, and sovereignty, these groups target parliaments, constitutional drafting processes, and regional human rights bodies. They draft model legislation, deploy strategic litigation, lobby policymakers, and cultivate relationships with heads of state and cabinet ministers.

They infiltrate international and regional human rights spaces to weaken protections, and run expensive communications campaigns while channeling cross-border funding to local organisations to portray coordinated efforts as grassroots.

Anti-rights groups seeking to reshape African policy

At the second Pan-African Conference on Family Values, held in Nairobi in May 2025, a declaration was adopted calling the family “not a flexible or negotiable construct” and committing to translate their discriminative doctrine into enforceable laws and regional partnerships. High-ranking Kenyan government officials delivered the opening and closing addresses.

The conference was co-sponsored by Family Watch International, C-Fam, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, all of whom served on the advisory committee of Project 2025, an initiative by the US-based Heritage Foundation seeking to roll back reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and diversity initiatives. These are not fringe actors. They are well-funded, politically connected, and pushing into the mainstream.

These groups have also drafted a proposed African Charter on Family, Sovereignty, and Values, which undermines gender equality by rejecting universal definitions of gender, sexuality, and sexual and reproductive health rights. Tabled at an inter-parliamentary conference in Entebbe in 2025, it calls for withdrawal from international human rights instruments and seeks to shield states from obligations under the Maputo Protocol, the African Union’s legally-binding women’s rights treaty.

Applications for observer status at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights from organisations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom signal an intent to infiltrate the very bodies designed to hold States accountable to their obligation to ensure equality, including in the family.

Harmful bills pass fast while equality bills stall

One of the most devastating patterns is the speed at which homophobic ‘family protection’ legislation moves, while paralysis grips laws to advance gender equality. In Uganda, the Anti-Homosexuality Act was passed in under three months. In Ghana, lawmakers are promoting the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill; in Kenya, political support for the Family Protection Bill is growing. Backed by far-right organisations in the US, these bills seek to criminalise sexual minorities and promote a rigid, exclusionary vision of the family centred on heterosexual marriage and conservative social structures.

Meanwhile, family law reform bills that would give women equal rights in marriage, divorce, and custody have stalled for decades in Uganda, Cameroon, and Ghana. The contrast is not coincidental. The same movement blocking equality for women and girls in family laws is the one pushing legislation against LGBTQI+ people. It uses the same language: family values, cultural integrity, sovereignty, national cohesion. But when you trace the money and the actors, the strategy becomes clear. The goal is not to protect the family. It is to protect the patriarchy within it.

How African civil society and coalitions are fighting back

None of this goes unanswered.

When the Pan-African Conference on Family Values convened in Nairobi, over twenty Kenyan human rights organisations petitioned for the venue to refuse to host it. Billboards celebrating diverse families lined the road from the airport. Activists disrupted the social media narrative and organised in the streets.

Strategic litigation has compelled the government to reinstate safe abortion guidelines in Kenya. International coalitions, including African women, have pushed back against anti-rights infiltration at the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. Survivors, lawyers, activists, and advocates are refusing to cede ground.

Working in coalitions is one of the most powerful tools available to those defending gender equality. The anti-rights movement succeeds in part because it is coordinated across borders, sectors, and institutions. The response must be equally organised. Equality Now’s coalition work is grounded in this understanding. Through the Africa Family Law Network, we join with civil society organisations, legal networks, faith communities, survivor advocates, and parliamentarians to build and sustain a stronger common front.

What African governments must do to reform family laws

This year’s Africa Day should serve as a call to action to prioritise family law reform. We are at a perilous moment of global regression in women’s rights, where hard-won legal safeguards are being deliberately dismantled. Discriminatory family law sits at the heart of that regression. The ask is not complicated. The political will is what is missing. We stand ready to work with you to change that:

To the African Union: Advocate for the universal ratification and implementation of the Maputo Protocol, a floor, not a ceiling. Push for lifting of reservations on equality in marriage, family, and reproductive rights by member states. Resist attempts to water down its provisions through model reservations crafted by anti-rights legal networks.

To African parliaments and parliamentarians: Reform discriminatory laws on marriage registration, equal divorce rights, child custody, and inheritance that have been stalled for too long. Every year of inaction is a year of harm. Do not allow parliaments to be used as platforms for movements that entrench inequality in the family under the disguise of protecting it.

To African governments: Enforce the Maputo Protocol, and ratify if not already undertaken. Conduct awareness-raising campaigns on family law rights. Invest in legal aid that reaches women in rural communities and informal settlements. Allocate sufficient budgets to gender equality and family law reform. Recognise unpaid care work. National family protection policies must protect all family members, not only those who fit a narrow ideological template.

To civil society, lawyers, journalists, and advocates: Build and sustain coalitions across borders. Expose the funding and actors behind anti-rights campaigns. Tell the stories of the women these laws fail. Make the abstract concrete. Keep going.

“Until family laws are equal, there is no equality in African society.”

This Africa Day, let us be clear about what we are celebrating, and honest about what still needs to change.

Deborah Nyokabi is a Legal Advisor on Legal Equality at Equality Now, a global human rights organisation dedicated to ending discrimination against all women and girls. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya.

IPS UN Bureau

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Excerpt:

Credit: Rizwan Tabassum/AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, May 22 2026 (IPS)

Narges Mohammadi, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her human rights activism in Iran, has been allowed to go home. After guards found her unconscious in her cell, the apparent victim of a heart attack, she was granted temporary release from prison and transferred to a hospital. However, she still faces the threat of being taken back to jail once her condition has improved.

Mohammadi has been repeatedly imprisoned for criticising the theocratic regime, demanding women’s rights, advocating for prison reform and campaigning against the death penalty. Over her lifetime she’s been sentenced to a total of 44 years. She’s already spent more than a decade behind bars, including 161 days in solitary confinement, and has also been sentenced to 154 lashes. In February she was handed a further seven-and-a-half-year sentence. From prison – where she experienced cardiac and blood pressure problems and severe weight loss – she has documented systematic rights violations against political prisoners, including sexual and physical abuse of women detainees, torture and extensive use of solitary confinement.

Mohammadi’s case is one among many. While her ordeal has rightly drawn international attention, others more distant from the spotlight are in danger. Three more women human rights activists – Pakhshan Azizi, Sharifeh Mohammadi and Varisheh Moradi – are on death row at imminent risk of execution. The dangers they and countless others face have grown sharply since the current war began.

Repression tightens

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he wants regime change in Iran. On 1 March, an Israeli strike killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. But if the intention was to topple the regime, it didn’t happen. Iran’s ruling theocratic structures run deep, with multiple layers of planned succession. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei, injured in the same attack, was quickly named his replacement, despite Iran’s official ideology formally rejecting hereditary succession.

While clerical leaders have been killed, Iran’s coercive apparatus has gained in its day-to-day power, hardening the theocracy into something closer to a military dictatorship, with the Basij, the paramilitary volunteer force long deployed to crush public dissent, now front and centre.

Israeli and US hopes that Iranians would rise up against the regime have been disappointed. Iran has seen successive mass protest waves, each crushed with large-scale lethal violence. They include the Green Movement that demanded democracy in 2009 and 2010 and the Woman, Life, Freedom protests that demanded women’s rights in 2022 and 2023. The latest uprising came in December 2025 and January 2026, triggered by economic collapse, forging a movement that united broad sections of society to demand an end to the theocratic regime. The state suppressed it with shocking brutality, killing thousands and detaining tens of thousands.

By February, the uprising had been crushed. The Israeli-US intervention was unlikely to reignite a meaningful mass protest movement. If anything, for some Iranians the war has stoked patriotism and more intense enmity towards Israel and the USA. The anticipated revolt simply hasn’t happened.

Much of Iran’s vast diaspora has rallied in support of the war as a means of toppling the regime. But while the diaspora is united in demanding change, its array of ethnic minority organisations, Islamist factions, leftists, monarchists and republicans is bitterly divided over what should come next. Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah, enjoys some support but others are wary about monarchical nostalgia and his close ties to Israel and the USA. The most credible potential unifying figures inside Iran are imprisoned or otherwise silenced.

Instead of losing control, the regime has tightened its repression. Even as Iran’s leaders wage a social media propaganda war abroad, at home they’ve imposed a near-total internet shutdown, including a block on VPN services. The blackout has caused immense economic harm, disrupting businesses and financial transactions and hitting women the hardest. This comes on top of the economic effects of the current US blockade of Iranian ports, sending inflation and unemployment soaring.

Under the cover of war and the internet shutdown, the government has accelerated executions of political prisoners. While precise figures are hard to get, rights groups report close to 200 executions so far this year, most preceded by prolonged torture to extract false confessions. Secret hangings are reportedly being carried out on an almost daily basis. Among those killed are people detained during the January protests. On 4 May, it was reported that three people arrested at protests on 8 and 9 January – Ebrahim Dolatabadinejad, Mohammadreza Miri and Mehdi Rasouli – had been hanged. For families, the suffering doesn’t end there, as authorities reportedly refuse to return bodies and pressure relatives to stay silent.

Local priorities

Democracy and human rights in Iran depend on the regime’s departure. But the latest war isn’t about any of this. For Netanyahu, with an election impending and anger remaining at his corruption charges and Israel’s security failures around the 7 October Hamas attacks, permanent warfare is a political strategy. Donald Trump’s many social media announcements provide little clue of what motivates a president who promised not to mire the USA in foreign wars, but distraction from low popularity ratings and his many appearances in the Epstein files may be a factor.

This war isn’t the way to achieve change. The regime appears entrenched and capable of surviving a longer conflict. Any peace deal would leave it intact, which its rulers would treat as a victory.

Real change will come when protests can grow into a mass movement large enough to withstand the lethal repression the state will inevitably deploy. That can only happen with sustained support that respects the autonomy of local civil society leaders and strengthens their capacity. The immediate priorities must be to protect credible local sources of information amid the information blackout and ensure the safety and security of Iran’s democracy and human rights activists.

Above all, states must press the Iranian government to halt executions and release everyone detained for speaking out, protesting and demanding change, beginning with Narges Mohammadi. Temporary medical release is nowhere near enough. The Iranian regime must let her be free.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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The community works to preserve its identity amid pressure from real estate development and non-Indigenous settlers. Credit: Samuel Tremembé

By Carla Ruas
BELÉM, Brazil, May 21 2026 (IPS)

On Brazil’s northeastern coast, the Indigenous community, Tremembé da Barra do Mundaú, lives on a preserved stretch of land shaped by mangroves, dunes, and deserted beaches. The group of around 160 families is led by women and depends on the 3,500-hectare territory for fishing and subsistence farming.

In 2023, the Tremembé won federal recognition of their ancestral land in the state of Ceará – giving them formal control over the territory.

But their home remains under threat. As tourism has expanded, they have faced growing pressure from real estate developments and around 100 non-Indigenous settlers. A push for renewable energy has also brought nearby wind projects that the community says damage the environment and disrupt their way of life.

“We have many problems here, including trash in our rivers, cars scaring away animals, and people damaging the dunes,” said Cleidiane Tremembé, a local Indigenous teacher. “With the installation of wind farms, many fish species have also disappeared from our river, and we’re catching fewer fish.”

The Tremembé da Barra do Mundaú Indigenous Land protects 27 km of mangrove forest and 8 km of coastline. Credit: Samuel Tremembé

This May, the group will begin investing roughly US$300,000 in efforts to protect their territory. The funds come from the Ywy Ipuranguete (‘beautiful land’) project – an ambitious initiative that aims to distribute a total of US$9 million to 15 Indigenous Lands across Brazil by 2030.

The project is coordinated by Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples (MPI), implemented by the Brazilian Biodiversity Fund (FUNBIO), and financed through the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF). The GBFF, whose donors include the governments of Canada, Norway and the United Kingdom, is managed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) – the world’s largest multilateral environmental fund.

According to the GEF, the goal is to support the protection of Indigenous territories as a strategy to conserve biodiversity and strengthen climate resilience.

“A growing body of evidence shows that territories managed by Indigenous Peoples — particularly where land tenure is formally recognised — consistently rank among the most effective settings for maintaining biodiversity, retaining carbon stocks, and preserving ecological integrity, often outperforming both unprotected lands and formally designated conservation areas,” said Adriana Moreira, Lead of the Partnerships Division at the GEF.

If fully implemented, the project would help protect 6.4 million hectares and reach around 61,000 Indigenous people.

Following the project’s launch in March 2025, the Tremembé will be among the first communities to put the funds into action.

Tremembé community member Mateus Castro says their goal is to preserve their land and culture for future generations. Credit: Julia Holanda

Mateus Castro, a community member coordinating the work locally, said the money will be used primarily to acquire drones, radio transmitters, vehicles and a boat to help secure the territory’s boundaries.

“We want to monitor and record the presence of outsiders,” he said in an interview. “This project will allow us to have the tools that give our territory security and autonomy.”

The same equipment would help the community inventory local ecosystems and animal species. Their coastal stretch is home to a wide range of species – from fish and crabs to endangered sea turtles.

“We want to record the species along our coastline so we can use that information as a defence against the licensing of new offshore wind farms,” he said.

With the funding, they also plan to reforest degraded areas, train local environmental brigades, and fund traditional festivals. The first will be the Farinhada Festival that takes place in July. During the festivities, families celebrate cassava as a sacred food and prepare traditional dishes for younger generations.

“In Indigenous culture, everything is connected,” Castro said. “Our goal is to preserve our land, culture, and identity for the children who are yet to be born. We are thinking 100, 200 years from now.”

Future Plans

The Indigenous communities selected to participate in the Ywy Ipuranguete project were chosen by FUNAI, Brazil’s federal Indigenous affairs agency, with input from Indigenous organisations.

The priority was given to groups outside the Amazon, including the Tremembé in Ceará, as part of an effort to decentralise environmental funding. Nearly half of Brazil’s 1.69 million Indigenous people live outside the Legal Amazon, according to the legal census.

“If we look at environmental projects in general, funding, implementation, and resources are usually focused on the Amazon,” said Francisco Itamar Gonçalves Melgueiro, FUNAI’s general coordinator for environmental policies. “That is why we distributed the project across five biomes in Brazil – the Amazon, Pantanal, Cerrado, Caatinga and Atlantic Forest.”

FUNAI also selected communities that had recently removed invaders from their lands, including the Kayapó and Munduruku, who have been in conflict with illegal miners in the Amazon for decades. “After that removal, we see an opportunity for Indigenous peoples to fully retake possession of their territories,” Melgueiro said.

Communities did not need their territories to be fully recognised by the federal government to qualify for the funding. However, they had to submit detailed plans, known as PGTAs, which are part of a broader set of Indigenous territorial and environmental management documents.

During the Farinhada Festival, families celebrate cassava and prepare traditional dishes such as tapioca crepes. Credit: Julia Holanda

“These plans serve as blueprints for their future and cover a wide range of themes and actions,” Melgueiro said. “They are an instrument of the peoples, built by the peoples.”

But many are still working on their PGTAs. More than a decade after Brazil created the framework for these plans, a 2023 civil-society report found that Indigenous communities have received little support for their development, especially during the administration of Brazilian right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro. To date, FUNAI has mapped just 148 PGTAs in a country with more than 800 Indigenous Lands.

The first year of the Ywy Ipuranguete project has been largely dedicated to helping participating communities finalise and detail their PGTAs. The Brazilian Biodiversity Fund (FUNBIO), GEF’s implementing agency, told IPS that this “is a massive and meticulous undertaking”, as they work with Indigenous communities to “determine which PGTA activities are to be undertaken, the best methods for executing them, and the specific implementation arrangements for each Indigenous Land”.

According to Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples (MPI), only about 8% of the total budget has been spent so far, mostly on planning, coordination and initial activities. Eventually, MPI said, 75% of the budget will go directly to the communities, with much of the funding transferred to Indigenous organisations. “Investing in Indigenous peoples to maintain their own ways of existing is investing in the survival of humanity itself,” the ministry said in a statement.

Community members say fish species have disappeared from their river following the installation of nearby wind farms. Credit: Samuel Tremembé

“Investing in Indigenous peoples to maintain their own ways of existing is investing in the survival of humanity itself,” the ministry said in a statement.

In Tremembé da Barra do Mundaú, where plans are underway, the community feels ready. The funding will build on years of work, from training young environmental agents to documenting food traditions.

“This is one of the largest resources the territory has ever received,” Castro said. “For us, it’s a huge opportunity to consolidate and strengthen our mission of caring for the land.”

Note: The Eighth Global Environment Facility Assembly will be held from May 30 to June 6, 2026, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
This feature is published with the support of the GEF. IPS is solely responsible for the editorial content, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of the GEF.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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CIVICUS discusses the cancellation of RightsCon 2026 with Barbora Bukovská, Senior Director for Law and Policy at ARTICLE 19, a human rights organisation that works on freedom of expression and information around the world.

Barbora Bukovská

Why does the cancellation of RightsCon matter?

This cancellation is significant on three levels. First, it means the loss of community. The human rights movement depends on relationships built across borders and over time. RightsCon was one of the few global spaces where civil society organisations, funders, governments, journalists, researchers and technology professionals could meet without political interference. Losing it means losing opportunities to build solidarity and strengthen the networks the movement runs on.

Second, it was a symbolic blow. RightsCon represented the idea that at least one global space existed where civil society could convene freely, protected from political pressure. That illusion is now shattered. The space proved vulnerable. It is yet more evidence of shrinking civic space globally, and the message it sends is chilling: no space is truly protected from state interference any more.

Third, it caused financial damage. Following funding cuts from the USA in early 2025 and reduced funding from other major donor governments, civil society is struggling to secure resources. Organisations had invested precious funding to attend RightsCon, covering travel, organising side events and preparing advocacy materials. These are resources vulnerable civil society organisations cannot afford to waste.

What does this episode reveal about transnational repression?

The cancellation lays bare how emboldened China feels to globalise its political red lines and exercise transnational repression. For years, it has applied pressure on governments to sideline Taiwanese participation in multilateral forums. Taiwan’s leading role in digital rights and technology has long irritated China. What’s new is other governments’ willingness to yield.

China’s tactics have grown more sophisticated. Rather than open confrontation, it leverages threats of diplomatic fallout or lost investment. The pressure now extends into spaces once thought beyond its reach, such as cultural institutions, rights conferences and universities. China has shown it can coerce governments across sectors and at multiple levels.

The wider context matters too. The USA, once a leading global supporter of internet freedom, has retreated from diplomatic and financial backing for digital rights. China’s influence on the African continent has expanded in the absence of rights-based alternatives. When democratic states withdraw support for civil society, authoritarian influence fills the void.

How do China’s leverage and Zambia’s democratic decline combine?

China’s leverage across Africa has grown substantially in recent years. Chinese funding has built major infrastructure in Zambia, including Mulungushi International Conference Centre, the venue where RightsCon was due to take place. Only days before the cancellation, China signed a new agreement to fund further development projects. Zambia carries roughly US$5 billion in debt to China, and that dependency comes with strings attached.

Domestically, the picture is similarly bleak. Despite President Hakainde Hichilema being elected in 2021 on a promise of democratic renewal, civic space has shrunk steadily since. In 2025, parliament passed cybersecurity laws now used to curtail freedom of expression online and detain political opponents. Ahead of the August 2026 general election, the government is enacting further laws designed to entrench its power. Political control is winning out over democratic commitments.

Yielding to Chinese pressure while restricting civic space at home calls Zambia’s commitment to the rule of law and human rights into serious doubt. The debt creates a channel through which China can extract political cooperation. Together, these dynamics create a dangerous precedent for other global south nations facing similar pressure.

What does this mean globally?

The danger extends well beyond Zambia. If a government can cancel a major international civil society gathering without serious diplomatic or institutional consequences, it sends the wrong signals. States must show that interference carries costs. Democratic states, multilateral organisations and regional institutions must impose costs through sustained pressure and exclusion from future convenings.

International human rights mechanisms, including the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association, have already condemned Zambia’s decision. But statements alone are not enough. Zambia shouldn’t be considered a reliable host for rights-based global dialogue in future.

If governments can yield to authoritarian pressure at the expense of civil society protections without paying a price, the pattern will spread.

What steps should be taken to protect global civil society forums?

Civil society can adapt but cannot insulate its gatherings from state pressure on its own. Real responsibility lies with states that claim to support human rights. They must send a diplomatic and political signal that interference in global forums is costly and prevent other governments from following Zambia’s example. They must reaffirm their commitment to multi-stakeholder forums and invest in civil society’s ability to convene and participate.

That includes member states of international coalitions such as the Freedom Online Coalition and the Media Freedom Coalition. They must act against restrictions on civic space and freedom of expression, using these platforms to impose costs on governments that interfere with civil society. The behaviour Zambia has just normalised must be made costly.

The UN, other intergovernmental organisations and states must work to guarantee the safety and openness of global gatherings. As democratic states withdraw support and authoritarian states expand their reach, the spaces where global civil society can gather, build relationships and advance human rights will continue to shrink. What’s at stake is the infrastructure of global civil society coordination and solidarity.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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Democracy: an enduring aspiration CIVICUS | State of Civil Society Report 2026
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Zambia: ‘The NGO Bill strengthens legal mechanisms designed to discredit or silence critical civil society voices’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Josiah Kalala 03.Jun.2025

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Credit: Bibbi Abruzzini/Forus - Rabat, Morocco

By Silla Ristimäki, Miguel Santibañez, Emeline Siale Ilolahia and Aoi Horiuchi
HELSINKI, Finland / SANTIAGO, Chile / SUVA, Fiji / TOKYO, Japan, May 20 2026 (IPS)

Just four years of the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development remain. What comes after 2030 is already a political battleground.

The next global development framework is being shaped now: through quiet agenda-setting, shifting alliances, financing choices, contested norms, and decisions about who gets to participate and who is pushed to the margins. That matters because the world that will shape what comes next is not the world that adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015.

The context is harsher, more fractured and less generous. Geopolitical fragmentation is deepening. Armed conflicts are distorting priorities. Climate impacts are accelerating. Development finance is under growing strain. Civic space is shrinking. Public trust in multilateralism is weaker. And too often, the rights, equality and accountability commitments that gave the SDGs their normative force are treated as negotiable.

“We step into the next decade against the background of climate chaos, growing inequality and increasing poverty. The scaffolding for positive change shall be to infuse democratic values in the blood stream of all our governments from the Right to the Left,” says Dr. Moses Isooba, executive director of the Uganda National NGO Forum and Vice-Chair of Forus.

The post-2030 debate must confront the political and structural weaknesses that limited implementation the first time around.

As a civil society network, we have been here from the very beginning. We have secured the adoption of the SDGs with the Beyond 2015 campaign, pushed for innovation and ambition, challenged power, brought forward the voices of communities, and held systems accountable. That role evolves and as we now look “beyond 2030”, we remain present, engaged, and determined to influence what comes next.

One message comes through clearly: the next agenda will only be credible if we are clear about three things — what must be defended, what must be demanded, and what must be declined.

What must be defended

Some foundations of the current framework remain essential and must not be traded away for the sake of political convenience.

The first is universality. One of the most important achievements of the SDGs was to establish that sustainable development is not only a concern for lower income countries, but a universal responsibility. Policies, consumption patterns and economic models that drive inequality, exclusion and ecological harm must be addressed in all regions. High-income countries must not only finance development but also reform their own adverse policies. If the next framework weakens the recognition that sustainable development must integrate social justice, equality, environmental sustainability, peace and human rights, it will not move us forward. It will mark a retreat.

The second is civic space. Civil society participation is one of the conditions that makes accountability, inclusion and implementation possible yet it is increasingly constrained by financial pressures, exclusion from global decision-making processes and erosion of fundamental rights. A future agenda which prioritises resources and protection for civil society supports the building of stable, sustainable societies.

The third is local leadership. Communities and local civil society actors remain closest to the realities that global frameworks claim to address, yet they are still structurally under-resourced and under-represented. Localisation beyond the “buzzword” can bring essential resources for problem diagnosis and planning, increasing effectiveness and legitimacy for sustainable development and peacebuilding.

And finally, what must be defended is multilateralism itself, not as an abstract ideal, but as the shared political space where common commitments can still be built.

“Safeguarding the structures created to advance peace, cooperation and rights sustains global hope and possibilities to address common global challenges. This is in the interests of us all, future generations and the planet.” Silla Ristimäki, Adviser at Fingo. “This is why ambitious reform of the UN cannot be separated from the post-Agenda 2030 discussion.”

What must be demanded

Defending core principles is not enough. Negotiations about the future must also correct what the Agenda 2030 left unresolved.

At the centre of this is financing. A credible post-2030 framework cannot rest on the same unequal financial architecture that has constrained implementation for years. Debt burdens, unequal fiscal space, volatile aid flows and weak commitments have all narrowed the room for governments and communities to act. Financing reforms must include debt restructuring and relief, fairer lending terms, increased concessional finance, stronger domestic resource mobilisation, tax justice, policy coherence and predictable support for civil society.

“Many countries are spending more on debt than education or health. We need to reform the current unjust international financial architecture,” says Aoi Horiuchi, Senior Advocacy Officer at JANIC, the civil society network for international cooperation in Japan.

Accountability must also be stronger. Voluntary reporting and soft review mechanisms have not been enough. A future agenda must be backed by mandatory, transparent and regular review, with independent oversight and a formal role for civil society and local actors in tracking progress and exposing implementation gaps.

And participation must mean more than consultation after decisions are already taking shape. Civil society needs a formalised, meaningful and safe role in both negotiating and implementing the future framework, especially for local actors and groups continuing to face structural or political exclusion.

“Meaningful change comes from meaningful participation. That’s why we need to defend civic space,” says Horiuchi.

What must be declined

Some directions already visible in early discussions must be rejected outright.

A thinner agenda that lowers ambition in the name of consensus must be declined. So must any attempt to weaken universality, rights, gender equality, civic freedoms or climate ambition for political expediency.

The continuation of a financial status quo that deepens inequality while speaking the language of partnership must also be declined. So must accountability arrangements that remain symbolic, selective or performative.

And tokenistic participation must be named for what it is. A process that brings civil society into the room for appearance’s sake while excluding it from agenda-setting, decision-making and follow-through is managed exclusion.

Finally, as development governance evolves, the expanding role of private and philanthropic actors must not come without public-interest safeguards, democratic oversight and accountability. Public goals cannot be left to unaccountable power.

We must get out of silos, create spaces of dialogue, of co-responsibility and raise the question of whether the post-2030 framework will be more honest about power, more serious about accountability, more capable of confronting structural inequality, and more open to those whose lives and rights are most at stake.

Our answer is here:
Defend what must not be lost.
Demand what must be corrected.
Decline what would weaken the future.

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: Emmanuel Herman/Reuters via Gallo Images

By Hannah Wheatley, Joanna Makhlouf and Taís Siqueira
BAGAMOYO, Tanzania / BEIRUT, Lebanon / WASHINGTON D.C., May 18 2026 (IPS)

In an era when civil society funding is in decline, it’s time to rebel against a broken system.

Today, too much is being asked from the people already doing the most. In a time of multiple and connected global crises – of climate, conflict, democracy, disinformation, global governance, human rights and inclusion – and in a context of intensifying civic space restrictions and collapsing funding, funders and the intermediary organisations that distribute resources somehow expect frontline organisations to transform systemic injustices that have built up over centuries. At the same time, these groups are expected to keep meeting inflexible targets, writing flawless reports and keeping their teams emotionally and physically afloat.

As governments, international organisations, investors, philanthropists, civil society and business leaders meet at the Global Partnerships Conference on the future of international development, it’s time to do things differently.

Let’s stop asking local leaders to transform their communities before they’ve had space to heal. Let’s stop training grassroots organisations to become international clones. Let’s stop intermediaries replicating burnout culture.

No single organisation can undo the long legacy of colonialism or the systemic problems of global capitalism. And they shouldn’t have to. The role of the civil society ecosystem must be to build and protect space, redistribute power and resources and, most of all, stop transferring institutional pressure downwards. If we truly trust local civil society, we must also trust its limits. That means intermediaries must stand their ground with funders, set realistic expectations and champion the right to do less when circumstances demand it.

At CIVICUS’s Local Leadership Labs – an initiative to tackle the barriers that get in the way of local leadership of development – partners often report feeling compelled to deliver ambitious workplans that involve them reaching every district, leading multiple initiatives and facilitating extensive community engagements, even as civic space is closing around them. Driven by passion and the need to prove their worth in a competitive ecosystem, many have overextended without realising the toll on their wellbeing and sustainability.

Burnout is not just about long hours. It stems from impossible expectations in unsafe, high-pressure contexts. Civil society is striving to stretch every grant dollar, prove its worth at every reporting cycle and ensure the survival of communities. In restrictive civic space conditions, these pressures are compounded by harassment, intimidation, surveillance and violence.

The result is a constant feeling of not doing enough, even when the demands are structurally impossible. Over time, this erodes morale, health and leadership sustainability.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, funders proved that another way was possible. They provided unrestricted funding and offered flexibility and simplified reporting. Trust was extended. Partnerships were strengthened. But that willingness to experiment has not lasted.

What must change

It must be recognised that in these conditions, scaling back is not failure. It is how movements endure.

We have seen that investing in healing and reflection is not a luxury. It is what sustains movements. At Local Leadership Labs, partners working with survivors of state violence realised they could not move forward without first addressing exhaustion and trauma. Their care-centred approach showed that the process itself can be the outcome. Taking time for healing and thoughtful collaboration produces more sustainable, transformational results.

This is what the civil society ecosystem should support: not chasing impossible targets, but creating conditions for dignity, reflection and resilience.

Addressing burnout requires more than acknowledgement. It calls for rethinking about how support is structured and how expectations are set. Funders and intermediaries can help break the cycle by:

1. Budgeting time and priority for healing
Leaders are often asked to deliver systemic change while carrying unaddressed trauma. Without space for healing, burnout is inevitable. Intermediaries can normalise pacing, integrate healing into workplans and advocate with funders for timelines that reflect reality.

2. Showing funders the way
Funders need guidance on becoming more adaptable to intensifying civic space conditions and contexts of high volatility. Intermediaries can convene learning spaces where funders reflect on how flexibility and responsiveness protect communities and sustain movements. They can also challenge extractive, funder-driven processes and advocate for spaces where local civil society can lead and influence on its own terms.

3. Bridging, connecting and humanising
Behind funders, intermediaries and frontline civil society are people, all under institutional pressure. Intermediaries can help in both directions, by shielding local partners from unrealistic demands while working with funders to develop an understanding of what’s achievable. By cultivating empathy, they can replace transactional directives with reciprocal accountability, unlocking collaborations that go beyond the extractive.

In many contexts, civil society is holding the line in the face of authoritarianism, even worse attacks on human rights and still stronger repression. The enemies of democracy and human rights thrive when those defending freedoms and demanding social justice burn out. When forced to compete for scarce resources, organisations try to over-deliver to prove their worth, further deepening stress and accelerating exhaustion.

In this context, supporting the wellbeing of local civil society is not optional. It is central to protecting the energy that drives activism. Funders and intermediaries must pause, reflect and reset expectations. If we create space for healing, rest and resilience, movements will survive the current storm, and emerge equipped to resist, transform and win.

Taís Siqueira is Local Leadership Labs Coordinator at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. Hannah Wheatley is CIVICUS’s former Data Analyst and Joanna Makhlouf is a former member of the Local Leadership Labs implementation team.

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CIVICUS discusses the rising trend of social media bans for children with Marie-Ève Nadeau, Head of International Affairs of the 5Rights Foundation, an organisation that promotes children’s rights in the digital environment.

Marie-Ève Nadeau

Are social media bans an effective way of protecting children?

Today, one in three internet users is a child, and digital technologies increasingly mediate all aspects of their lives, from the classroom to the playground, from their first friendships to how they see themselves. As evidence of harms and risks mounts, lawmakers around the world are racing to impose age limits on children’s access to social media. The instinct to act is right, but the current direction risks missing the point.

The real issue is the conditions children face when online. Children are growing up in a digital environment designed without their distinct rights, needs and vulnerabilities in mind. This is a deliberate choice. Tech companies’ business models prioritise commercial gain over children’s safety and wellbeing, deliberately embedding persuasive design, relentless engagement loops and extractive data practices by default. Fixing this requires more than blocking children’s access.

Age restrictions are not new, yet their effectiveness remains inconclusive. Banning children from specific services while leaving the underlying system untouched lets tech companies off the hook for recommender systems that push harmful content, persuasive design that keeps children compulsively engaged and data practices that exploit their attention for profit. Used in isolation, bans create an illusion of protection while the same harmful design practices continue unchallenged. Children are pushed towards other unregulated environments, such as AI chatbots, gaming platforms and educational technology services, where they face equivalent risks with even less scrutiny.

What do these bans mean for children’s rights to expression and information?

Children’s rights are interdependent and indivisible, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child General Comment No. 25 makes clear that all children’s rights apply fully in the digital environment. This includes the right to protection from harm, but also to the rights of access to information, expression and participation. In practice, tech companies have made these rights conditional on the commercial surveillance, exploitation and manipulation of children, eroding their privacy, safety, critical thinking and agency.

Age-based bans that restrict access without addressing underlying design practices create a false choice between freedom and safety. Children need both protection from harm and meaningful access to expression, information and participation. Restricting access without reforming the systems that embed risk fails to uphold the full range of children’s rights.

Who is most harmed by these bans, and what gaps do they create?

Children’s rights apply until the age of 18, yet proposed restrictions often only cover children under 16 and a narrow set of high-risk services. This creates gaps. Children above the age threshold, and those who circumvent poorly implemented restrictions, end up in unregulated spaces outside the scope of bans.

Bans can also entrench inequality. Children are not a homogeneous group, and those facing intersecting vulnerabilities linked to disability, gender, political opinion, race, religion or ethnic, national or social origin may heavily rely on digital spaces for expression, identity safety and support.

At the same time, engagement-based platform design often rewards and amplifies divisive and harmful content, for example on gender-based violence, heightening risks for excluded communities. Blanket bans do not create safer spaces, nor eliminate these harms. Instead, they displace them to less visible, less regulated and even less accountable spaces. Effective protection must ensure children can exercise their rights and have safe spaces of support and community.

How does age verification work, and what does it mean for children’s privacy?

Tech companies routinely invest heavily in targeting advertising and personalising content yet fail to apply the same rigour to protecting children. Age assurance, an umbrella term for both age estimation and age verification solutions, allows companies to recognise the presence of children and act accordingly. It must be lawful, rights-respecting and proportionate to risk. Data collection should be limited to what’s strictly necessary to establish age, and used only for that purpose.

Global privacy regulators found that 24 per cent of services lack any age assurance mechanism and 90 per cent of those relying on self-declaration are easily bypassed. Yet robust solutions exist. Australia’s age assurance technology trial demonstrates that privacy-preserving age verification can confirm age without exposing identity. Technical standards, such as the 2089.1-2024 Standard for Online Age Verification published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, show that independently audited frameworks, like those used in product safety or pharmaceuticals, are both feasible and necessary to ensure age assurance systems are secure, proportionate and compliant.

For low-risk services appropriate for all users, there should be no requirement to establish age. Where services or functionalities present risk to children, companies should address or mitigate specific high-risk features rather than gatekeeping entire services.

What should governments demand from platforms to protect children?

Age restrictions have become part of a global playbook, notably in data protection regimes like the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which sets 13 as the threshold for consent to data collection. Poor implementation and enforcement of COPPA and similar laws have allowed tech companies to hide behind obscure disclaimers while failing to meaningfully restrict access and profiting from embedding risk into children’s digital experiences.

There’s another way forward. The priority should be holding tech companies accountable, not banning children from the digital world. That means banning exploitative practices, regulating risky features such as addictive design, manipulative recommender systems and extractive data practices, and requiring privacy, safety and age-appropriate design as the baseline.

It also means shifting to systemic risk management: companies should be legally required to anticipate, assess and mitigate how their products expose children to risk. This baseline already exists in other high-risk sectors such as aviation, food safety and medicine, where products must demonstrate safety before reaching the market.

A growing global consensus points to a clear path forward: embedding age-appropriate design, requiring child rights impact assessments, mandating privacy and safety by design and default, establishing effective enforcement mechanisms and ensuring independent auditing. Over 55 leading organisations and experts from all continents have endorsed the 10 best-practice principles developed by the 5Rights Foundation.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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Child social media bans: a growing global problem CIVICUS Lens 05.May.2026
Technology: Innovation without accountability CIVICUS | State Of Civil Society Report 2026
North Macedonia: ‘The solution cannot be to cut children off social media, but to make it safer’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Goran Rizaov 23.Apr.2026

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Jabiru Muhammed stands beside a tree planted as part of the Great Green Wall project in his village in Jigawa State. Credit: Promise Eze/IPS

By Promise Eze
GARABADU VILLAGE, Nigeria, May 12 2026 (IPS)

In 2021, Gadeja Shehu and about a hundred farmers in Garbadu village, Zamfara State in northwestern Nigeria, were invited by officials of the National Agency for the Great Green Wall to plant trees across a large stretch of land in their community.

Shehu remembers how fierce, dust-laden winds from the Sahara Desert often tore off the roof of his home and damaged his farmland. For him, taking part in the tree-planting exercise was a way to confront this challenge, especially after seeing the impact of similar interventions in other northern states such as Kaduna, Bauchi, and Jigawa, where desertification has degraded once fertile land.

The Sahara is advancing relentlessly across the Sahel, expanding by nearly 10 per cent since the 1920s. In Nigeria, around 35,000 hectares of land are lost each year as the desert continues to encroach southwards.

Trees planted in Garbadu village, Zamfura State. Credit: Promise Eze/IPS

Desertification is causing land degradation in the Sahel. Credit: Promise Eze/IPS

In Garbadu, a community of roughly 6,000 people who rely on farming, many had abandoned their fields, resulting in falling incomes and growing food shortages. However, the tree-planting initiative is beginning to reverse this trend. It is part of the Great Green Wall Initiative, an ambitious plan to create an 8,000-kilometre-long and 15-kilometre-wide belt of vegetation across Africa.

Launched by the African Union in 2007, the initiative spans 11 countries in the Sahel, including Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti. It aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, generate 10 million jobs, and capture 250 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030.

Nigeria’s section stretches roughly 1,500 kilometres, focusing on a 15-kilometre-wide belt of drought-resistant trees across vulnerable northern states.

Initially conceived as a plant barrier, the initiative has since expanded its goals. It now focuses on restoring degraded lands, halting desert expansion, improving soil and water conservation, supporting agriculture and livestock, creating green jobs, and helping communities adapt to climate change.

“The project has been really impactful here. Previously strong winds would rip off our roofs, but now it is no longer frequent. Before the plantation, the soil of the areas where the trees are now barely held water, but now it does have moisture and I’m happy the area is slowly turning green again,” said Shehu, who added that he continues to care for the trees.

Senegalese villagers working in a tree nursery forming part of the Great Green Wall. Photo: FAO/Benedicte Kurzen/NOOR

Family of Funds

The Great Green Wall has attracted significant funding over the years. The Global Environment Facility (GEF), a key partner, has provided more than $1 billion in grants. These funds have helped leverage an additional $6 billion from governments, development partners, and multilateral institutions. The investments have strengthened landscapes, improved livelihoods, reduced poverty, and enhanced food and water security.

Jonky Tenou, Africa Regional Coordinator at the GEF, said the GEF has supported the Great Green Wall Initiative through strategic, programmatic investments over successive replenishment cycles, leveraging its family of funds to build momentum and coherence.

These efforts include the GEF 4 Strategic Investment Program for Sustainable Land Management in Sub-Saharan Africa (SIP), the GEF 5 Sahel and West Africa Program (SAWAP), the GEF 6 Integrated Approach Pilot on Food Security (IAP Food Security), the GEF 7 Food, Land-Use and Restoration Impact Program (FOLUR), and, under GEF 8, the Transformational Approach to Large-Scale Investment in Support of the Implementation of the Great Green Wall Initiative (TALSISI GGWI).

Tela Jubrin, a farmer, planted trees for the Great Green Wall in Jigawa State, Nigeria. Credit: Promise Eze/IPS

Shafi’u Ladan, one of the farmers who participated in the tree planting project in Garbadu, Zamfara state. Credit: Promise Eze/IPS

Sustainable Impact

The TALSISI GGWI, Tenou explained, is designed as a truly programmatic, multi-country platform that builds on lessons learned over the past decade.

“Compared to earlier approaches, TALSISI places stronger emphasis on regional coordination, deeper integration across GEF focal areas, and a clear focus on scalability, learning, and adaptive management. Crucially, the programme also gives greater attention to the institutional, financial, and security constraints that have previously limited effectiveness, helping to create the conditions needed for sustained and transformative impact at scale,” he said.

Observers have noted that the Great Green Wall Initiative has often been criticised for being highly ambitious but slow in delivery — a concern acknowledged by the GEF and its partners. They stress, however, that the programme is not designed as a quick fix, but rather as a long-term intervention aimed at delivering sustained impact over time.

“Progress on the Great Green Wall is assessed through a transformational, system-level lens rather than through isolated output metrics. In Nigeria and across the Sahel, GEF investments have contributed to advancing land degradation neutrality objectives by strengthening sustainable land management practices, restoring ecosystem functionality, and improving livelihoods in highly vulnerable areas,” said Tenou.

Emmanuel Diagbouga, a natural resources planning and management expert based in Burkina Faso, said the effectiveness of the Great Green Wall Initiative depends on a clear and operational multi-level governance framework that connects regional coordination, national planning, and community-level implementation.

Community Ownership Drives Tree Protection

Murtala Bado, the village head of Garbadu, said one sign of the Great Green Wall Initiative’s progress is the behavioural change among community members in a region where deforestation is a serious problem.

He told IPS that people are now aware of the benefits of trees and no longer cut them in the Great Green Wall Initiative project sites. Defaulters who are caught are reported to village leaders and security agencies for disciplinary measures.

“The project has even provided employment opportunities for people here. Farmers who are part of it receive allowances from the government. This project cannot work if there are no people to take care of it. And for people to actually show up and take interest means that it is going to be sustainable in the long term,” he said.

Rising Above the Challenges

The Great Green Wall Initiative has achieved only 30 per cent of its planned execution in participating countries. In Nigeria, progress is higher, at about 50 per cent, but insecurity has slowed the project and remains one of its greatest challenges.

Insurgency in northern states such as Zamfara, Katsina, and Borno, where the project is implemented, has been a major obstacle. For decades, insurgents have imposed taxes, killed villagers, and kidnapped for ransom, targeting anything linked to the state, including environmental projects.

“Insecurity has emerged as one of the most critical risks to the long-term sustainability of the Great Green Wall, particularly in countries such as Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. Direct operational constraints include armed conflict and the presence of non-state armed groups, which restrict access to restoration sites, force the suspension of field activities, and expose environmental staff and local partners to security threats. Several restored areas have been abandoned due to population displacement and the lack of institutional presence,” said Diagbouga, and the impact is that the budget is diverted toward defence spending.

Tenou said that despite the challenges, the GEF and its partners have responded by adopting flexible and adaptive implementation approaches, including working through local institutions, adjusting geographic focus when necessary, and integrating conflict-sensitive design.

“These approaches help sustain progress while safeguarding communities and ensure that investments remain aligned with GEF’s broader objectives on durability, inclusion, and risk-informed programming,” he said.

Addressing the Funding Gap

Another major challenge facing the initiative is financing. In 2021, $19 billion was pledged at the One Planet Summit to support the Great Green Wall. However, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification estimates that at least $33 billion is needed to meet its targets, leaving a significant funding gap. Experts say that even where funds exist, their impact has yet to be fully felt.

“The Great Green Wall project has been observed to be hindered by a massive gap between pledged and disbursed funds, with only a fraction of promised international funding, often less than 10% in some areas, reaching local implementers. It has also been observed that severe bureaucratic delays, lack of local capacity to manage funds, and high regional insecurity are some of the reasons stalling progress,” said Yusuf Maina-Bukar, a former Director-General/Chief Executive Officer of the National Agency for the Great Green Wall, which has been implementing the initiative in Nigeria since 2015.

The GEF acknowledged that coordination across diverse national contexts remains a central challenge of the Great Green Wall initiative but noted that this is addressed through regional frameworks, shared results architectures, and close collaboration with regional institutions such as the Pan-African Agency of the Great Green Wall, while maintaining flexibility to accommodate country-specific priorities.

Maina-Bukar told IPS that collaborating effectively to ensure that funding for the initiative translates into lasting impact requires shifting from a top-down, tree-planting approach to a community-driven, integrated landscape management model. This, he said, should be supported by harmonised, multi-level funding, such as that promoted by the UNCCD, which allows partners to measure, report, and verify implementation using a common framework.

He added that other measures include empowering local ownership, establishing transparent monitoring systems, fostering public-private partnerships, and using tools such as the Regreening Africa App to track and evaluate restoration efforts on the ground.

Despite the challenges, Diagbouga believes that “the Great Green Wall has the potential to become one of the most impactful climate resilience and land restoration initiatives globally.”

Great Green Wall: Achievements

Graphic: Wilson Mgobhozi/IPS

Burkina Faso

Graphic: Wilson Mgobhozi/IPS

Ethiopia

Graphic: Wilson Mgobhozi/IPS

Nigeria

Graphic: Wilson Mgobhozi/IPS

Niger

Graphic: Wilson Mgobhozi/IPS

Senegal

Graphic: Wilson Mgobhozi/IPS

Mali

Graphic: Wilson Mgobhozi/IPS

Chad

Graphic: Wilson Mgobhozi/IPS

Sudan

Credit: Wilson Mgobhozi/IPS

Mauritania

Graphic: Wilson Mgobhozi/IPS

Eritrea

Graphic: Wilson Mgobhozi/IPS

Djibouti

Graphic: Wilson Mgobhozi/IPS

Note: The Eighth Global Environment Facility Assembly will be held from May 30 to June 6, 2026, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

This feature is published with the support of the GEF. IPS is solely responsible for the editorial content, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of the GEF.

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