A Community Health Worker in a door-to-door campaign to vaccinate people in communities in Nanyamba village, Mtwara Region, in southeastern Tanzania. Credit: Kizito Makoye/IPS

By Kizito Makoye
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania, Oct 28 2025 (IPS)

When COVID-19 hit Tanzania in 2020, Alfred Kisena’s life was torn apart. The 51-year-old teacher still remembers the night he learned that his wife, Maria, had succumbed to the virus at a hospital in Dar es Salaam. He wasn’t allowed to see her in her final moments.

“The doctors said it was too dangerous, and the virus was contagious,” Kisena said, gazing at a faded photo of her hanging on the wall.

Maria’s burial took place in eerie isolation. Municipal workers dressed in white protective gear lowered her body into a tomb at Ununio Cemetery on the city’s outskirts.

“Saying goodbye to a loved one is sacred, but I didn’t get a chance,” he said.

Across Tanzania, many families endured the same pain—losing loved ones and being denied the rituals that give meaning to loss. The government imposed strict measures: banning gatherings, restricting hospital visits, and prohibiting traditional burial rites. Schools shut down, and for three months, Kisena’s five children stayed home, their education abruptly halted.

“I was not working, so it was hard to meet the needs of my family,” he said. “We survived on the little savings I had.”

Five years later, as the scars of that crisis linger, Tanzania is charting a new path toward resilience. Earlier this month, the government launched its first-ever Pandemic Fund Project, aimed at strengthening the country’s capacity to prevent and respond to health crises.

Supported by a USD25 million grant from the global Pandemic Fund and USD13.7 million in co-financing, the initiative marks a shift from reactive crisis management to proactive preparedness. It unites local and international partners—including WHO, UNICEF, and FAO—under a “One Health” framework that recognizes the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health.

Learning from the Past

The memories of COVID-19 and the more recent Marburg outbreak remain vivid. When the pandemic first struck, Tanzania’s laboratories were under-equipped, surveillance systems were weak, and community health workers were overwhelmed.

Tanzania’s Deputy Prime Minister, Doto Biteko, said during the launch that the lessons from those crises shaped the country’s new determination.

“For the past 20 years, the world has battled multiple health emergencies, and Tanzania is no exception,” he said. “We have seen how pandemics disrupt lives and economies. Strengthening our capacity to prepare and respond is not optional—it is a necessity.”

That necessity has only grown as Tanzania faces rising risks of zoonotic diseases linked to deforestation, wildlife trade, and climate change. The new project aims to address these vulnerabilities by upgrading laboratories, expanding disease surveillance, and training health workers across the country.

The Human Frontlines

In southern Kisarawe District, 38-year-old community health worker Ana Msechu walks along dusty roads with a backpack containing medicine, gloves, and health records.

“Sometimes I walk for three hours just to reach one family,” Msechu said. “During the pandemic, people stopped trusting us. They thought we were bringing the disease.”

With no protective gear or transport allowance, Msechu faced villagers’ suspicion head-on. At the height of the pandemic, she lost a colleague to the virus. Yet she continued, delivering messages about hygiene and vaccination.

“Sometimes we didn’t even have masks—we used pieces of cloth instead,” she recalled.

The new initiative, she believes, could change that. Implementing partners plan to supply personal protective equipment (PPE), digital tools for data collection, and regular training sessions.

“If we get proper support and respect, we can save many lives before diseases spread,” she said.

“Community health workers are the backbone of resilience,” said Patricia Safi Lombo, UNICEF’s Deputy Representative to Tanzania. “They are the first point of contact for families and play a critical role in delivering life-saving information and services.”

UNICEF’s role will focus on risk communication and community engagement—ensuring that people in rural and urban areas understand preventive measures, recognize early symptoms, and trust the health system.

Between Fear and Duty

Hamisi Mjema, a health volunteer in Kilosa District, remembers how fear became his biggest enemy.

When the Marburg virus hit last year, his job was to trace suspected cases and educate families about isolation.

“I was insulted many times, and some families wouldn’t even let me into their homes,” he said.

Without transport or communication tools, Hamisi walked from one remote village to another with his bicycle, often relying on farmers to share their phone airtime so he could report cases to district health officials.

Under the new initiative, local health officers say community health workers will receive field kits, digital disease-reporting tools, and risk communication materials in local languages.

“It will make our work safer and faster,” he said. “When we detect something early, the whole country benefits.”

Fighting Misinformation

In a lakeside village in Kigoma, volunteer health educator Fatuma Mfaume recalls how rumors once spread faster than the virus itself.

“People were afraid,” she said. “They said vaccines would make women barren. Others believed doctors were poisoning us.”

Armed with a megaphone, Mfaume moved through villages trying to dispel falsehoods—often facing insults. But her persistence paid off. Slowly, women began bringing their children for immunization again.

With the new project, she hopes community workers like her will gain formal recognition and training in communication skills.

“Many of us work without pay,” Mfaume said. “If this project can train us properly and give us materials, we can fight not just disease but fear and lies too.”

Animal-Borne Threats

At the same time, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is strengthening animal health systems, recognizing that most pandemics originate from animals.

“By improving coordination between veterinary and public health services, Tanzania is taking vital steps to prevent zoonotic diseases before they spill over to humans,” said Stella Kiambi, FAO’s Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases Team Lead.

These measures include upgrading veterinary laboratories, improving disease surveillance in livestock markets, and training field officers to detect early signs of outbreaks.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is also supporting efforts to strengthen human health systems—from expanding testing capacity to developing rapid response teams.

“This project marks a bold step forward in health security,” said Dr. Galbert Fedjo, WHO Health Systems Coordinator. “It advances a One Health approach that links human, animal, and environmental health.”

Rebuilding Trust and Hope

For Priya Basu, Executive Head of the Pandemic Fund, Tanzania’s project represents “an important step in strengthening the country’s preparedness to prevent and respond to future health threats.”

Across Africa, the Fund—established in 2022—has supported 47 projects in 75 countries with USD 885 million in grants, catalyzing more than USD 6 billion in additional financing.

According to the World Bank, every USD 1 invested in pandemic preparedness can save up to USD 20 in economic losses during an outbreak.

For Tanzania—a nation that lost thousands of lives and suffered deep economic shocks during COVID-19—the stakes couldn’t be higher.

“Preparedness is about saving lives and livelihoods,” said Dr. Ali Mzige, a public health expert. “It’s about making sure families don’t suffer when a pandemic strikes.”

For Kisena, the government’s new initiative is a quiet promise that the lessons of loss have not been forgotten.

“Maria’s death taught me how precious life is,” he said. “If this project can protect even one family from that kind of pain, then it will mean her death was not in vain.

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Children at the San José Obrero School use the primary school's computer lab. At their homes in the municipality of Peñalolén, to the east of Santiago de Chile, many do not have computers because 90 percent of them come from poor families. CREDIT: Courtesy of San José Obrero

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Jul 1 2022 (IPS)

A Chilean government plan seeks to ensure connectivity in remote areas, in a first step to address a deep digital divide among the country’s inhabitants that includes a lack of access to technology and digital education deficits, exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2020, during the social isolation at the height of the pandemic, 76 percent of children in higher income segments had their own computer, laptop or tablet and 23 percent had access to a shared one.

But in the lowest income segments, only 45 percent of children had their own computer or laptop, while 16 percent had none. The rest managed to get access to a shared computer or tablet.

There are also notable differences according to the type and location of schools.

One school that illustrates the gap

“People here don’t have computers, although it may seem strange,” said Cecilia Pérez, principal of the San José Obrero School in Peñalolén. “Computers are just a dream for many. Nor do they have their own connection, or wi-fi. They have cell phones with prepaid minutes or very cheap plans that do not give them a good enough connection to support a lesson.”

In a conversation with IPS at the school, she said “this is a disadvantage that has nothing to do with the children’s desire to study, their intelligence, or their worried families. It is something external that is difficult to solve.”

To illustrate, Pérez said that “if homework is posted on the platform, it is very hard for children to read it and do it from their cell phones.”

Her school is in a poor neighborhood located at the end of Las Parcelas Avenue, in the Andes foothills of Santiago, the capital. Most of the first to eighth grade students come to school on foot.

At the San José Obrero School in the municipality of Peñalolén, in the foothills surrounding the Chilean capital, 90 percent of the students come from poor families, with parents who work as street vendors, cleaners or similar trades. Parental support for homework is almost non-existent, says the principal of the primary school, Cecilia Pérez. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

This public primary school in the municipality of Peñalolén, which serves 427 students, is an example of the connectivity problems faced by students in the most deprived urban and rural areas.

In this South American country of 19 million people, there are 3.6 million primary and secondary students. Two million students are enrolled in the first to eighth grades (six to 13 years of age) and the rest are in secondary school (13 to 17 years of age).

Of the total number of students, 53 percent study in state-subsidized private schools, 40 percent in municipal schools and seven percent in private schools.

“We have third grade students today who started first grade in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when they had to learn to read and write. These children had only gone to kindergarten and are now coming to class in the third grade with a very significant delay,” she said, referring to the effects of distance learning during the pandemic.

Because of this, Pérez said, “we had to set priorities in the curriculum and reinforce language and math which are super important to continue learning.”

She added that another serious problem is that many of their students experience situations of domestic violence. “Their emotional and social support is the school, and when they couldn’t be with their classmates, they lost two years of socializing,” she said.

“We have children between the fifth and eighth grades who have experienced a lot of violence, a lot of individualism, a lot of sexualization that never happened before. Partly because there is no parental control over cell phones at home,” she said.

An additional problem is connectivity because in Peñalolén “there are many hills and in some parts the internet does not work. There are families who returned the ‘router’ (a device that receives and sends data on computer networks) that we lent them because the signal does not reach their homes.”

Older children at the San José Obrero School in the municipality of Peñalolén, near Santiago de Chile, stay two hours longer at the school, doing sports and other activities as part of their education. In this way they avoid excessive leisure time and a lack of supervision at home, which can be dangerous for them. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Tackling inequality

The deep digital divide among Chileans is aggravated by the difficulties in accessing the internet in isolated villages, rural localities and also in poor urban neighborhoods where telecommunication companies do not provide service or where criminals steal the cables.

“Inequality in our country is also manifested in internet access,” said leftist President Gabriel Boric, in office since March. “Thousands of students were unable to exercise their right to education during the pandemic due to a lack of connectivity.”

To address this situation, he said in a recent communiqué, “our Zero Digital Divide Plan will ensure, by 2025, that all the country’s inhabitants have access to connectivity.”

“This requires a sustained effort to continue with current initiatives such as the Internet as a Basic Service Bill and the generation of new projects that will allow us to reach isolated and rural areas,” he said.

As an example, Boric mentioned the town of Porvenir, which a month ago became the southernmost part of this long narrow South American country with access to the 5G network.

The 36-year-old president won the elections in the wake of the huge 2019 protests, in which one of the demands was to end the social inequality gap, one of the largest in the world according to international organizations, and where more equitable access to education was one of the main points.

Paulina Romero, a first-year chemistry and pharmacy university student, became a symbol of the digital divide that Boric seeks to eliminate, when two years ago images of her climbing onto the roof of her house in the small community of San Ramón, in the southern region of La Araucanía, in a dangerous attempt to find a signal to be able to do her assigned homework, went viral.

A colorful mural decorates the staircase leading to the second story of classrooms at the primary school in Peñalolén, located in the snowy Andes foothills seen here in the background in the middle of Chile’s southern hemisphere winter. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Plans to close the gap

Claudio Araya, undersecretary of telecommunications, told IPS that all efforts are focused on improving connectivity.

“A bill was approved in Congress a month ago that guarantees internet access for students,” he said. He pointed out that in part this access already exists but it is not operational for schoolchildren, because “many students in areas with coverage had problems with distance learning because their families could not afford cell phone plans.”

Araya added that a project is being implemented to ensure that all public schools, whether run by municipalities or the State, as well as subsidized private schools, have coverage for remote areas and connection speed.

“One part of the project is being completed now, by August, for 8,300 schools, a second part with 500 more by March 2023, and a third with a call for bids before 2023, which will cover just over a thousand schools,” he explained.

His office has also allocated resources for a new project, called “last mile”, which seeks to bring connectivity to isolated or rural areas. “We have already invested some 200 million dollars and we are contemplating an additional 150 million dollars to provide service coverage to the communities,” he said.

There are 40 computers available at the San José Obrero School for the children to search for information and complete their learning in various subjects under the supervision of the teacher in charge. But there is no possibility of laptops that they can take to their homes, where most of them have no computers. CREDIT: Courtesy of the San José Obrero School

Another school stumbling over connectivity issues

Connectivity is the main problem for the 73 students at the school in the small town of Samo Alto, in the Andes foothills area of the municipality of Rio Hurtado, 440 kilometers north of Santiago.

“We are educating 21st century children with 20th century resources and technology,” Omar Santander, principal of the primary school, told IPS by telephone.

“The connection to the global world does not exist. You turn on a computer, log on to the network and all the other computers disconnect. It is impossible to work online. We have computers and tablets, but there they are, and they can only be used with resources and programs downloaded ad hoc,” he said.

The students cannot communicate and “these are gaps that keep us from providing greater opportunities,” he said.

“The lack of computers is the smaller problem. We have achieved internet efficiency and we have the equipment. The big problem is connectivity,” Santander stressed, adding that an antenna they made to capture the signal was not enough.

He said that “last year when we held hybrid classes, half at home and half at school, one day we tried to connect and it was a terrible disappointment.

“There is a wealth of information, of pedagogical resources available to students that unfortunately we don’t have access to,” Santander complained.

The principal explained that “everything that has to do with access to resources that enrich reading, writing, calculus and mathematics is there and we cannot make use of it.”

From the San José Obrero School, Santiago de Chile can be seen in the background, under a cloudy sunset after a recent rain on the first day of the southern hemisphere winter in Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

More than internet access

Luciano Ahumada, head of the School of Informatics and Telecommunications at the Diego Portales University, said that “reducing the digital divide goes far beyond having an internet plan.”

“It also involves promoting the use and daily impact of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to maximize people’s well-being. It is a much more complex and time-consuming challenge than access,” he told IPS.

In his view, “we must work on access, but also on economic, ethnic and gender barriers and establish a framework concept of cybersecurity or basic concepts in the population to live in a healthy way in this new world.

“There is an economic gap, an age gap, an ethnic gap, which in different countries has become very evident,” he said.

Ahumada said that “access is just the starting-point. It is a good initiative, necessary to massify internet access, but we must think about massification of high-speed connections because with networks of the past we cannot carry out actions of the future and establish the basis for an information society.”

Preschool students stand in a section of the garden at the El Zaite Children's Center, where teacher Sandra Peña teaches them the importance of healthy eating and the advantages of having a vegetable garden, in El Zaite, a poor neighborhood near Zaragoza, in the southern Salvadoran department of La Libertad. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
ZARAGOZA, El Salvador , Apr 11 2022 (IPS)

A group of preschool students enthusiastically planted cucumbers and other vegetables in their small school garden in southern El Salvador, a sign that school feeding programs are being revived as the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although the impacts of coronavirus are still being felt, schools in Latin America, particularly in Central America, have reopened their doors to on-site and blended learning classes.

Gradually, important components of school meal programs, such as vegetable gardens, have begun to come back to life.

“Does anyone know what plant this is?” teacher Sandra Peña, 36, asked the small group of children who had followed her, in line, to the small vegetable garden at the El Zaite Children’s Center, located on the outskirts of Zaragoza, a city in the department of La Libertad in southern El Salvador.

The children responded loudly: “tomato!”, while pointing to a tomato bush, which was already showing some yellow flowers.

With difficulties, because coronavirus hasn’t gone away, schools in Central America are making efforts to continue the school feeding programs, which were making good progress before the pandemic.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), these programs benefit 85 million students in Latin America and the Caribbean. Moreover, for nearly 10 million children, they are one of the main reliable sources of food received each day.

“Students are returning to classes, in a context that is not yet back to normal, but they are gradually returning,” Najla Veloso, an expert with the Brazil-FAO International Cooperation Program, told IPS from Brasilia.

As a result of this cooperation, at the beginning of the pandemic, in 2020, several Latin American and Caribbean countries carried out joint actions to keep school feeding programs active, as part of the Sustainable School Feeding Network (Raes).

These nations were Belize, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Peru, Paraguay, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Raes was created by the Brazilian government in 2018, as part of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016-2025), in order to support countries in the region in the implementation and reformulation of school feeding programs, based on access and guaranteeing the right to an adequate diet.

Teachers Marta Mendoza (l) and Sandra Peña pose with their students at the El Zaite Children’s Center, located in a community that is struggling to get ahead in a context of poverty and violence, like many villages and towns in El Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The challenges continue

When the pandemic hit and schools were closed, activity in school gardens and the kitchens where food was prepared ground to a halt. That meant strategies had to be devised to make sure the students had food – not in the schools, but in the homes of families who were under lockdown to curb the spread of the virus.

The stopgap solution was to take non-perishable food to the students’ homes, because meals were not being cooked in the schools.

The FAO expert pointed out that Guatemala and El Salvador did a good job in this regard and, in general, all the Central American countries made an effort to keep their students fed.

“Some countries had to change their laws, because food could only legally be given to students, and with the schools closed they could no longer deliver it to them, and they had to give it to fathers, mothers and the families,” Veloso explained.

The logistics of an already complex program had to be expanded greatly, with components such as local purchases, which involved coordinating the purchase of legumes, grains, vegetables, fruits and other products that were part of the school menus from local farmers.

In some cases, seed kits and farming tools were also provided so that families could plant vegetables in their home gardens, since the school gardens were no longer functioning.

Now that in most of the seven Central American countries schools are open again with a mixture of online and face-to-face learning, food is no longer taken to students’ homes, but rather parents come to the schools to pick up the products.

In the case of El Salvador, the Ministry of Education has invested, for the school year that began in January and ends in November, more than 10 million dollars for the food program to serve more than one million students nationwide, in 5128 public schools.

In this Central American nation of 6.7 million people, two food baskets have begun to be delivered, one containing a 1.1 kilogram bag of corn cereal for breakfast and seven liters of UHT liquid milk, while the other contains rice, beans, sugar, oil, powdered milk and a vitamin-fortified drink.

When IPS visited, parents and teachers at the school in the canton of San Isidro, in the municipality of Izalco in the western department of Sonsonate, were in the process of quarterly delivery of the baskets of items, which for now is replacing the serving of meals at public schools.

The photo shows sprouts planted by students at the El Zaite Children’s Center, in the south of El Salvador, in the school garden that will soon produce vegetables for their school meals again – part of the effort to keep the garden and healthy eating alive, now that schoolchildren are beginning to return to school as the COVID pandemic dies down. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

“We have had to manage to get by during the pandemic, and now we are gradually getting the vegetable garden going again, for example,” said Manuel Guerrero, the school principal.

The school in San Isidro, which has been semi-open since 2021, serves 1,500 elementary and middle school students.

“Teachers are already working with the students in the gardens to make up for lost time,” added the 57-year-old principal.

Before the pandemic, they grew tomatoes, green peppers, yucca, cabbage and a local plant known as chipilín (Crotalaria longirostrata), whose leaves are added to soups for their high vitamin content.

“From our experience, and because I have visited many schools, I would say that the idea of school gardens has been well assimilated from the beginning, and that is why we must work hard to maintain it,” Guerrero added.

A state-of-the-art preschool

At the El Zaite Children’s Center, activities in the kitchen are back in full swing, although not as they were prior to the pandemic, when the cook, Dinora Gómez, took great care to ensure that the menus were to the children’s liking.

Somewhat nostalgically she reminisced to IPS about those days when she toiled away over pots and pans.

“For example, for lunch, I would make them a vegetable mince, with soy meat, tomato sauce and rice,” said Gómez, 50. Other times it was lentil soups and other vegetables.

For breakfast, “I would make scrambled eggs, fried beans and plantains,” she added.

Non-perishable food packages donated by Convoy of Hope, an evangelical organization, are also distributed to the students’ families.

Marta Mendoza and Sandra Peña are part of the teaching team at the El Zaite Children’s Center in southern El Salvador, where they are striving to return to the pre-pandemic standards of education and nutrition. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Now, although the kitchen is still formally closed, Gómez is preparing something to eat for a small group of students whose parents are unable to provide them with a mid-morning snack.

She also occasionally makes a salad from the vegetables grown in the garden.

This small school in El Zaite, which opened in 1984, serves 110 students ages four to six, and has six teachers.

The school is located in a low-income semi-rural community populated by people who settled here in the 1980s, fleeing bombings and military operations during the Salvadoran civil war (1980-1992). It is now home to 563 families.

“We are on land that used to be the pastures for the cattle of the wealthy people of Zaragoza,” Carlos Díaz, director of Patronato Lidia Coggiola, the NGO carrying out community support initiatives in this area, including the school, told IPS.

The school is a community project that falls outside the network of the Ministry of Education, which follows its curriculum as required but puts an added emphasis on topics such as the right to water or taking care of the environment.

In 1999, as part of the Patronato’s activities, a scholarship and distance sponsorship program was launched with support from donors from Italy, France and the United States, to benefit young people from the community who wished to continue their high school and university studies.

One of the beneficiaries of the initiative was Marta Mendoza, who attended preschool at the center, graduated from university and now returned to the center as a teacher.

“We formed the groups, and we are working on reading,” Mendoza told IPS. “The children came out of the lockdown with very energetic behavior.

“Little by little we are getting back to the dynamics we had in the classroom prior to the pandemic,” she said.

Alice Atieno relies on sack farming outside her shanty in the sprawling Kibera Slums in Nairobi, Kenya. COVID-19 reversed gains made in poverty reduction, and the unequal access to vaccines has deepened global inequality. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Mar 29 2022 (IPS)

Even as COVID-19 brought Africa’s already fragile health care and economic systems to the brink, wealthy states colluded with corporate giants to dupe people with empty slogans and false promises of a fair recovery from the ongoing health pandemic, a newly released report by Amnesty International report finds.

The global human rights organization says at the heart of the report are revelations of how “global leaders peddled false promises of a fair recovery from COVID-19 to address deep-seated inequalities, despite only 8 % of Africa’s 1.2 billion people being fully vaccinated by the end of 2021.”

Amnesty International Report 2021/22: The State of the World’s Human Rights finds that wealthy nations, alongside corporate titans, have driven deeper global inequality. As a result, African countries are worse off and left struggling to recover from the pandemic against a backdrop of significant levels of inequality.

Grace Gakii, a Nairobi-based gender and development expert, says fall-out from COVID-19 includes “poverty and unemployment, severe food insecurities, increased sexual and gender-based violence as well as a strained and struggling health system.”

According to the World Bank, as early as August 2020, COVID-19 induced economic downturn had already pushed an estimated 88 to 115 million people in the world’s most vulnerable communities into extreme poverty. For the first time in a generation, gains made in global poverty reduction were reversed. For instance, an UN-backed report indicated that extreme poverty in West Africa rose by almost 3 % in 2020 due to COVID-19.

World Bank’s Kenya Economic Update showed that the East African nation gained an additional two million ‘new poor’ as of November 2020 due to the ongoing health pandemic. Many like Alice Atieno in the sprawling informal settlements practice sack farming outside their shanties to put food on the table.

According to Amnesty International, many countries in Africa and the Sub-Saharan Africa region face multiple socio-economic challenges because of the unequal distribution of vaccines in the year 2021.

“COVID-19 should have been a decisive wake-up call to deal with inequality and poverty. Instead, we have seen deeper inequality and greater instability in Africa exacerbated by global powers, especially rich countries who failed to ensure that big pharma distributed vaccines equally between states to ensure the same levels of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s director for East and Southern Africa.

“As things stand now, most African countries will take longer to recover from COVID-19 due to high levels of inequality and poverty. The after-effects of COVID-19 have been most damaging to the most marginalized communities, including those on the frontlines of the endemic poverty from Angola to Zambia, Ethiopia to Somalia, and the Central Africa Republic to Sierra Leone.”

Dr Githinji Gitahi, a medical doctor, currently serving as the Global CEO of Amref Health Africa, tells IPS Africa was first let down when it desperately wanted COVID-19 vaccines. But they were hoarded despite high demand and urgency.

He tells IPS the trajectory has changed because the COVID-19 vaccine supply has significantly improved after rich countries satisfied their need and greed. With this sudden increment, more than 50% of doses in the continent were supplied from November 2021. However, other cracks have appeared and will continue to widen if urgent responsive measures are not taken.

“Africa has major inequalities with regard to COVID-19 vaccine distribution and delivery between urban and rural areas and between rich and poor communities. Whereas the urban centers may have reached up to 50 percent COVID-19 vaccination coverage rate, some rural areas are at below 10 percent absorption rate even in Kenya,” he observes.

He explains that vaccine distribution inequalities exist between countries and within countries because initially, countries in Africa, including Low-Income Countries, were required to buy their vaccines.

This was before COVAX – the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access, which is co-led by GAVI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and the World Health Organization – was able to supply vaccine doses for Low-Income Countries as earlier planned.

“African countries in a position to buy were able to access these vaccines ahead of others. Kenya, for example, bought COVID-19 vaccines with a loan from World Bank. Other African countries could not afford it.”

Gitahi further speaks about the different capacities that countries have to deliver these vaccines once they arrive in African countries, as countries have better health system infrastructures than others.

“Health systems capacities in terms of clinical health workers and the vaccine cold chain that ensures proper storage and distribution of vaccines in a country such as Morocco is not the same as those in South Sudan or even Chad. This creates inequality because of a lack of capacity to deliver the vaccines to the people and more so, in far-flung areas in a manner convenient to them,” he cautions.

“Today, they are sending vaccines in Africa, and it is almost as if they are being dumped, and some of them are short expiry vaccines forcing countries to hold back shipments and demand all arriving vaccines must have at least three months of shelf life. The supply is high, but distribution and convenient delivery are low in communities doing informal work and facilities that open only on weekdays when people are at work.”

Just because a country can and has received millions of doses of vaccines does not mean that people are receiving these vaccines in a manner that fits their daily lives. He says millions of doses arrive three months or six weeks before the expiry date.

Africa, he stresses, needs an ongoing increased supply of vaccines to match delivery capacities so that vaccines are available and easily accessible to all who need them on time – further emphasizing the need to match shipments to absorption to avoid wastage while at the same time working to improve delivery capacity.

In the absence of increased delivery and distribution capacities in African countries, health experts such as Gitahi are raising alarm that Africa will remain ill-equipped to overcome and recover from existing COVID-19 induced challenges and that socio-economic inequality will only widen.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Climate change is reversing some of Africa's gains in achieving Sustainable Development Goals in food security and poverty alleviation and the continent needed to build resilience against future shocks. Credit: Busani Bafana/ IPS

By Busani Bafana
KIGALI, Rwanda, Mar 28 2022 (IPS)

The COVID-19 pandemic reversed several development gains on the continent, and Africa’s leaders are convinced stronger cooperation in boosting investment in green growth will help Africa meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

African economies took a hit during the pandemic, which governments say has led to reverse progress made in health care, education, poverty alleviation, food security, and industrialisation as part of delivering on the SDGs adopted by the UN in September 2015.

The 8th Session of the African Regional Forum on Sustainable Development (ARFSD) – an annual multi-stakeholder platform system to review and catalyse actions to achieve the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, heard how Africa is on the cusp of opportunity in building better through green investment.

But the opportunity will only be unlocked when African countries cooperate more and deepen political and economic relations.

A springboard and not a setback
“Building the Africa we want is up to us,” said Rwanda President Paul Kagame, who opened the Forum convened in the capital, Kigali. He urged Africa to prioritise domestic resource mobilisation to finance its development, particularly its national health care systems.

“Over the years, Africa had made significant progress in tackling economic challenges. However, COVID 19 has slowed the development gains in some cases reversed progress,” Kagame noted. He called for solid mechanisms to monitor and change the implementation of the SDGs. “We have to own and lead the process and support one another. That’s why these agendas [2030 Agenda and Agenda 2063] are important because it is about achieving the stability and sustainability of our continent.”

Organised jointly by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and host governments in collaboration with the African Union Commission, the African Development Bank and other entities of the UN, the ARFSD was this year convened under the theme, ‘Building forward better: a green, inclusive and resilient Africa poised to achieve the 2030 Agenda and Agenda 2063’. The two agendas provide a collaborative structure for achieving inclusive and people-centred sustainable development in Africa.

“We have to look at the silver lining of this [COVID-19]. We can build an Africa that is greener and more resilient in line with the Agenda 2063 … instead of being a setback, the pandemic response can be a springboard to recover human development,” said Kagame remarking that Africa needs bilateral partnerships to strengthen vaccine manufacturing and pharmaceuticals, mobilise domestic financing and adopt suitable technologies and infrastructure.

More than 1800 participants comprising ministers, senior officials, experts and practitioners from United Nations Member States, the private sector, civil society, academia and United Nations organisations and high-level representatives of the Governments of 54 ECA members states participated at the 8th ARFSD.

“The fate of the SDGs will be decided in Africa,” UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed noted. She explained that the pandemic had increased debt distress in some African countries and called for the channelling of Special Drawing Rights allocated by the International Monetary Fund to help countries in need.

“There are big returns to be had in Africa,” said Mohammed admitting that the African continent has faced development and economic challenges which need addressing for Africa to succeed.

Mohamed said in achieving the 2030 Agenda and Agenda 2063, Africa must prioritise ending the pandemic and building resilience to future shocks, scaling up climate resilience, with developed countries honouring their pledges and making a fast transition in energy and food systems. She said recovering education losses and supporting gender equality actions were key to winning the development battle.

Africa is winning
Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of ECA, Vera Songwe, highlighted that Africa, despite the impact of COVID-19 on Africa’s recovery efforts, the continent has achieved several wins.

Songwe said Rwanda’s vaccination of more than 70 percent of its population was a win Africa can emulate, citing that only 17 percent of Africans have been vaccinated, and 53 percent of African countries have vaccines that are not being used.

“Africa will not open, and our economies will not recover if we do not vaccinate,” Vera warned. “The conversations in most forums like this is about vaccine appetite. But when we stand here today, we talk about vaccine success…. We can win by looking at our neighbours, the seven countries on the continent that have managed to vaccinate – succeeded in vaccinating 70 percent of their population, and that’s the first win.”

Songwe underlined that the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) was another win for Africa to boost trade and spur economic growth. She cited that in 2022, not one economy was going into a full-blown debt crisis in Africa.

Africa had traded more with itself than it has in the five years before COVID-19, essentially because Africa had to rely on itself to begin to trade PPEs, she said.

ECA notes that COVID-19 and climate change have highlighted Africa’s vulnerabilities and food security insecurity. Africa needs an estimated $63.8bn in annual financing needs to meet the SDGs for ten years.

Despite representing just 17 percent of the global population and emitting 4 percent of global pollution, Africa was the worst impacted by climate change.

African economies are losing on average 5 percent of their GDP because of climate change. This has increased to 15 percent in some countries, says Linus Mofor, a senior environmental expert at ECA. He explained that Africa had shown leadership on climate action, with all but two African countries having ratified the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement has ambitious Nationally Determined Commitments that require up to $3 trillion to implement.

Noting the unprecedented impact of COVID-19 and climate change on Africa’s quest to realise the 2030 Agenda and Agenda 2063, Director, Technology, Climate Change and Natural Resources Division at ECA, Jean-Paul Adam, said Africa’s current assessments on the implementation progress of the two agendas indicate that most African nations are off-track to achieve the targets and set-goals of the two development blueprints within the set timeframe.

“While a sliver of good news against the COVID-19 pandemic reflects resilience and recovery through vaccines rollouts, health preparedness and responses, Africa has shown its willingness to overcome and prevail over its complex development challenges, Adam told IPS.
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Doris Martínez gets ready to start cooking at her food kiosk in Valles del Tuy, an area of small dormitory towns near Caracas. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez/IPS

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Mar 18 2022 (IPS)

Doris Martínez was a cook in a Venezuelan restaurant that closed its doors; she emigrated to Colombia, got sick from working long hours standing in front of a stove, and returned to her country where, together with her husband and children, she runs a busy fast food kiosk on a road in Valles del Tuy, near the Venezuelan capital.

Johnny Paredes of Peru was a security guard and employee of a restaurant in Lima until he decided to become a self-employed street vendor selling fancy clothes in the mornings and food and beverages in the afternoons in the upscale neighborhood of Miraflores.

Mexican computer technician Jorge de la Teja works much longer hours in Mexico City than at his former job in a service company, but with forced telework increasing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, his clients and income have grown over the past two years.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, 140 million workers (51 percent of all employed people) work in the informal sector and have been strongly impacted by the pandemic. But, often working on the streets, they take the pulse of the crisis and take on new tasks or ventures to support their families.

Since the pandemic broke out in March 2020, 49.6 million jobs, both formal and informal, have been lost in the region, 23.6 million of which were held by women, according to data from the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) latest labor overview, published in February.

Informality “continues to be one of the most important characteristics of the region’s labor markets,” Roxana Maurizio, an Argentine labor economics specialist with the ILO, told IPS from the agency’s regional headquarters in Lima.

Studies by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) have shown that of the 51 percent of informal workers, up to 37 percent work in the informal sector of the economy, more than 10 percent in the formal sector and four percent in households.

In practice, one out of every two employed persons in the region is in informal employment, according to the ILO, and one third is self-employed, according to ECLAC.

The ILO considers informal employment to be all paid work (both self-employment and salaried employment) that is not registered, regulated or protected by legal or regulatory frameworks. For the workers who perform it, it adds, remuneration depends directly on the benefits derived from the goods or services produced.

Street vending is one of the expressions of labor informality that dominates many streets in the region’s large cities, as in this open-air market in Lima. CREDIT: Courtesy of Johnny Paredes

Faces behind the numbers

Paredes, 46, told IPS from Lima that “in my case it worked out better, because of the independence of having my own schedule and being able to shorten or lengthen it depending on how the workday turns out, and because on the street I earn between 25 and 35 dollars a day, double what I was paid in my previous jobs.”

De la Teja, 37, agrees and explains that in Mexico City he supports his family “comfortably, with regard to food and other day-to-day expenses, because I earn more than 2,000 dollars a month. But extra expenses, such as insurance, or traveling for vacation, are difficult.”

Martinez, a 50-year-old mother of two sons and three daughters and grandmother of three, works as a domestic and caregiver in the mornings and in the afternoons she helps run the family kiosk, the “Doris Burger”, with her husband and two sons.

At the kiosk she earns “about 30 or 35 dollars a day from Monday to Friday, and up to 50 on weekends. Much more than in the jobs I have had standing in front of a stove since I was young, and it’s also better because it brings in money for several members of the family.”

The situation is different for Wilmer Rosales, a 39-year-old “todero” or jack of all trades in Barquisimeto, a city 350 kilometers west of Caracas, who said that “here in the interior (of the country) there is almost nothing to do and when there is, the pay is very low – two, three, or five dollars for a day’s work, at the most.”

Home delivery of food and other products has become a source of informal sector work in Latin American cities, in a sector driven by the COVID pandemic. CREDIT: ILO

Recovery with fewer jobs

In its February report, the ILO showed that the region’s 6.2 percent economic growth in 2021 was insufficient for the labor market to recover, and the regional unemployment rate stood at 9.6 percent.

Of the 49 million jobs that were lost at the peak of the crisis, in the second quarter of 2020, 4.5 million have yet to be recovered, the vast majority of them jobs previously held by women. And in total there are some 28 million people looking for work.

After the onset of the pandemic, the crisis manifested atypically and instead of affecting more formal occupations, there was a greater loss of informal jobs, leaving millions of people without an income.

In Argentina, Mexico and Paraguay, for example, the reduction in informal sector jobs accounted for more than 75 percent of the fall in total employment during the first half of 2020. In Costa Rica and Peru the proportion was somewhat lower, 70 percent, while in Brazil and Chile it was around 50 percent.

The situation has now been reversed, and the countries with available data indicate that between 60 and 80 percent of the jobs recovered up to the third quarter of 2021 were in the informal sector.

Among the factors favoring recovery of the informal sector are the destruction of formal sector jobs due to the pandemic, the greater ease of interrupting an informal salaried relationship, its greater incidence in small businesses and enterprises, as in the case of Martinez, and the impossibility of many informal workers to do telework.

Women are lagging behind in this recovery, due to their greater presence in sectors strongly affected by the crisis that are rallying slowly, such as hotels and restaurants. In highly feminized sectors, such as domestic service work, the rate of informality exceeds 80 percent.

Nor is informality benign to young people, who face greater labor market intermittency, explained in part by the intense inflows and outflows of the labor force; and greater labor instability is associated with their prevalence in informal, precarious, low-skilled activities.

Telework is an informal work option that has thrived during the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America and is a refuge for women, who were especially hard-hit by the abrupt drop in employment during the confinement and shutdown of non-essential activities at the beginning of the health crisis. CREDIT: ILO

Leave no one behind, especially women

Against this backdrop, informality represents a challenge to the need and proposals in the region to produce, at the pace of the pandemic and as a way to overcome it, a sustainable and inclusive recovery, “leaving no one behind”, as the mantra already embedded in the discourse of various international organizations goes.

Maurizio is clearly committed to the formalization of employment. “Today, more than ever, the recovery needs to be people-centered; in particular, the creation of more and better jobs, formal jobs,” she said.

Informality “continues to be one of the most important characteristics of the region’s labor markets. Economic and social recovery will not be possible unless significant progress is made in reducing its incidence,” said the ILO specialist.

A necessary condition is “to advance in a process of economic growth with stability, reconstruction of the productive apparatus and persistent improvements in productivity.”

There must be, according to the expert, “a particular focus on the digital transition and young people; strengthening of labor institutions such as, for example, the minimum wage; care policies that allow women to return to and remain in the labor market; and support for small and medium-sized enterprises.”

Maurizio also called for the extension of unemployment insurance, social protection policies and “income guarantees for the population that continues to be strongly affected by the crisis.”

The gender perspective takes on “a central relevance in the recovery, taking into account the fact that of the 4.5 million jobs still to be recovered, 4.2 million are in traditionally female occupations.”

Among other measures, it is necessary to “facilitate the return of women to the labor market through a policy of investment in comprehensive care services with greater coverage, which at the same time should be a source of formal employment. Also, to support the recovery of economic sectors with a high female presence.”

Precarious working conditions have been a characteristic of informality associated with poverty in Latin America. CREDIT: Marcello Casal/Agência Brasil

Unions for a new working class

In the world of the trade unions, Brazilian Rafael Freire, secretary general of the Trade Union Confederation of the Americas (TUCA), added the challenge of “having a trade union for today’s working class, which in large part is precarious, outsourced, or working from applications.”

This workforce, “without job contracts, is increasingly part of the informal sector, in large proportions, for example 70 percent in Honduras and 80 percent in Guatemala,” said the leader of the 55 million-member central trade union from its headquarters in Montevideo.

Informality, which is structural in the Latin American social and labor panorama, is a major hurdle for economic recovery and social justice in the region, and while governments design strategies, define policies and take measures, millions of informal workers rely on their resilience to bring home food for their families.

Africa can expect new spikes in COVID-19 every six months, a report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. The continent with its low vaccination rates could continue to be vulnerable. Credit: USAID/South Africa

By Samira Sadeque
New York, Mar 11 2022 (IPS)

Countries on the African continent have a pattern of a six-month break before a new COVID-19 spike happens, researchers at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change have said in a newly released report.

Marvin Akuagwuagwu, a data analyst in the Africa COVID-19 Policy unit at the Institute, told IPS that it’s the countries with the lowest vaccination rate that are most at risk.

According to data from the African Union CDC, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and Chad are among the countries with the lowest percentage of the vaccinated population – some as low as less than one percent.

These other countries on the continent can learn from Rwanda’s approach, which Akuagwuagwu said is a success story.

“Rwanda has significantly ramped up its vaccination and testing programmes which has reduced their case numbers and the overall impact of COVID-19,” he said.

“With their vaccination rate at almost 60 percent and a positive case rate of less than 10 percent, Rwanda is a good example for other African countries to emulate, particularly for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that face similar challenges.”

However, vaccine rollout isn’t an issue of supply but a result of wealthier countries withholding supplies, contributing to a grave vaccine inequity. Africa has received six percent of the world’s vaccines, despite the continent hosting seventeen percent of the world’s population, according to the Brooking’s report.

And this only exacerbates the pattern that Akuagwuagwu and his co-author Adam Bradshaw discovered in their report.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Inter Press Service (IPS): You mentioned there is a pattern of a new wave hitting Africa roughly every six months. How does this affect the continent of Africa specifically?

Marvin Akuagwuagwu (MA): We identified a trend that about every six months, a Covid-19 wave impacts Africa. This was the case with Beta, Delta, and Omicron.

Omicron was like a flash flood – it did some serious damage but thankfully didn’t lead to mass deaths. However, we may not be so lucky next time – the next variant may be more severe, especially in countries with low levels of protection, such as in Africa.

This means we now have a six-month window of opportunity to vaccinate Africa against Covid-19 before the next variant appears – we need to make progress towards achieving the WHO target of vaccinating 70% of the population. TBI is working with a number of countries across Africa to support their vaccine rollout to help get there.

IPS: Why do you believe lockdowns are being approached more cautiously and are “not always the best course of action”?

MA: Lockdowns are effective, but they are not always the best course of action to tackle Covid-19 due to their negative economic and social impacts.

As the virus evolves and we learn more, countries in Africa are gradually moving away from blanket lockdowns. We now have a range of tools in the toolbox to tackle Covid-19 and lockdown is only one of many options.

When the pandemic first started, no one had ever been exposed to Covid-19 – now billions of people have been infected or vaccinated, so it’s a different ballgame, and we need to adapt with it.

IPS: With the six-month window between variants, are there spill-over effects? (For example, even though Omicron wasn’t as bad as Delta, were any Delta effects that spilled over to the phase where Omicron was present)?

MA: The low testing and vaccination in Africa during the Delta wave spilled over to the Omicron wave. African countries have just started ramping up their vaccination and testing programmes, which were significantly lower in the Delta wave.

Without a continued acceleration of vaccination programmes, Africa will remain behind other regions in vaccination rates. International actors, donors, and partners should listen and respond to African countries to adequately support their vaccination and community engagement programmes and enhance their data management systems and associated human resources required.

IPS: How does the current financial inflation affect the measures you’ve proposed?

MA: The current financial inflation impacts the measures we have proposed as they require adequate funding. However, strong political will and community engagement are catalysts to enhancing these measures and curbing health and social inequalities caused by the pandemic.

IPS: One of the recommendations suggests: “increase testing and genomic sequencing to reduce transmission.” How many countries have the economic capacity and manpower to ensure this? How realistic is this goal?

MA: We understand that this is a significant challenge for low- and middle-income countries, but the alternative is far worse – serious illness, lockdowns, and deaths which also affect the economy and society at large.

It goes back to global cooperation – the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is working in Africa to build long-term resilience in data, vaccine, and testing infrastructure and provide greater institutional strength to withstand future Covid-19 waves. We support governments to build their capacity and deliver for their populations.

We are calling for global leadership to develop a global pandemic plan to support the Global South to vaccinate their populations and increase testing.

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The employment outlook for women in Latin America continues to face obstacles before it can reach pre-COVID-19 levels. But a sustainable and inclusive recovery will require measures to close the gender gaps that already affected employment of women in the region before the pandemic. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Mar 3 2022 (IPS)

The COVID-19 pandemic did not hit everyone equally and employment has shown a clear gender-differentiated impact. Two years after the start of the pandemic, it is more difficult for women than men to recover their jobs, and this is clearly reflected in Latin America.

The 2021 Labour Overview, Latin America and the Caribbean, published by the regional office of the International Labor Organization (ILO), highlights the differences in this regard.

While 25.5 million jobs lost by men between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the months following the onset of the pandemic have been recovered, women have yet to recuperate four million of the 23.6 million jobs they lost in the same period.

“This is so because we entered the pandemic without having resolved structural problems of the sexual division of labor; women and men are in different positions in the formal labor market as a result of the patriarchal order,” Peruvian feminist sociologist Karim Flores, a specialist in gender and employment, told IPS.

She explained that although in recent decades there has been an accelerated increase in the number of women in the formal labor market, gender gaps persist in terms of wages, access to decision-making positions, precarious conditions within the formal labor market and feminized positions.

“Not only that, other serious asymmetries such as the unemployment rate, which is higher among women than men, had not been overcome. In addition, the family-work relationship, which is a serious structural problem, had not been resolved,” she said.

The expert said that this set of factors led to women entering the pandemic at a disadvantage, which now makes the process of recovering their jobs more difficult and slower.

Activities such as manufacturing, commerce, tourism, catering and hospitality, characterized by a larger female labor force, were among the hardest hit by the crisis. They suffered a contraction and even came to a standstill at the onset of the pandemic.

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) reported that 56.9 percent of the female population in Latin America and 54.3 percent in the Caribbean worked in the sectors that were most impacted by the crisis.

According to the ILO, as of the second quarter of 2020, the female economic participation rate in the region was 43.5 percent. This is partly due to the fact that women who lost their jobs did not remain inactive or idle but turned to a number of other activities.

Aracelli Alava’s life was turned upside down by the pandemic. She is a tour operator at Machu Picchu, the emblematic Inca ruins in southern Peru, where she is seen in the photo. The paralysis of the tourism industry forced her to become an online translator and only now is she beginning to resume her profession and her passion. CREDIT: Courtesy of Aracelli Alava

Survival instinct

Aracelli Alava is one illustration of this phenomenon. The 40-year-old Peruvian used to depend totally on tourism for a living. A qualified English translator, she helped moved tourists to different parts of the country with her company that provided services to travel agencies.

“I traveled four times a month on a routine basis, when suddenly the borders were closed and flights were brought to a halt. It was a terrible sensation; when they take away something that you are passionate about, that is your motor and motivation, it depresses you. That’s when my survival instinct kicked in,” she said.

She saw that her colleagues started selling different products, or tried to start businesses. She made her degree count and began doing various translations online to support herself, often overcoming the feeling of not wanting to get out of bed.

“Thank God I don’t have dependent family!” she told IPS in a telephone interview from the historic Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, in Cuzco, where she is once again accompanying a group of tourists.

She said that tourism activity has begun to recover, albeit very slowly. “My income has not rebounded yet, the gap is big, I am still doing translations but I am confident that by mid-year things will be a little better,” she remarked.

Despite a greater recovery of women’s jobs in 2021 due to the reactivation of sectors of the economy, driven by the mass vaccination drive, it has not been enough to reach 2019 levels.

The unemployment rate is 12.4 percent according to the ILO report, several points higher than the pre-pandemic 9.7 percent.

This situation is compounded by the impact on working conditions and income levels in those jobs that were not lost or were recovered.

Before the pandemic, Yolanda Castro, 45, worked eight hours a day at a private school in the Peruvian capital, and after work she devoted herself to her family.

The Mar. 16, 2020 declaration of a state of emergency in the country and the new restrictions completely changed her routine as head of tutoring at a primary level.

“Shifting the dynamic of work to home was an odyssey, although I learned the monster of on-line work,” she said. “The hardest thing has been that it affects my family, that I had to take over their space, tell them to keep quiet, and work more than eight hours a day under those conditions for half my salary.”

To cover part of her monthly budget deficit, she used her culinary skills and on weekends she cooked food to sell. She was thus left without a break because she worked seven days a week.

Yolanda Castro, the head of tutoring at a private school in the Peruvian capital, poses in the living room in her home, which has become her workplace since the start of the COVID pandemic, which also reduced her salary and forced her to supplement her income with other work and to work seven days a week. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Castro said that in the first few months of the pandemic, during the lockdown when the military patrolled the streets, she would go out on the street with a white flag to drop off orders of stuffed potatoes, chicken broth, ‘sopa seca’ or potato pie at neighboring houses.

But the extra income was not enough to allow her to continue her specialization studies, which she had to suspend due to a lack of time and budget.

She has not yet returned to her pre-pandemic salary and although the government has announced that this year schools will go back to on-site classes, Peruvian educational institutions are still evaluating whether they will do so fully or in part, and contracts and pay will depend on what happens in that regard.

Decent and equal employment

Flores the sociologist remarked that talk of pre-pandemic levels should not render invisible the gender inequality gaps in employment that need to be corrected in a post-pandemic scenario.

She raised the need to establish post-pandemic employment pacts to achieve a policy promoting decent work in Latin America and the Caribbean, the most unequal region in the world, also in terms of labor.

“According to the ILO, decent work respects rights, does not discriminate on the basis of gender or any other cause, respects unionization and collective bargaining, and guarantees a fair income and unemployment insurance,” she said.

She included in the proposal attention to mental health, affected by the high levels of anxiety and stress caused by uncertainty and shortages during the pandemic, and the gender digital divide.

“That gap already existed, it was linked to access and training; during the pandemic these two factors have excluded many women from teleworking,” she said.

Both the public and private sectors would be involved in the initiative of the pacts, which should include the central goal of advancing towards gender equality in employment.

At 24 years of age, university graduate Mariana Navarro is one of many young people in Peru struggling to find a job amidst the greater difficulties created by the pandemic. She shares a smile of confidence in a better future, at a shopping mall in the city of Lima. CREDIT: Mariela Salazar/IPS

The case of young women

Flores also referred to youth unemployment, which according to the ILO report stands at 21.4 percent for the region. Although that is lower than the 23 percent of 2020, it remains more than two points above the pre-pandemic rate of 18 percent.

She highlighted the barriers faced by female university graduates or young women who are trying to gain access to more highly qualified positions.

“Gender stereotypes persist in the management of human potential, from the processes of selection and evaluation to hiring, which end up marginalizing women,” she said.

In addition to all this, the idea prevails that because they are young, they should be willing to accept exploitative conditions.

That is what happened to Mariana Navarro, a 24-year-old with a university degree in administration, who for most of 2021 worked at a private medical center.

“It was an onsite job as an administrator, but I was the only non-health staff member so I also had to look after business issues, logistics, reception, and whatever came up. It was too many responsibilities for one person, they didn’t want to give me a raise, and I was very stressed out,” she said.

She never imagined that after she quit she would not be able to find another job. She has been applying for different jobs for the past four months.

“I have seen countless application forms and I have noticed that they have raised the requirements, they ask for experience in the public and private sector, program management, specializations…My resume is not strong enough for the recruiters, how could I meet those expectations if I am just starting out, what options do we have?” she complained.

Being economically dependent on her parents affects her self-esteem and budget, and also limits her options, but she is not willing to be employed under exploitative conditions or in any activity outside her profession.

“I am persevering, fighting for a possibility of a decent job,” Navarro said.

Faces of a group of domestic workers in Brazil, during a meeting of one of their unions – a reflection that they are mostly black and poor. They have been fighting for decades for their labor recognition and rights. Today they are organized in 22 unions in states or municipalities and, since 1997, they have a national federation that represents them. CREDIT: Trabalhadoras Domésticas/Flickr

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 24 2022 (IPS)

“Woman, poor, black and illiterate” – most domestic workers suffer quadruple discrimination in Brazil, which made them more vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic, says one of their leaders, Gloria Rejane Santos.

President of the Paraíba Domestic Workers’ Union for the past 12 years, she found herself out of work after coronavirus appeared on the scene.

Of the 6.2 million domestic service jobs in Brazil in 2019, 1.5 million were lost in 2020, estimated Hildete Pereira de Melo, an economics professor at the Federal Fluminense University who has been researching gender and economics for four decades.

Vaccination against COVID-19, which began in January 2021, made it possible to recover only part of the lost jobs.

Paraíba is one of the nine states of the Northeast, Brazil’s poorest region, which is home to 4.06 million of the country’s 214 million inhabitants.

In its largest inland city, Campina Grande, population 415,000, police and labor inspectors freed a woman on Feb. 2 who was working in a home under slavery-like conditions including overwork, unhealthy conditions, rarely being allowed to leave the workplace, and no labor rights.

Helping her colleagues and combating discrimination against domestic workers, who are overwhelmingly black women, is the mission of Gloria Rejane Santos, president of the Domestic Workers Union of Paraíba, a state in Brazil’s poor Northeast region. CREDIT: Courtesy of Santos

Lingering slavery

“The pandemic aggravated the continuation of slavery,” Santos told IPS from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba, a city of 825,000 inhabitants, where two cases of slave labor were discovered and are still under investigation, she said.

Modern-day slavery in Brazil tends to be a more rural phenomenon. There were 1937 workers rescued from slavery conditions in 2021, almost all of them in the countryside of the Brazilian hinterland.

“Many employers demanded that their domestics stay at work all the time,” fearing that they would bring coronavirus back and forth to their homes. “The day laborers who could not accept it, we lost our jobs,” Santos said, referring to live-out domestic workers.

The pandemic thus created conditions for a return to work without time limits, without time off, and with a greater violation of labor rights, which have never been well-respected in domestic work.

The domestic labor market has changed since the 1980s. Live-in maids who worked an unlimited number of days have disappeared, as have domestics who work exclusively for one employer with a monthly salary.

There was an increase in the number of domestics who lived in their own homes and were hired for a limited number of days, who were more autonomous, in a process that accompanied advances in society, with new technologies and new habits, such as eating out more frequently, Melo noted. In addition, homes have become smaller and have lost the “maid’s room,” she said in an interview with IPS in Rio de Janeiro.

Domestic workers from Paraíba, a state in the Northeast region of Brazil, hold a protest organized by their union demanding respect for their rights and compliance with the laws that regulate their activity in the country. CREDIT: STDP

Female and informal

But informal employment is predominant. Nearly 70 percent of domestic workers do not have an employment contract. As a result, they do not have legal rights and are subject to the employer’s discretion, which has facilitated dismissals during the pandemic.

Their vulnerability is aggravated by the fact that 92 percent are women and 66 percent are black women, according to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics in 2019, the year before the outbreak of the COVID pandemic.

Domestic workers’ trade unions have included the feminine form of the word “workers” – trabalhadoras – in their names, recognizing the overwhelming majority of women in the sector.

Santos, despite presiding over the union, was left without regular work as a day laborer throughout the pandemic, as were “more than half of the domestic workers in Paraíba,” she estimated.

Getting by

Work in the trade unions is voluntary. It only offers limited per diem income from a few sponsored projects, generally for the training of female workers, but “lately we don’t even get that,” lamented the 64-year-old trade unionist, who has six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

In the last two years she has survived on food basket donations and the emergency aid that the government granted to the poorest of the poor, worth 600 reais (about 115 dollars) in 2020, reduced by half during 2021, when it was only made available for a few months.

“I managed to get it after much struggle, with the support of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, because I was registered as a town councilor, although I was an unelected candidate,” said Santos.

She attributes her decision to accept the presidency of the union to her “vocation”. “I am the daughter of a domestic worker, I suffered a lot watching my mother work hard for scraps of food, some clothes or shoes,” she said.

When she became a trade union leader at the age of 52, she decided to go back to school, and completed primary and middle school. Going to school with adolescents was very difficult, she said, as she was rejected as an “old woman”, especially when it came to group projects.

She then attended an adult education course for high school, where everything went well. But she did not make it into university, where she wanted to pursue a degree in social work. She has channeled that inclination at least partly into her union work.

During the pandemic, the union carried out a permanent campaign to collect food and aid for unemployed members. “We provided assistance to more than 400 families” at the João Pessoa headquarters and the subheadquarters in Campina Grande, she said.

The pandemic forced Roseli Nascimento to replace beef in her diet with chicken, eggs and legumes. A live-out domestic worker in Rio de Janeiro, she lost four of the five days she worked weekly in 2020 and only regained them in mid-2021, when her employers felt protected by the widespread vaccination against COVID-19. CREDIT: Courtesy of Nascimento

Rights

But her main ambition is to “fight discrimination and make society recognize the value of domestic work.” She pointed out that she receives almost daily complaints of mistreatment and other conflicts from her colleagues. In these cases she receives help from a lawyer who has been working with the union on a pro bono basis since 2019.

To illustrate, she cited the case of “a maid who came to the union in tears” after she was accused of having stolen one hundred reais (19 dollars) from her employers. She was saved by a phone call from a son of the family, who confessed to taking the money without telling his parents.

The marginalization suffered by domestic workers in Paraíba is probably stronger than in other states because in that state “90 percent of them are black women,” said Santos.

“I am black, poor and the daughter of a domestic, but since I have an active voice, I decided to use it for the collective good,” she said.

Roseli Gomes do Nascimento, a 60-year-old resident of Rocinha, one of the large, famous favelas or shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro, had slightly better luck than Santos. Also a live-out domestic worker, of the five days she worked during the week, she lost four at the start of the pandemic.

It was not until the middle of the following year that she was able to return to work five days a week, when a good part of the Brazilian population was vaccinated against COVID. Only one supportive employer had kept her continuously employed and even paid her for her day of work during three months in which, for health safety reasons, she stayed away from her employer’s home.

That small income and 115 dollars a month in emergency government assistance for one quarter of 2020 and a fourth of that for nine months of the following year were barely enough to survive on. She lives alone, as her two daughters are now on their own, with her six cats. “I used to have nine, but I gave three away,” she told IPS.

A drastic reduction in beef consumption, sometimes replaced by less expensive chicken and eggs, and a diet with more fruits and vegetables, as well as fewer outings, helped her to live on a reduced budget, with the advantage of losing “about eight kilos, without even dieting.”

Legislators and trade unionists celebrate the first anniversary of the constitutional amendment establishing the rights of domestic workers in Brazil on Apr. 2, 2014. CREDIT: José Cruz/Agência Brasil

Context

Domestic work employed 75.6 million workers, or 4.5 percent of all wage earners around the world, according to a 2021 report by the International Labor Organization (ILO).

Latin America accounted for 18 percent of these workers and Brazil for nine percent, a much higher proportion than the size of the population, which represented 7.4 percent of the total in the case of Latin America and 2.7 percent in the case of Brazil.

In other words, the region has a higher proportion of paid domestic work, a product of its history and slavery, noted economist Melo. Only 20 percent of Brazil’s 60 million families hire domestic workers, a privilege of the upper-middle and upper classes.

Alice Cruz-UN, Special Rapporteur on eliminating discrimination against persons affected by leprosy and their family members, told the youth that their participation was crucial to removing legal discrimination. Her young son Leo asked the global audience not to forget leprosy. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Jan 25 2022 (IPS)

Yohei Sasakawa said the youth have the power to change the world, and their participation in removing the stigma and myths about leprosy is crucial to the campaign to end the disease.

Sasakawa, the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination and Chairman of the Nippon Foundation, was speaking at a webinar held in the run-up to World Leprosy Day on January 30. He engaged youth from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in an online discussion dubbed ‘Raising Awareness about Leprosy – Role of Youth’.

“The history of the world is changed by young people. The spirit of young people is essential in the fight against leprosy. Speak out and let the world understand leprosy better. Use online tools at your disposal to tell the world not to forget leprosy,” Sasakawa told participants.

“The younger generation has joined our efforts. Our goal is to hear from you, work with you and take action with you towards a day when there will be zero stigma and discrimination against those affected by leprosy.”

At the heart of discussions were highlights from three regional forums, stimulating conversations about leprosy and its related challenges and efforts to build collaboration and networks to combat an ancient disease at risk of being forgotten.

The webinar was organized against the backdrop of the global ‘Don’t Forget Leprosy’ campaign by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative. The initiative strategically links the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, Sasakawa Health Foundation, and the Nippon Foundation towards achieving a leprosy-free world.

Stigmatized, forced to migrate, denial of education, abandonment of children affected by leprosy, difficulties for those affected by leprosy, and women finding marriage partners – were highlighted in the discussions. Leprosy is even recognized as grounds for divorce in some countries.

These were only a few of the many challenges faced by those affected by the disease, speakers said.

Yohei Sasakawa, the WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination and Chairman of the Nippon Foundation, told youth from Africa, Asia, and Latin America that they had the means to change perceptions about leprosy. They were educated and knew how to use social media to benefit leprosy-affected communities. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

“We need collective efforts to address the disease itself and, at the same time, the rampant stigma associated with leprosy. Today, the second generation of those affected by leprosy still find difficulties getting a job because of the stigma,” Sasakawa said.

He said efforts to address leprosy are two-pronged, engaging global and well-respected figures and grassroots actors for community-level engagement.

Participants heard that youths learning about leprosy and sharing that it is curable could accelerate progress towards a world free from medical and social problems related to leprosy.

Youth participation could significantly help dispel myths rooted during the many centuries in which leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, was incurable.

The online discussion followed three preparatory regional youth forums held in December 2021 and January 2022. The engagement was in anticipation of a Global Youth Forum on the theme, ‘Don’t Forget Leprosy’, organized by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative slated for March 2022.

Dr Michael Chen from HANDA, China, told participants how the first Asia Youth Forum engaged young people in a virtual meeting to discuss the reduction of stigma and discrimination faced by people affected by leprosy.

He said six Asian countries, including Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Nepal, participated. Discussions included the need to engage the younger generation in a world free of stigma and discrimination.

Similarly, Marcos Costa, from Morhan in Brazil, spoke of the first Latin American and Caribbean Virtual Meeting of young people affected by leprosy, their family members, and supporters.

The meeting, he said, sought to engage young people and their families in a dialogue centered on the challenges faced by those affected by the disease and to explore policy solutions to the problem.

“In Brazil, it is reported that many new leprosy cases were not diagnosed in 2020 because of COVID-19. The pandemic has compounded challenges facing young people as many of them are unemployed due to the stigma attached to people affected by leprosy,” he said.

Likewise, Tadesse Tesfaye from ENAPAL in Ethiopia summarized discussions during the first-ever Africa Youth Forum, with attendance from nine African countries, including Kenya, Niger, and Mozambique.

Tesfaye said the forum explored “how stigma and discrimination manifest upon persons affected by leprosy and their families and the need to build national, regional and international alliances to address social and medical challenges related to the disease.”

Within this context, Alice Cruz, the UN Special Rapporteur on eliminating discrimination against persons affected by leprosy and their family members, reminded the younger generation that leprosy was also a political factor and their voices were needed.

She called for diversity, new faces, ideas, innovations, and the engagement of young people and families affected by leprosy.

Cruz stressed that young people’s contribution to enforcing the human rights of people affected by leprosy should be encouraged. Their contribution was crucial to reforming more than 150 laws and regulations in various parts of the world that discriminate against persons affected by leprosy.

Her young son, Leo, finalized her address calling for a world free of all forms of discrimination and one where leprosy was not forgotten.

Chen and Costa further drummed support for the engagement of young people especially through social media to raise awareness of leprosy and challenge long-standing stereotypes.

“We need to cultivate the potential of young people, provide sufficient funding to young people, and a supportive platform for young people to learn, grow, communicate and solve problems,” Chen said.

Dr Takahiro Nanri, the Sasakawa Health Foundation executive director, moderated a session between the Goodwill Ambassador and young participants, including Costa, Rahul Mahato from ATMA Swabhiman in India, and Joshua Mamane from IDEA in Niger, who are also from a families affected by leprosy.

The discussion stressed the need to engage young people in the fight against leprosy actively.

Sasakawa said youth participation would usher in a new and much-awaited era in global and grassroots efforts to fully tackle leprosy as medical, public health, and human rights issues.

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Delivery of syringes for the vaccination campaign in El Salvador. Latin American countries have made steady progress in immunizing their populations, partly through direct negotiations between their governments and suppliers and partly through international cooperation. CREDIT: PAHO

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jan 20 2022 (IPS)

The Covax initiative, the hope of the countries of the developing South to immunize their populations against COVID-19, only met half of its goals in 2021. And as 2022 begins, and the omicron variant of the virus is spreading fast, the scheme still depends on the decisions of pharmaceutical companies and the goodwill of donor governments.

José Manuel Durão Barroso, president of the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, one of the entities leading the Covax initiative, warned at the outset that “as long as a large part of the world’s population is unvaccinated, variants will continue to emerge and the pandemic will drag on.”

“We will only prevent variants from emerging if we are able to protect the entire world population, not just the rich areas,” added Durão Barroso, former prime minister of Portugal (2002-2004) and former president of the European Commission (2004-2014), in an email interview with IPS.

Covax, a global access fund for COVID-19 vaccines established in April 2020 as an alliance of countries, multilateral organizations and private foundations, had brought together 184 countries by October that year and set out to procure and distribute hundreds of millions of vaccines against the disease equitably in countries of the developing South.

Under the scheme, one group of countries self-funds and pays for the vaccines sent to it by Covax, while another, the poorest, are to receive the immunizations free of charge.

Shortly after the first vaccines were applied in industrialized countries in late 2020, an encouraging first shipment of 600,000 doses of the British Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine arrived at the international airport in Accra, Ghana, the first country to benefit from the Covax mechanism, on Feb. 24, 2021.

The initiative was launched to distribute and apply, in more than a hundred countries, two billion doses throughout 2021, to ensure equitable immunization of 40 percent of the world’s population, before reaching 70 percent in the first half of 2022 – figures aimed at curbing the pandemic"As long as a large part of the world's population is unvaccinated, variants will continue to emerge and the pandemic will drag on. We will only prevent variants from emerging if we are able to protect the entire world population, not just the rich areas." -- José Manuel Durão Barroso

But disaster lurked around the corner. India was hit by a sudden, devastating wave of COVID-19 infections, and the overcrowded country stopped exporting vaccines. And the Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, was to be the source of the vaccines for the Gavi-Covax mechanism.

While high-income countries such as the United States, Canada, European nations and Israel purchased large quantities of vaccines from pharmaceutical transnationals, sometimes in excess of their populations, it was logical for Covax to seek supplies from India’s SII, where doses were also cheaper.

A dose prepared by the SII could cost three dollars, compared to 50 or 100 percent more in a Western pharmaceutical company.

Thus, while its recipients in the South awaited vaccines under great pressure from their local populations, Covax had to announce in April and May that there would be delays, which occurred in the following months, placing many countries in an uncertain and impotent wait while the virus variants raged.

By early January 2022, the number of infected cases exceeded 300 million worldwide and deaths surpassed 5.5 million, with two populous countries in the South, India and Brazil, following the worst-hit country in absolute numbers: the United States.

Instead of two billion doses, Covax distributed less than half of that – 900 million – throughout 2021. And as of November 2021 it had delivered less than 600 million doses, although it reached 900 million thanks to donations of 310 million doses in December.

What went wrong?

Durão Barroso explained that “the unfortunate epidemiological situation in India, combined with the fact that only a few vaccines had received the WHO emergency use listing and were available for global supply at that time, significantly delayed the launch of Covax.”

This situation “together with export restrictions, the hoarding of vaccines by many richer countries, and manufacturers who do not prioritize vaccine equity, meant that we could not access as many doses as we expected in the second and third quarters of the year,” added the head of Gavi.

When the race against the clock for vaccines began, “many governments in high-income countries made reference to global solidarity,” so that all nations would have access to immunizations, recalled Kate Elder, senior vaccines policy advisor at the humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

“Pharmaceutical companies said they would do their part to ensure that the mistakes of the past were not repeated and that it was not just high-income countries that would have access to medical innovations,” Elder said in her response to a list of questions from IPS.

“However, this did not happen and calls to move away from the business-as-usual approach were ignored. High-income countries started buying up COVID-19 vaccine doses even before they were available,” she said.

The corporate behavior contradicted earlier assertions that antiviral vaccines should be global public goods, and pharmaceutical corporations, as in other circumstances in the past, prioritized sales to the highest bidder and sought primarily their own financial gain, according to MSF.

Donations arrive

The result of the first few months was that Covax only delivered one million doses in February 2021, 23 million in March, 15 million in April, and 30 million in May. From early on it was clear that reaching the goal of two billion doses in 10 months was impossible.

Confidence in vaccine delivery mechanisms, and in immunization itself, eroded, for example in Gambia, Namibia or Nigeria in Africa, or in Afghanistan and Pakistan in Asia. Anxiety also escalated because, having received the first dose of a vaccine, people demanded the second even more loudly

The first shipment of vaccines by Covax to a developing country arrived at the international airport in Accra, Ghana on Feb. 24, 2021. CREDIT: Krishnan/Covax

The countries of the developing South then began or intensified their search for vaccines outside of Covax. And, in parallel, some made progress in the production of their own vaccines, as was the case of Saudi Arabia, India and Singapore in Asia, Egypt in Africa and Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico in Latin America.

In the second half of 2021, donations began to appear, like a lifeline. Rich countries, having vaccinated large segments of their population and with vaccines or supplies such as syringes available, began to donate, often under the Covax umbrella, millions of doses to countries in the developing South.

Donor countries have so far offered Covax 591 million doses to be delivered in 2021 and the first half of 2022, and the scheme has sent 259 million doses to recipient countries, which partially explains the acceleration of deliveries in November (155 million) and December (310 million) 2021.

The main donors to Covax have been the United States (145 million doses), a group of 16 European Union members (81 million), the United Kingdom (11.5 million) and Canada and Japan (8.4 million doses each).

However, in some cases the doses arrived very close to their expiration date – or with a shortage of syringes or freezers to preserve them, as in Somalia and East Timor – forcing them to be discarded or sometimes sent back, as happened in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan.

The road ahead

Covax, in Elder’s view, was “naively ambitious,” and its success “was tied to unsound assumptions. Foreseeable challenges were not factored into the design of the mechanism and some poor policy decisions were made.”

“From its design to its governance and accountability mechanisms, the exclusion of meaningful participation of key stakeholders has undermined Covax’s ability to succeed,” the MSF vaccines policy expert argued.

The hoarding of vaccines and medicines by high-income countries has already happened on other occasions, such as during the HIV/AIDS epidemic or with regard to access to vaccines against pneumococcus, human papillomavirus or rotavirus.

For Elder, “if we want to learn from this experience to improve access to vaccines, the first step is to make a radical change. This basically means making the technology and innovation of medical tools public to guarantee an equitable model and decentralize production.

“Technology born of public investment cannot be owned by corporations, it must be a global public good,” she said.

In addition, “it is necessary to strengthen multilateral organizations and regional platforms, since each region knows best what its needs are, instead of public-private alliances based on the goodwill of pharmaceutical companies, which, at the end of the day, we already know what their interests are going to be.”

Durão Barroso said that Covax “has reached a point where it can now meet the demand of the countries it serves. However, there is a real risk that the supply disruption will continue in 2022.”

So “we have asked manufacturers to be more transparent about when they will make doses available, and from donor governments we have asked for larger and more predictable donations. This is finally happening,” added the head of Gavi.

Durão Barroso stressed that in the face of the spread of different variants “it is absolutely critical that we avoid a scenario of vaccine nationalism 2.0, where rich countries immobilize the supply of new vaccines.

“We depend on countries’ commitment to multilateralism and manufacturers’ commitment to transparency to ensure that we don’t fall behind again,” he stated.

The private sector and some government agencies have demanded that staff vaccinate, especially in the tourism industry that drives many regional economies. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Nov 22 2021 (IPS)

When face-to-face Cabinet meetings resumed in Jamaica following more than a year of virtual meetings due to COVID-19, Ministers lined up to have their immunisation cards inspected.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness said the Government “has to lead the country towards normality”.

“The way to do it is for every Jamaican to comply with the infection, prevention and control measures that have been established, which will eventually be relaxed the higher the level of vaccination,” he said after the October 12 meeting.

In the current atmosphere, outbreaks, no-movement days that shut down commerce and vaccine hesitancy send ripples through the economy. So, while Jamaica has no national vaccine mandate, private sector companies and some government agencies are already demanding that staff vaccinate.

In addition to several vaccination drives that target employees, Jamaica Private Sector Organisation joined the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce and the Jamaica Manufacturers and Exporters Association to put their support solidly behind a campaign for a national mandate.

The groups say that with the low vaccination rates almost two years into the pandemic, Jamaica is being left behind in achieving population immunity, putting the country’s recovery at risk. The groups contend that the social and economic impact will be devastating, and “the ripple effects will continue for years to come”. But even with growing support for a mandate, opposition leader Mark Golding opposes one. Only about 17 percent of the Jamaican population is vaccinated.

Across the region, governments have already implemented mandates. In Guyana, nationals who want to enter any public buildings, including banks, restaurants, supermarkets and schools, must show proof of vaccination. In the twin-island state of Antigua Barbuda, opposition legislators accused House Speaker Sir Gerald Watt of acting beyond his powers after he prevented them from participating in the sitting of the Senate because they did not show proof of vaccination.

With each outbreak, concern for the tourism industry that drives many regional economies grows. Many countries now have vaccination policies for incoming adult travellers. These include Anguilla, Grenada, St. Barts, St. Kitts and Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos, and the Cayman Islands.

And even as governments ponder mandates, they are also bracing for civil unrest and legal challenges from workers. In a recent opinion, the Jamaican Bar Association said nothing was preventing the Government or employers from implementing mandates. The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States outlined its position in a 16-page document titled: “The Legal Dimensions of Mandatory/Compulsory Requirements for COVID-19 Vaccinations, August 2021”.

According to the report, that countries could legally pursue mandatory vaccination laws.
“Having demonstrated … that mandatory vaccination is constitutionally appropriate given the leeway granted in favour of public health imperatives, it is submitted that employers could justify a requirement in a pandemic context, at minimum where the workplace is a high-risk environment, such as health-care, or essential services, or for workers more at risk at the workplace, such as frontline workers interacting with the public,” the document said.

But while public health legislation specifically addresses restrictions in times of pandemic, those who oppose mandates argue that they are a breach of human rights.

President of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions, Helene Davis-Whyte, is expecting a national mandate if efforts to boost vaccination numbers fail. She argued for a comprehensive public awareness programme with consultations before such a step is taken and cautioned that a “draconian approach” could discourage some people.

“We are not necessarily opposed, but what we are saying is that you have to do more work because we don’t think that enough work has been done,” she told journalists recently.

And so, armed with their individual legal opinions, governments have been implementing the rules they say will protect their countries. By October 2021, at least seven governments across the region had instituted COVID-19 mandates for government workers.

In August, in Guyana, police were called to evict staff members in the education ministry’s head office who had entered the building without proof of vaccination. Earlier that month, there were mass protests in St. Vincent and Barbados. And in July, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves was hit on the head and injured by an angry protestor during anti-mandate demonstrations in St Vincent.

Barbados, like Jamaica, has not officially backed a vaccine mandate, but Holness acknowledges he may have to make the decision soon. But even with no national mandate in Jamaica increasingly, civil servants find they must be vaccinated to work.

The Ministry of Tourism has raced ahead to vaccinate the 170,000 people who work in the sector. Already workers who come in contact with cruise ship visitors must be fully inoculated.

And as the country eyes a return to full-time school, it’s the turn of teachers and school staff. Medical workers have already been issued a mandate. In the private sector, more than 80 per cent of staff are vaccinated.

In the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector, where several companies became hotspots during the height of the first wave, vaccination is compulsory. In Jamaica, COVID-19 restrictions and 14-days of lockdown cost the sector US$42 million (J$5.88 billion) in revenue.

But it is in the region’s tourism industry that mandates have become the norm. Hoteliers and other service providers seek to prevent lawsuits and shutdowns by demanding that staff be fully vaccinated. In the Bahamas, workers and visitors must be fully vaccinated. Unvaccinated visitors face a 14-day quarantine. Jamaica is aiming for a 100 per cent vaccinated workforce.

A growing number of countries have instituted vaccination policies for incoming adult travellers. These include Anguilla, Grenada, St. Barts, St. Kitts and Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos, and the Cayman Islands.

Meanwhile, the private sector’s desire for a return to normalcy and increased economic activity could push many toward a vaccine faster than any government mandate could.

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Many people living on the banks of rivers in the Amazon rainforest live in stilt houses over the water. Water into which garbage and other waste is dumped – the same water that is used for human consumption, with important consequences on their health, whose magnitude was underlined by the Covid pandemic. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Oct 8 2021 (IPS)

Basic sanitation, a sector that is undervalued because, according to politicians, it does not bring in votes, has gained relevance in Brazil due to the pandemic that has hit the poor especially hard and the drought that threatens millions of people.

Brazil has made very little progress in sewerage construction in the last decade. In 2010, only 45.4 percent of the population had sewer service, a proportion that rose to 54.1 percent in 2019. Access to treated water increased from 81 to 83.7 percent in the same period.

During that time, however, hospitalisations due to waterborne diseases decreased by 54.7 percent, from 603,623 to 273,403, according to the study “Sanitation and Waterborne Diseases” by the Trata Brasil Institute, released on Oct. 5 in the city of São Paulo.

Among children under four, who represent 30 percent of the patients requiring hospital admission, the reduction was slightly more pronounced, 59.1 percent.

“The data make it clear that any improvement in the public’s access to drinking water, collection and treatment of wastewater results in great benefits to public health,” the Institute’s president, Édison Carlos, stated in the report.

Covid-19 has underscored the country’s social and economic inequalities by disproportionately affecting the poor, who for one thing are the least likely to have sewerage services.

This is reflected in the distribution of basic sanitation infrastructure by region in Brazil. In the North, only 12.3 percent of the population was served by a sewer system in 2019, the last year data was available from the governmental National Sanitation Information System (SNIS), which served as the basis for the study.

As a result, it is the region with the highest rate of hospitalisations, 22.9 per 10,000 inhabitants. It is also the region that concentrates the country’s most generous water resources, as it is located entirely in the Amazon basin.

But the presence of so many large rivers does not mean the local population has drinking water. In fact only a little more than half of the population has access to clean water.

The result is a high incidence of diarrhea, dengue fever, leptospirosis, schistosomiasis, malaria and yellow fever, all of which are waterborne diseases.

One of the favelas or shantytowns of São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, where local residents have turned a stream into an open-air garbage dump and a source of frequent flooding due to lack of sewage and garbage collection. Nor do favelas in Brazil’s cities have piped water. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

At the other extreme, the Northeast region suffers from water scarcity in most of its semiarid territory. With only 28.3 percent of the local population served by sewer systems and 73.9 percent with access to treated water, it recorded 19.9 cases of hospitalisation per 10,000 inhabitants in 2019.

Part of the progress in sanitation in the region is due to the more than 1.2 million rainwater storage tanks that have been set up in rural areas by the Articulação do Semiárido (ASA), a network of 3,000 social organisations created in 1999.

The semiarid ecoregion, an area of 1,130,000 square kilometres (most of it in the Northeast) that is home to 27 million people, suffered the longest drought on record from 2012 to 2017, and even until 2019 in some parts.

But this time the hunger, violence and exodus to other regions triggered by similar calamities in the past did not occur.

Disparities in health

A comparison of Brazil’s 26 states reveals more alarming disparities. The northeastern state of Maranhão, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, registered 54.04 hospitalisations per 10,000 inhabitants, far higher than its Amazonian neighbour to the west, Pará, with 32.62.

“Maranhão faces huge challenges in sanitation, as does Pará, but it has higher population density, more people living close together and in contact with dirty water in the open air, for example. Its beaches, often polluted by irregular waste, are another factor to consider,” said Rubens Filho, head of communications at the Trata Brasil Institute and coordinator of its new study.

At the other end of the scale, Rio de Janeiro stands out with the lowest rate of hospitalisations, only 2.84 per 10,000 inhabitants, even though some of its low-income municipalities are among those with the poorest sanitation coverage.

“It is possible that some municipalities do not register cases of waterborne diseases or that people do not seek medical assistance,” Filho told IPS from São Paulo, in an attempt to put the low rate of hospitalisations into context.

“Above and beyond the differences between states, Brazil still has more than 270,000 hospitalisations for preventable diseases; these are costs that could be drastically reduced if everyone had sanitation coverage,” he stressed.

Rainwater harvesting tanks are now part of the landscape in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, thanks to recent initiatives to help people live with drought. There are some 200,000 tanks for irrigating crops, like those of farmer Abel Manto, and 1.2 million to store drinking water. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The North and Northeast are the poorest regions in the country, despite the enormous contrast in terms of their ecosystems – rainforest vs semiarid. They are both far from the goal of near universal sanitation in the country by 2033, set by a law – the Legal Framework for Sanitation – passed in 2020.

More precisely, the aim is to bring treated water to 99 percent of the population and sewerage to 90 percent in this enormous country of 213 million people.

The three regions least affected by the lack of such infrastructure, the Midwest, South and Southeast, are suffering this year from the effects of reduced rainfall, apparently due to climate change and no longer to occasional, short-lived droughts.

The low rainfall began in 2020 and since then has caused interruptions in the water supply in cities such as Curitiba, capital of the southern state of Paraná, and an increase in forest fires in the Pantanal, wetlands on the border with Bolivia and Paraguay, and in the southern Amazon jungle.

This year, many cities in the southeastern state of São Paulo began rationing water. In the state capital, São Paulo, and surrounding urban areas, the local sanitation company reduces the pressure in the pipes at night, a measure that prevents leaks but leaves some areas without water.

The fear is that there will be a repeat of the 2014 and 2015 water shortage crisis, which was similar to other shortages that have occurred this century. Twenty years ago a similar drought caused blackouts and ushered in energy rationing for nine months, starting in June 2001.

Brazil depends heavily on rivers for its electricity supply. Even though the proportion was much higher two decades ago, hydroelectric power plants still account for 63 percent of total installed generation capacity.

Reforestation and recovery of springs and headwaters have become part of the country’s sanitation and energy policy.

The frequency of droughts in south-central Brazil confirms the role of the lush Amazon rainforest in increasing rainfall in large areas of this country and neighbouring Argentina and Paraguay.

So-called “flying rivers” carry moisture from the Amazon to South America’s most productive agricultural lands and to watersheds that play a key role in the production of hydroelectricity. But deforestation of the world’s largest tropical forest is taking its toll.

A view of the shantytown in São Bernardo do Campo, the hub of Brazil’s automobile industry, near São Paulo. A common sight in the poor neighbourhoods in Brazil’s cities: unpainted cinderblock houses are stacked on top of each other over streams, into which they dump their debris and garbage. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Lessons learned from Covid-19

Covid-19 has highlighted the urgent need for sanitation. There is a consensus among epidemiologists that the lack of sanitation is one of the factors in the unequal spread and lethality of the coronavirus, to the detriment of the poor, by limiting access to proper hygiene as a preventive measure.

With 598,152 deaths recognised by the Ministry of Health up to Oct. 4, Brazil’s death toll is second only to that of the United States, which counts more than 703,000 deaths due to Covid. But in proportional terms, 280 Brazilians have died per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 214 in the U.S., according to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland., which keeps a global record on the pandemic.

The need for improved sanitation infrastructure is also gaining momentum for financial reasons. Brazil’s states, whose governments control the main sanitation companies, see privatisation as a source of revenue to overcome their fiscal imbalance and possibly give the sector a boost.

The 2020 Legal Framework for Sanitation encourages the concession of the service to the private sector as a way to attract investment and meet the goal of near universal coverage.

Companies in four Brazilian states have already been privatised. In Rio de Janeiro, on Apr. 30, 2021, the sanitation services of three of the four areas into which the state was divided will be handed over to private groups for 4.2 billion dollars, 133 percent more than expected.

The fourth area is to be privatised later this year. The 35-year concession requires larger investments than the sums paid for the operation of the services.

Cleaning up rivers, lakes and bays, expanding and repairing the pipeline network, improving water quality and reducing distribution losses, estimated at 41 percent, are tasks that will fall to the new owners.

Zimbabweans readily join the COVID-19 vaccine queues, but the rollout hasn’t been smooth. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Zimbabwe , Oct 8 2021 (IPS)

More than a month ago, she lost her parents, brother, and wife, to the coronavirus. Then her fiancé battled COVID-19, but 27-year-old Melinda Gavi said she had not contracted the disease.

Gavi joined crowds scrambling to get vaccinated at Parirenyatwa hospital in the Zimbabwean capital Harare even though she was previously sceptical about getting vaccinated against the dreaded disease.

Her parents, brother, and wife were equally sceptical of the COVID-19 vaccines before they were visited by the disease, which eventually claimed their lives.

In a country of about 15 million people, nearly 5.5 million have had at least had one dose of the vaccine the Reuters COVID-19 tracker, which assuming that each person needs two doses, represents 18.8% of the population.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed in October that Zimbabwe had received 943 200 COVID-19 vaccine doses from the global COVAX Facility in September and October for its ongoing vaccination campaign.

IPS has been following the rollout of the vaccines in various centres over the past few months, recording people’s personal experiences in the queues.

Gavi says it has taken her days to get vaccinated.

“This is my third day coming here at Parirenyatwa to try and get vaccinated,” Gavi told IPS as she stood in a long and meandering queue at Zimbabwe’s biggest hospital.

About 200 people gathered at the back of the hospital, some looking tired as they lingered in the queue. Some sat on the pavements and or flower beds, waiting for their turn to get vaccinated in the slow-moving queue.

“We have limited vaccines, and often on a day we are vaccinating just 80 people and everybody else often just goes back home without getting vaccinated,” a nurse who refused to be named as she was unauthorised to speak to the media, told IPS.

In February this year, Zimbabwe began vaccinating its citizens against coronavirus after receiving a donation of 200 000 doses of China’s Sinopharm vaccine.

But when the vaccine first arrived, it was met with growing scepticism from social media platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter, and Facebook, which fuelled the vaccine hesitancy.

This is no longer the case. Now healthcare workers have to battle hordes of people scrambling for the vaccine.

“With time, as more and more people got vaccinated without severe safety fears, the public became more assured, and demand for vaccines gradually started to rise,” said epidemiologist Dr Grant Murewanhema in Harare.

In Bulawayo, on July 8, in the presence of IPS, at the United Bulawayo Hospital, a nurse moved along the queue of people waiting to get vaccinated, counting up to 60 recipients. She told the rest to return the next day.

She told them she only had enough vaccines for 60 people.

At number 60 was 47-year-old Jimmy Dzingai, who said he was a truck driver.

“Oh, better, at least I am going to get vaccinated,” said Dzingai then as he heaved a sigh of relief, folding his hands across his chest.

Meanwhile, as they were told to leave, others did so but grumbled as they filed outside the hospital, some waving their face masks in anger, shouting at hospital authorities for turning them away.

“This is not the first time I am coming here to try and get vaccinated. I have been here four times, and this is my fifth day starting mid-June – only to get excuses,” 54-year-old Limukani Dlela, a man who said he lived in Matsheumhlope, a low-density suburb in Bulawayo, told IPS saying that at times the excuse was that there not enough vaccines available and at other times there were a limited number of vaccines.

Corruption and nepotism have characterised this Southern African country’s bitter war against COVID-19, and many people like Dzingai, the truck driver, have not been spared by the rot.

As Dzingai stood at the end of the queue, four middle-aged women strode past him and all others, going straight to the head of the queue and quickly got vaccinated and left.

According to one of the nurses who manned the queue, “the four were staff members and couldn’t wait in the queue like everybody else.”

The nurse said this even though the four women, after receiving doses, immediately left the premises just like any other ordinary person.

“I was talking to my bosses right now, and my truck has been loaded for me to take the delivery to Zambia. I have told my bosses I was getting my vaccine. Instead, you are telling me I’m not going to be vaccinated. You should get water to inject me and give me the vaccine certificate. I will not leave this place without the vaccine,” swore the truck driver.

But the nurse would have none of it.

“You won’t be vaccinated today. That won’t happen, unfortunately,” she said.

Dzingai vowed to stay put at the hospital until he was vaccinated, but because the four women who jumped the queue and got vaccinated before him, it meant he (Dzingai) and three others who had waited at the end of the queue had to leave without the jab.

With many Zimbabweans like Dzingai now eager to get vaccinated, the government has so far authorised the use of China’s Sinovac and Sinopharm, Russia’s Sputnik V, and India’s Covaxin and the U.S. Johnson and Johnson vaccines.

It has not, however, been easy for people to get the doses. Now bribery has become the order of the day at Zimbabwe’s hospitals like Sally Mugabe Referral hospital in the capital Harare.

Lydia Gono (24), from Southertorn middle-income suburb in Harare, said she had to ‘switch to her purse’, which is local parlance for a bribe, to get quickly vaccinated at Sally Mugabe hospital, the closest medical facility to her home.

“I spent close to a week trying to get vaccinated here without success, but today I just rolled a US 10 dollar note in my hand and shook the hand of a nurse who manned the queue, leaving the note in her hand. I was taken to the front and vaccinated without any delay,” Gono told IPS.

Tired of the corruption and nepotism and the delaying tactics characterising the vaccination process at public healthcare centres, many middle-income earners like 35-year-old Daiton Sununguro have opted for the private medical centres to get their vaccines parting with US 40 dollars for a single dose.

“Paying is better than having to wait for many hours before getting the vaccine at public healthcare facilities. I will still come back and pay the other US 40 dollars for my second dose,” Sununguro told IPS at a posh private medical facility in Harare’s Mount Pleasant low-density suburb.

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The Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina, Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley and Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern. Credit: Pictures in montage ©United Nations

By Alison Kentish
DOMINICA, Sep 22 2021 (IPS)

On September 20, Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina accepted an award from the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network for her country’s ‘striking’ progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

That progress includes an adult literacy rate that jumped from 21 percent in 1981 to 75 percent in 2019 and a spike in access to electricity from 14 percent in 1991 to 92 percent today. The country has also drastically reduced the childhood mortality rate. Fifty years ago, 225 of every 1,000 children died before the age of five. By 2019, that figure was down to 31.

“Even though we are in the midst of a big crisis globally everywhere, we still want to celebrate Bangladesh’s achievements. When we analyze, as the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network does each year, countries’ progress toward the SDGs, Bangladesh came first in the world in most progress between 2015 and 2020,” said Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and Network President.

Sheikh Hasina has led Bangladesh for most of the award period. The four-time Prime Minister (1996-2001, 2009-2013, 2014-2018, 2018 to present) was honored for her commitment to sweeping education, healthcare, and social reform and her tireless focus on gender equity.

She credited her success with SDG progress to a vow to ‘leave no one behind.’

And it is that drive, along with her firm, decisive and science-driven approach to issues of sustainable development that has marked her leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Known as dynamic and visionary, Prime Minister Hasina is among women leaders whose stewardship of their countries during COVID-19 has been instructive and inspiring for the world.

Her administration issued a strict ‘no mask, no service’ policy in 2020. An early intervention saw students transitioning to online learning. They returned to the classroom last week, after 18 months. The government disbursed 26 stimulus packages totaling $14.6 billion to keep the economy afloat and expanded its social safety net programs to include 11 million people, most of them women and children.

Bangladesh has rolled out a massive, free vaccination campaign.

In June, Hasina told the country’s parliament that it aims to have 80 percent of the population vaccinated and promised to procure the vaccines ‘no matter how much’ it costs.

To date, just over 11 percent of the eligible population is fully vaccinated.

This year, the leader who usually uses her time at the United Nations General Assembly to advocate for climate financing and gender equity is adding vaccine equity to her mission.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has upset the world. It has taken countless lives and upset livelihoods. Millions of people worldwide have been reduced to poverty and hunger. Education is facing huge disruptions, especially of children,” she said.

“We want vaccines for everyone everywhere. There are many poor countries that cannot buy vaccines. Vaccines should be made available to them. Developed and rich countries can come forward.”

One day after Prime Minister Hasina addressed the 9th Annual International Conference on Sustainable Development, a fellow revered female leader, the Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley, made her case for support for vulnerable states.

Prime Minister Mottley has been hailed across the Caribbean and internationally as a well-spoken, forthright, and no-nonsense leader, providing the decisive leadership needed in a pandemic.

She is the first woman to lead the Caribbean country, and like Hasina, Mottley carries the weight of steering a climate-vulnerable country through a protracted crisis.

The worst pandemic in over 100 years has dealt a blow to her country’s, economy with a 17 percent decline in GDP in the last year. In April this year, a volcanic eruption on nearby St. Vincent doused Barbados in ash. It was the worst ash fall in over a century. Then in July, Elsa became the first hurricane to hit Barbados in 66 years.

Through it all, Mottley, the Caribbean’s only female Prime Minister, has remained resolute in steering her country through its multiple crises. Caribbean nationals regularly tune in to her national addresses – talks to her people that are tough when necessary, interspersed with light-hearted moments, but always clear and consistent messaging that has led many to refer to her as Prime Minister of the Caribbean.’

“You really inspire us. Your leadership is absolutely wonderful, and the power of your vision is just what we need,” Professor Sachs told the Barbados leader.

Mottley’s goal now is to ramp up vaccination numbers. According to the Barbados Government Information Service, about 36 percent of the eligible population is fully vaccinated, with the country recording just under 6,500 vaccinations weekly.

Mottley is aiming for 10,000 vaccinations a week,

“If we can do that, and we can maintain that each week for the next five weeks, then we will have the majority of those persons fully vaccinated before the end of November… We may, as a country, consider then the options of significant review and removal of restrictions that we have in place,” she said this week.

On a different island, this time in the South Pacific, another popular female leader assured her country that 90 percent vaccination coverage or higher would bring significant ease in restrictions.

“High vaccination raters will undoubtedly be a game-changer for New Zealand, but the key there is high,” said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

Ardern’s administration has launched an ‘elimination’ strategy for COVID-19. According to the country’s health ministry, it is a targeted means of ‘finding the virus and stamping it out. It is hinged on vaccination as protection.

The leader, now in her second term in office, was a popular figure pre-COVID – a young mother, the country’s youngest female Prime Minister who gained international admiration for her poise, empathy, and stoic leadership through crises such as the March 2019 terror attacks and a volcanic eruption nine months later.

During the pandemic, Arden again grabbed global attention for stewardship in crisis.

A former communications major, her regular press appearances show a world leader taking clear, tough decisions based on science, justice and equity.

Like Prime Ministers Hasina and Mottley, Arden is exhibiting the best of female leadership even in the worst of times.

She continues to take early action against potential COVID-19 case surges – even when her decisions raise eyebrows. In August, New Zealand dominated international headlines when Ardern announced a swift, national lockdown over a single case of the Delta virus.

This week, she said that decision saved her country from a potential explosion in cases.

“With Delta, we knew we couldn’t take chances, and the immediate move to Level Four, initially to understand the breadth of the outbreak and then to get it under control, was the right move and has worked,” she told a September 19 post-cabinet press briefing.

“Modelers tell us that, had we waited just one more week to act, we would be sitting at around 5,000 cases by now,” she said.

According to UN Women, women are heads of state and government in only 21 countries, but they continue to be applauded for their more efficient management of the COVID-19 health crisis.

“They are being recognized for the rapidity of the response they are leading, which has not only included measures to ‘flatten the curve’––such as confinement measures, social distancing, and widespread testing––but also the transparent and compassionate communication of fact-based public health information.”

The leaders face their fair share of challenges.

Prime Minister Hasina has stated that COVID-19 is threatening her country’s ambitious plans to further accelerate health, education, and climate initiative, on the journey of successfully achieving the SDGs. Prime Minister Mottley is leading a small island state in a stubbornly vaccine-hesitant region, and Prime Minister Arden’s lockdown and elimination strategies have earned her some caustic criticism.

What the three have shown, however, is that women leaders have the resolve and strength to make hard decisions – along with the compassion, sensitivity, and empathy to help their countries survive the toughest of times.

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Many families in the Solomon Islands and across the Pacific Islands region struggle to keep their children in school due to COVID-19 related economic hardship. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia , Aug 27 2021 (IPS)

Before the pandemic, many Pacific Island countries grappled with low numbers of students completing secondary education. Now experts in the region are concerned that the closure of schools to contain the spread of COVID-19, and the economic downturn, will lead to even more students dropping out of education early.

It’s an issue that has consequences for the region’s future development, given its large youth population. The Pacific Islands is home to about 11.9 million people, more than half aged below 23 years. And 90 percent of Pacific Islanders reside in the southwest Melanesian countries of Fiji, Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Solomon Islands.

“Many factors affect education retention in the Pacific region, and COVID-19-related disruptions to education have added to the list. It is very possible that, in instances where families are responsible for some or all of the fees for secondary education, some students will not be able to continue their education for economic reasons,” Michelle Belisle, Director of the Educational Quality and Assessment Program (EQAP) at the regional development organization, Pacific Community, in Fiji told IPS.

“The teenage years are an important time in a young person’s life and, unfortunately, experience has shown that students who leave school before the end of secondary are not likely to return to education until later in their adult life, if at all,” she continued.

Many families, now on lower incomes or affected by unemployment since the COVID-19 virus emerged in early 2020, are struggling to afford the costs of transport, fees, and educational materials for their children to attend schools where they are open.

In the Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific, a nation of about 721,000 people scattered across more than 900 islands, less than half of all children finish primary school. Josephine Teakeni, President of Vois Blong Mere, a civil society organization in the capital, Honiara, told IPS that: “Some families have had to delay their children’s education while they find ways to get money to pay school fees…to send their children back to school in 2022. Some families have taken the risk of taking loans from formal and informal financial institutions to pay for school fees or support income-generating initiatives to pay school fees.”

For years, many Pacific Island countries had strived and successfully boosted universal education. But, while net primary enrolment is high across the region, the numbers of students starting school have not been matched by those completing it. In the Cook Islands, 100 percent of youths aged 10-14 years are enrolled in education, but this declines to 57 percent of those aged 15-19 years. Similarly, 93 percent of people aged 10-14 years are in school in the Solomon Islands, in contrast to 68 percent of the older age group.

Now, the closure of schools, as part of national lockdown restrictions, is exacerbating the loss of learning. UNICEF, which is working with Pacific Island governments to retain students in education, advocates that ‘with the COVID-19 pandemic now well into its second year, safely reopening schools has become an urgent priority. School attendance is critical for children’s education and lifetime prospects.’ It claims that extending school closures in the Asia Pacific region could result in losses of up to US$1.25 trillion in future productivity and lifetime earnings for the current generation.

As of 12 August, a total of 93,346 cases of COVID-19 were recorded in the Pacific Islands. The majority were located in Fiji, where there were 38,812 cases and PNG with 17,806.

In both nations, education institutions have shut for periods since the beginning of last year. In PNG, primary and secondary schools closed their doors from March to May 2020, and then again in March 2021, as virus cases rapidly rose. Restrictions were lifted in May, but the Pacific Community reports that many schools have chosen not to reopen because of ongoing fears about infection. Meanwhile, the lockdown in Fiji, which began on 20 April, is into its fourth month, and students are being encouraged to turn to online learning.

However, while about 50 percent of Fiji’s population has access to the internet, this drops to 11 percent in PNG. In the region’s most populous nation of about 9 million people, one-third of women and one-quarter of men aged six years and over never attended school prior to the pandemic. Many students, especially in rural areas, have faced significant barriers to participating in tuition being offered via radio, television, and the internet.

“There are lessons provided on TV and radio. Unfortunately, for most children, these lessons cannot be accessed due to radio stations in the provinces having poor signals and connections. Similarly, with TV. If electricity is not provided, lessons on TV are useless,” Dr Kilala Devette-Chee, Leader of the Universal Basic Education Research Program at PNG’s National Research Institute, told IPS. She added that high rates of illiteracy in rural communities also reduced the ability of many parents to support their children with home-based learning.

A rapid assessment by the PNG Government last year revealed that less than half of students in more than 72 percent of schools across the country had electricity at home. Only 22 percent of schools reported that most of their students had radios.

Children celebrate Youth Day this month, however, there is concern that COVID-19 lockdowns impacted on the education of children in the Pacific region. Credit: Pacific Community

“The lack of accessible alternate learning pathways for students outside of formal secondary education completion [across the region] leaves school leavers in many areas with no options for continuing and completing their education,” Belisle said. The digital divide could increase inequality in education outcomes, with rural and remotely located students the most vulnerable.

As a development organization with the capacity to draw from expertise across the region, the Pacific Community plays a vital role during this crisis. It’s providing governments and educational institutions with research, data, and insights into how the pandemic affects educational practices and outcomes, supporting informed decisions and response plans at the national level.

The organization’s gathering and analysis of student learning data, literacy and numeracy assessments and the performance of students in relation to their curriculum “is a priority to understand how the COVID-19 disruption is impacting learners differently and to assess risk factors for different segments of the population,” Belisle explained.

“In a post-COVID-19 environment, understanding the challenges of adapting teaching and support of students around disruptions to classroom-based learning, and how to support students learning at home for extended periods, will be critical to maintaining equitable access to quality education for all students.”

The work of the Pacific Community’s EQAP program, which receives major donor funding from Australia and New Zealand, also includes ensuring the quality and recognition of job-related skills training programs, which lead to micro qualifications, in fields ranging from business management to the sports professions. These initiatives aim to upskill Pacific Islanders to adapt to the changing landscape of work opportunities and build their resilience in times of economic setbacks.

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Chiring Tamang holds the family’s new baby while his wife Priya looks on. She delivered the girl at home in their village in Nepal’s Sindhupalchowk district in February 2021. Credit: Marty Logan / IPS

By Marty Logan
Kathmandu, Nepal, Jul 21 2021 (IPS)

One year after Nepal’s Ministry of Health (MoH) appealed to international organisations in the country to urgently supply a drug used to stop excessive bleeding after childbirth, a UN agency has delivered $1 million worth of contraceptives to prevent another shortage.

The 1.6 million cycles of oral contraceptive pills and 776,000 units of injectable contraceptives and syringes will prevent roughly 75 000 unintended pregnancies, 22 000 unsafe abortions and 80 maternal deaths, according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).

As it was last year at this time, Nepal is at the tail end of a lockdown designed to break a runaway number of Covid-19 cases. Between April and May 2021, daily cases went from 150 to more than 8,000—fuelled by outbreaks in neighbouring India. Intensive care unit beds were unavailable in most hospitals in the capital Kathmandu and some cities on the southern border with India, and patients attached to oxygen tanks were forced into hospital parking lots. Crematoriums had to be expanded to accommodate the dead.

More than 9 500 people have died, and 667 000 had been infected as of 18 July, according to official figures, which are widely considered to underestimate the true impact.

“This support is very timely as Nepal was on the verge of facing a shortage of the injectable contraceptives and oral pills,” said Dr Tara Nath Pokhrel, Director of the Family Welfare Division (FWD) of the MoH. “These supplies will greatly help the federal, provincial and local governments to address the increasing family planning needs during the COVID-19 pandemic,” he added in a UNFPA press release.

Last year’s urgent need was misoprostol, a drug used for medical abortion and to stop excessive bleeding of new mothers, also known as postpartum haemorrhage (PPH). The condition is the leading cause of death among women who give birth at home, a number that skyrocketed after the first case of Covid-19 was detected in January 2020. Deliveries in health facilities fell by more than 50% during the 2020 lockdown, according to The Lancet journal.

The shortage affected only the three-pill package of misoprostol used to prevent PPH, not medical abortion kits. It was December before UNFPA could deliver nearly 500 000 doses to the government, a one-year supply.

Maintaining a steady supply of misoprostol has been a challenge for the Government of Nepal since it took over the programme from a project sponsored by the US government in 2010. Initially, it was able to turn to international partners to source the drug outside of the country, but it soon absorbed the purchasing into its procurement system.

However, in 2014 the government’s corruption agency charged eight ministry of health employees with importing poor quality misoprostol into the country at inflated prices.

Eventually, they were acquitted, along with private-sector suppliers, but the high-profile case put a ‘chill’ on further buying by government officials, a former employee of the project told IPS. “If the person needed to justify (misoprostol procurement) maybe they were thinking, ‘this created lots of tension in the past, so let’s not go for procurement’.

Shortages resulted. Then in 2015, earthquakes rocked Nepal, killing nearly 9,000 people. That disaster was followed by a months-long blockade of road routes from India after Nepal’s politicians approved a controversial new Constitution. Supply chains became twisted and unreliable.

In 2017, following Nepal’s first elections under a federal governance system, some health responsibilities were transferred from central authorities to provincial or local officials, including the purchase and distribution of misoprostol. But local governments appeared unprepared.

“In general, local governments did not have sufficient time and resources to strengthen their procurement capacity on lifesaving maternal and neonatal health commodities,” a spokesperson for UNFPA noted in a statement. “It also depended on how much priority each local government had given to the health sector in general.”

Before Covid-19 hit, the misoprostol programme was in place in 56 of Nepal’s 77 districts, but in January 2020, a survey of 12 of the 56 districts found that none had the drug, says Surya Bhatta, executive director of One Heart Worldwide, an international NGO working in Nepal.

“I think misoprostol is one of the most discussed matters in our office,” he adds. “We talk about this a lot with local leaders, pregnant mothers, female community health volunteers during their monthly meetings, and with service providers in the health facilities. Even for the managers, in larger government forums, there is a lot of discussion happening, but the implementation side has a lot of holes to fill.”

During the 2020 lockdown, misoprostol shortages and PPH deaths of women who gave birth at home generated many headlines. This year there have been no reports of misoprostol shortages, Dr Punya Poudel of the FWD told IPS. However, maternal deaths remained above average for the second year running. From mid-March 2020 to mid-June 2021, there were 258 maternal deaths, compared to 51 in the same period pre-Covid, according to preliminary statistics.

Nepal’s maternal mortality rate of 239 per 100,000 births is equivalent to roughly 1,200 deaths annually.

In the agency’s press release, UNFPA Representative to Nepal Lubna Baqi urged the government and partners to make reproductive health a priority.

“Nepal has continued to struggle with shortages in supplies due to competing priorities and demands, but it is time for the government and development partners to turn their attention to preventing unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions by investing in family planning and comprehensive sexuality education.”

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Logistic and communication challenges to rolling out the COVID-19 vaccine are immense in the rural and remote highlands region of Papua New Guinea. Credit: Catherine Wilson

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia , Jul 13 2021 (IPS)

Papua New Guinea (PNG), like many other Pacific Island countries, successfully held COVID-19 at bay last year, aided by early shutting of national borders. However, by March this year, the pandemic was surging in the most populous Pacific Island nation, and by July, it had reported 17,282 cases of the virus and 175 fatalities.

PNG has a steep battle against the virus ahead, made more problematic by a high rate of refusal by health workers to take the vaccine. PNG’s Health Minister, Jelta Wong, stressed in an interview with Australia’s Lowy Institute for International Policy in April that “the vaccine will be the key to containing COVID-19 in our country.”

But in Eastern Highlands Province in the country’s rural interior, Dr Max Manape, the province’s Director of Public Health, told IPS that “in our province, there is a huge COVID-19 hesitancy due to so much negativity of COVID-19 vaccinations in social media and we are finding it very hard to convince our fellow frontline workers, including health workers.” By early July, only 23.3 percent of all health and essential workers in the province were vaccinated, including 329 health workers.

The situation is causing wider community concern. “Health workers are the frontline and first responders in this pandemic, and their refusal places them at a greater risk to contract the virus. This will lead to the feared collapse of our struggling health system, and the roll-on effect of other deaths from preventable diseases and maternal health issues created by a lack of manpower,” a spokesperson for the PNG National Council of Women told IPS.

In April, the country was supplied with 132,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, the first batch of a total supply of 588,000 doses by COVAX, the global alliance of organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), working to achieve equitable vaccine access. The Australian Government also supplied eight thousand doses. The national vaccination rollout began in early May, with priority given to frontline responders.

Yet progress has been very slow. By this month, only 59,125 people in a national population of about 9 million had been vaccinated, including 7,844 health workers. The largest group of healthcare recipients, about 1,150, were located in the capital, Port Moresby.

PNG’s Health Minister says there are numerous challenges to achieving widespread inoculation. “In this country, we’ve never had an adult vaccine go out, we’ve always had the children’s ones, and that has worked really well. It is going to be a real challenge for us to do this vaccination rollout…The biggest thing will be education. Our people need to be educated enough to know that this vaccine will help them in the future,” Wong said.

More than 80 percent of people in PNG live in rural and remote areas where logistic and communication challenges are the greatest. Here scepticism of the vaccine is high. Only 12 percent of all health and essential workers in remote Enga Province in the northwestern highlands region have been vaccinated. “The uptake of the vaccine is very poor in Enga Province. Frontline health workers at the hospital have mostly refused the vaccine,” Dr David Mills, Director of Rural Health and Training at Kompiam District Hospital in the province, told IPS.

However, it’s a nationwide issue. PNG’s newspaper, The National, conducted a public online survey last month, reporting that 77 percent of respondents did not want the vaccine. In May, a survey of students at the University of Papua New Guinea by the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, Canberra, revealed a high level of indecision among respondents. Only 6 percent said they would accept the vaccine, 46 percent had not decided either way, while 48 percent planned to refuse it.

Doctors and health care leaders claim that major reasons for the low uptake are cultural and religious opposition, misinformation and conspiracy theories being touted on social media. And lack of public trust in the country’s health system, which, for decades, has struggled with an insufficient workforce, very poor infrastructure, and resources.

However, Dr Mills said that the government was very active in responding to conspiracy theories with facts and authoritative health information. “There is plenty of information, too much information. It’s a blizzard of information but sorting it out is the hard part. Keep in mind that there is a high level of mistrust and scepticism generally in this society. People don’t take anything at face value. It’s fertile soil for believing alternative hypotheses,” he said.

Confusion was one of the biggest reasons for indecision among respondents to the Australian National University’s survey. And they were more likely to trust the information provided by local Christian leaders (32 percent), followed by family and friends (31 percent) and the WHO (29 percent). In contrast, faith in the government as a source of information was negative (-8) percent, leading to the study’s conclusion that ‘distrust of institutions of authority and vaccine hesitance goes together.’

Despite having an economy based on natural and mineral resource wealth, PNG has a relatively low human development ranking of 155 out of 189 countries and territories, and basic service delivery beyond urban centres, hindered by lack of investment and corruption, has been deficient for decades. There are 0.5 physicians and 5.3 nurses per 10,000 people in the country, according to the WHO.

Distrust of the vaccine by healthcare staff has consequences. “High vaccine refusal amongst health workers, particularly nurses, confuses the general public and fosters vaccine scepticism. And unvaccinated health workers can be a danger to the very vulnerable patients that we have as inpatients in hospitals,” Professor Glen Mola, Head of Reproductive Health, Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the School of Medicine and Health Services, University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, told IPS.

Although uptake by health staff in the capital could change following a new ruling at the Port Moresby General Hospital. “Recently, the hospital board approved a policy of the hospital management that any new health workers, contract renewals and trainees, like interns and medical students, must be vaccinated before they can enter the clinical care areas of the hospital,” Professor Mola said.

However, in the highlands, Dr Mills said the challenges were too great for vaccinating everyone. “For the broader population, vaccination was never going to be the way out (of the pandemic). The uptake is too small, the delivery too small, and delivery mechanisms too weak. We will get to herd immunity the hard way, which is by getting most people infected,” he claimed.

Nevertheless, in June, further funding of US$30 million was approved by the World Bank to boost PNG’s COVID-19 inoculation program, where it is now being offered to all citizens aged 18 years and over.

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A domestic worker in her house in the Dhaka’s Malibagh slum. She no longer has work because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Courtesy: Rafiqul Islam

By Rafiqul Islam
DHAKA, Jun 30 2021 (IPS)

Rani Akter, a mother of five, usually works as a domestic helper in Dhaka’s Zikatola area. When the coronavirus pandemic broke out in Bangladesh last March, her employers asked her not to come to their homes for fear of infection.

“I lost my work in three houses one after the other, which became a nightmare for me. My rich employers did not allow me in their homes as they thought that I might carry the invisible virus,” Akter told IPS.

Akter’s husband also lost his job because of the COVID-19 lockdown and the family fell on hard times.

“We had nowhere to go. Once we had a home in Mehendiganj in the coastal Barishal district, but riverbank erosion engulfed our home eight years ago. That’s why we were compelled to stay in the city,” she said.

Akter began knocking on doors, looking — unsuccessfully — for work.

“We did not find government relief or cash assistance. But we had to survive and that’s why at first we were bearing family expenses from our savings. And when the savings were spent, we started borrowing from our relatives. We’ve already borrowed Tk 40,000 ($ 471). We are taking Tk 5,000 to 6,000 ($ 58 to $ 70) in loans per month from neighbours and relatives to meet our food demand and pay rent,” Akter said.

She said her family was running into debt and she did not know when their suffering would end.

Shahana Akter (20), a single mother who works as a domestic helper in Netrakona town, also lost her work when the pandemic started. But she was more fortunate that most.

“When I lost my work, I thought how my five-year-old son and I would survive. I had no savings. But I was lucky enough as I got a new work after two months of the lockdown,” Shahana Akter told IPS.

Millions of domestic workers lost their jobs because of COVID-19

There is no official data on the number of domestic workers in Bangladesh. But according to Rezaul Haque, additional secretary (Labour Wing) of Bangladesh’s Labour and Employment Ministry, around 95 percent of domestic helpers are women and girls.

A 2006 International Labour Organisation (ILO) study estimated that Bangladesh had four million domestic workers in a country with a population of 163 million.

While a recent study by the National Domestic Women Workers Union (NDWWU) showed there are about 2.2 to 2.5 million domestic workers, of which about 60 percent or 1.5 million were live-out workers with the remaining 40 percent living their employer’s homes.

According to NDWWU general secretary Murshida Akter Nahar, when the coronavirus outbreak began here in March 2020, many domestic workers lost their jobs without notice and without being paid the wages owed to them. 

It is estimated that around 1.2 million live-out workers lost their jobs since March 2020.

“And many domestic helpers were forced out of their employers’ houses, so they had to suffer a miserable life during the lockdown last year. They had no shelter to live and no food to eat in Dhaka city. That was why many of them were compelled to leave the city,” she told IPS.

Once the COVID-19 infection rate reduced, many domestic workers returned to the city, hoping to be re-employed by their former employers. But most did not get their jobs back.

Nahar said those domestic helpers who had been able to find employment, lost their jobs when the coronavirus situation started deteriorating once again this March. “But they did not get enough support from the government.”

She said many domestic workers started begging, resulting a rapid rise of beggars on the city streets.        

Mahmuda Begum (40) lives in a small rented house in the city’s Zikatola area and she had also worked in the area as a domestic helper. When the pandemic began she lost her job overnight.

“I lost my only livelihood option due to COVID-19. I spent all the savings that I had. Now I have no money to pay house rent (Taka 5,000 per month or $58) or buy food and other essential goods. That’s why I had no option but to borrow money at high interest,” Begum told IPS.

Begum, a widow and mother of two, said she did not pay her rent for four months and her family often have to starve for lack of food. “We cannot eat meals three times in a day,” she added. 

Shahana Akter (20), a single mother and domestic worker in Netrakona town, also lost her work when the pandemic started. She was able to find employment again. Credit: Rafiqul Islam/IPS

Domestic work is an unregulated sector

Rights bodies have been demanding ratification of the ILO Convention 189 and implementation of the Domestic Workers Protection and Welfare Policy. In 2015, the Bangladesh government adopted the Domestic Workers Protection and Welfare Policy aiming to ensure the rights of domestic workers and they were supposed to be a registration process. 

“But the government is yet to implement the policy. We are also demanding the government include the domestic work issue in the Labour Act to be amended,” Nahar said.

Domestic Workers Rights Network coordinator Abul Hossain said: “At the onset of the lockdown enforced in Bangladesh, the domestic workers faced a lot of suffering. About 30 percent of them, who lost work, were compelled to return to their villages and those who were in the city did not have any work. A majority of them did not get any government support.”

He said that many were now in a difficult situation as they could not pay rent and were trapped in debt. He said this also resulted in a rapid rise in family feuds.

Hossain, also a trade union leader, said it was impossible to currently ensure the rights of domestic workers and suggested bringing them under a legal framework to establish their rights.

Haque, additional secretary (Labour Wing) of the Labour and Employment Ministry, said the government distributed cash assistance and relief among the unemployed by preparing their lists. He said that there was no specific social protection scheme for domestic workers as they worked in the informal sector.

Haque said that if the proposed Domestic Workers Protection and Welfare Policy Act was passed, the rights of domestic workers could be established.

“Talks continue with stakeholders concerned to formulate a law to ensure the rights of domestic workers,” Haque said.      

_______________________________________________________________________________

This feature was made possible by a donation from Farida Sultana Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Farida Sultana passed away in December 2020 after battling COVID-19 for two weeks. 

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Sarah and Doris ride to school on their bicycles because they live several kilometres away. Ghana’s education sector was one of the hardest affected by the pandemic and for many girls, particularly those in rural areas, the consequences of school closures means many will never return to their schooling. Credit: Jamila Akweley Okertchiri/IPS

By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri
ACCRA/WA EAST DISTRICT, Ghana, May 27 2021 (IPS)

Seventeen-year-old Muniratu Adams, a form two student of the Jeyiri D/A Junior High School at Funsi in the Wa East District of the Upper West Region of Ghana, is fortunate to have returned to school this January after the long COVID-19 shutdown.

Ghana’s education sector was one of the hardest affected by the pandemic and for many girls, particularly those in rural areas, the consequences of school closures means many will never return to their schooling.

“It was difficult for me to come back to school,” she tells IPS. “When I was home, I did not think I will be able to return to school.”

Adams was like many girls here who had to take on more responsibilities at home during the lockdown.

“I had little time to study my books because I had more household chores to do and I also had to help my family farm for food which we survive on,” she explains. “When I get to learn, I don’t get the help I need,” she adds.

Last March, Ghana closed schools in the wake of rising COVID-19 infections across the country.

Approximately 9.2 million learners from Kindergarten to High School and about 500,000 tertiary learners were affected until schools opened in mid-January, according to a report by United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

However, the prolonged absence of teaching and learning activities in a structured setting disrupted the academic calendar affecting the gains made in education and negatively impacting low performing students.

For many children from vulnerable groups, including children with disabilities, the prolonged school closures have put a premature end to their education.

Prior to the pandemic, UNICEF data for Ghana showed that 16.9 percent of children aged 5 to 11 years, 50.9 percent of children aged 12 to 14 years, and 83.3 percent of children aged 15 to 17 years were either not attending school, two or more years behind in school, or have not achieved the correct level of schooling for their grade. 

The pandemic’s impacts on children’s access and quality of education were most severely felt through the tracking closure of schools without adequate alternative education services accessible by all children, nation-wide.

This exacerbated existing inequities in education in the short and long- terms and worsened existing barriers to access as urban/rural disparities are significant, with children in rural areas, as well as in the Northern and Upper West regions faring far worse.

Adams says initially she was unable to continue with her studies at home during the closure of schools as she did not have the tools to facilitate her studies.

“My parents did not have a television or a radio at home so I read only my notes ,which I had before our school was closed,” she says.  “But later I got a mobile device which helped me to learn through the remote learning system.”

Remote Learning Impact

Ghana’s government, with funding from the World Bank, introduced a $15 million, one-year remote learning system as part of the COVID-19 response for continued learning, recovery and resilience for basic education. 

It included developing accessible and inclusive learning modules through TV and radio, distributing printed teaching and learning materials, distributing pre-loaded content devices to vulnerable groups who lack access to technology, and in-service teacher training to ensure teachers can effectively deliver lessons through innovative platforms.

Despite the remote learning platforms, Adams says she and some students in her community still faced a lot of challenges in ensuring equitable access to these services, because “we do not have access to online learning devices or the internet at home”.

“A large number of us in my community lack technology such as TV sets, computers, smart phones and other online devices, as well as stable internet connectivity,” Adams says.

Chief Director of the Ministry of Education, Benjamin Kofi Gyasi, who is also the COVID-19 focal person for education, tells IPS that while remote learning strategies aim to ensure continual learning for all children, “we know that the most marginalised children, including those in the most rural, hard-to-reach and poorest communities and girls, may not be able to access these opportunities.”

He adds that the ministry is prioritising the learning of most vulnerable children through the provision of learning devices/equipment and connectivity, where possible, adding that the initiative has reached more than half of targeted learners.

Executive Director of the African Education Watch, Kofi Asare, tells IPS that more children have been left behind as a result of the pandemic. He believes the government can do more to ensure that vulnerable children especially those in the remote and poorest communities of the country have the tools needed to access quality education.

‘Now the children are back to the classrooms but I can confidently say that we have lost a significant number due to the long period schools were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” he asserts.

His statement is confirmed by Adams, who says some girls in her class are yet to return more than five months after schools reopened.

“I have not seen some of my friends since we started school in January, I do not know if they will be coming or not,” she tells IPS. “My friend, Hassana Yakubu who came to school here from another community has still not returned.”

This feature was made possible by a donation from Farida Sultana Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Farida Sultana passed away in December 2020 after battling COVID-19 for two weeks. 

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Social distancing in a Macau Hospital waiting room. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said censorship of the Chinese media made the COVID-19 situation worse. Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, May 26 2021 (IPS)

China is one of the worst places in the world for media freedom, according to the global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) which ranked the country 177 out of 180 in its latest World Press Freedom Index. In the report, the group warned that Beijing is taking “internet censorship,  surveillance and propaganda to unprecedented level,” and had “taken advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to enhance its control over online information even more”. China is also the world’s biggest jailers of journalists with more than 120 journalists and what the group calls “defenders of press freedom” currently detained.

IPS spoke to Cedric Alviani, East Asia Bureau Head at RSF, about what effect China’s media restrictions had in the early days of the country’s Covid-19 outbreak over a year ago, how foreign journalists are facing unprecedented pressures in the country, and what Beijing is doing to try and create a New World Media Order to spread its propaganda around the globe.

Interpress Service (IPS): Media freedom watchdogs, and many doctors, have pointed to how restrictions on media during the Covid-19 pandemic may have cost lives. Some members of RSF have even gone as far as to say that had China had a freer press, the Covid-19 pandemic may not have needed to happen. Would you agree with that?

Cedric Alviani (CA): What we are saying is that had there been a freer press in China, information about the first infections would have been made public much sooner, and authorities in China, and elsewhere, may have been able to better control the spread. The pandemic may not have been so severe. But we are not in any way blaming China for the pandemic as there are so many other factors involved in any pandemic.

However, censorship made the situation worse. Viruses do not recognise borders, nor censorship. Compare what happened in China with regard to open reporting on the virus, and Taiwan, where the authorities were very open right from the start with information about Covid and disseminating it to the public. That way the public were fully informed and could make decisions to protect themselves.

We still do not have the information to fully see the current situation with Covid in China because of censorship. Have there been any outbreaks? Would we know, be told about them? We cannot have a clear picture.

What this pandemic has shown is the very reason we need a free press and independent journalism so that the facts and full information can be got out. This is not just in the case of a pandemic, but in any situation in which getting full information out to people can help save lives.

In a world where media is completely controlled by the state, can you imagine how many epidemics there would be? You cannot censor, or hide, a virus. They could spread overnight. There would be no full information, doctors would be afraid to speak.

IPS: In RSF’s latest press freedom index, China is ranked the fourth worst country in the world for media freedom and the report accompanying the index said that China continues to take internet censorship, surveillance, and propaganda to “unprecedented levels”. What kind of media restrictions do Chinese journalists face and what happens to journalists who defy those restrictions and report freely, or critically of the government?

CA: China is the world’s worst enemy of free press. Our fear is that in 20 years there will be no journalism, only state propaganda. The censorship authorities in the country are providing lists to media of what they can and cannot talk about. The lists are getting longer all the time.

IPS: Is this the same in Hong Kong, where there have been increasing curbs on general freedoms in the last few years?

CA: In Hong Kong, the Chinese government has entered ownership of most Chinese language media and through economic pressure has also managed to deprive other media of funds. The situation is getting worse with direct attacks being used to impose Beijing’s media rules and censorship on local media.

IPS: Last year, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, news about the situation in China leaked out to the rest of the world through many so-called ‘citizen-journalists’. Some of these people later reportedly disappeared or there were claims they had been forced into silence by the authorities and were living in fear of arrest, or worse. Has the regime essentially shutdown any and all citizen journalism now, and what does this mean for freedom of information in the country?

CA: We use the term ‘non-professional journalist’ rather than citizen journalist as these are people who are imparting facts, as professional journalists do – to their readers or audience. What has happened to these non-professional journalists is that since Chinese leader Xi Jinping came to power, professional journalists have been increasingly under pressure, and some people in society have stepped in to replace them and do the role professional journalists have found increasingly difficult to perform by getting information out there that is not being seen by people, for instance information about various social movements in China, which is not being disseminated. Obviously, non-professional journalists have also come under pressure in recent times – some bloggers have been jailed for years for writing about subjects such as corruption of officials – but there will always be people out there who will want to get hold of, and spread, information about what is going on.

IPS: What is the situation like for foreign journalists in China?

CA: Unlike local journalists, their families can’t be threatened so they can do freer reporting than domestic journalists. But now they are coming under pressure from the regime. A lot are moving to Taiwan, which is a safe haven for journalists, but it makes it more difficult to report on mainland China and get an accurate picture of events there. The world needs foreign correspondents in mainland China so we know what is happening there.

In the last year, the Chinese government has expelled 18 foreign correspondents. So many being expelled is unheard of here. Foreign journalists are starting to worry they may be taken hostage in political disputes between China and other countries. They have also complained of pressure being put on their sources, so they are left with no one to speak to for their stories as those sources are too scared to speak on record or too scared to speak at all.

IPS: Can you see a time in the future where foreign journalists will not be able to work at all in China, or not without their work being censored or approved in some way by authorities in Beijing?

CA: Unfortunately, it is looking more and more likely that this could happen. Twenty years ago, China needed foreign correspondents to promote the country and its story to the world. In recent years though it has developed a system of propaganda so the regime can reach the people it wants to directly, and therefore no longer needs foreign correspondents. There may come a time when foreign correspondents do not want to work in China.

IPS: RSF has previously spoken about what it claims is China’s pursuit of a New World Media Order to expand its ideological influence beyond its borders, which poses a threat to free journalism and democracy. Could you explain what this New World Media Order is and how exactly China is pursuing it?

CA: The New World Media Order is simple to explain – China’s aim is to make journalism a synonym for propaganda. It wants to remove any counterforce or opposition to the regime in power. Investigative journalism is necessary for democracy and accountability, and what China wants is to have ‘journalists’ who are patriotic people who present propaganda. The regime is trying to change and control the narrative of itself and China. It is using international TV broadcasting, as well as buying up advertising space in international media and even working its way into foreign media, as part of its aim to create this new order.

IPS: Do you think the countries in which China is trying to infiltrate foreign media and gain influence are aware that this is what Beijing is doing?

CA: Everyone is aware of what China is doing with this New World Media Order and trying to infiltrate media, but they have closed their eyes to it because countries want to do trade with China. There has been this engagement and stated aims of trying to change and improve the human rights situation in China, but it has been shown that nothing has changed. What is going to happen is that citizens in these other countries, in democracies, are going to soon realise that their governments have been selling their countries’ souls for decades.

IPS: Beijing could argue that by setting up Chinese language TV stations and media outlets in other countries it is doing nothing different to what the BBC, CNN, or other similar foreign broadcasters do, or have done, in China. What would your counter argument be for that?

CA: There is a huge difference between public media, i.e. media which is essentially owned by the public, and state media. It is important for any public to have access to information which is independent, and which acts as a reference media for the public. For example, the BBC is a public media, it is now owned or run by the state authorities, it has its own board, and is responsible for its own decisions, and it is impossible for the government to make it publish or broadcast something which it does not want to. It is independent. But something like China’s CCTV has to promote the Chinese communist party’s propaganda. The two entities are entirely different in their nature and it is incorrect to even compare them in any way.

IPS: Are other regimes copying China’s example of gaining influence and peddling propaganda in foreign media to pursue their own ideological and political aims?

CA: China’s model of media turning into state propaganda is being exported all over the world. Dictators now know that if they can control the media, they can keep getting re-elected because there is only one message getting to the people – that they have a glorious leader.

IPS: What can, or should, countries which claim to support freedom of information and free media, such as many Western democracies, be doing to counter China’s pursuit of a New World Media Order?

What they have to do is to remain democracies and open and not arbitrarily get rid or ban any media. But they also have to have a system in place which protects free, independent media and makes sure competition is fair, and that any media operating on that market do so by adhering to free and open journalism and not to propaganda.

IPS: What are the prospects for media freedom in China in the medium and long-term future?

CA: As long as Xi Jinping is in power it is hard to see any positive change in the state of media freedom in China any time soon, and in fact it is more likely to just get worse. The only hope is that political forces eventually emerge within China which will open up the possibility of a freer media and give the Chinese people what they want, which is freedom of information. We saw how angry Chinese people were online when they realised that the authorities had lied to them over Covid-19. The government has powerful technological tools at their disposal and have been successful in stopping people accessing information, but the demand from the people for real and accurate information will win out in the end, even though that does not appear to be something likely to happen any time very soon.

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Kathmandu’s main infectious diseases hospital in Teku is full, and patients are being cared for in open verandahs and parking lots – a scene repeated in government hospitals across the country. Credit: Nepali Times.

By Narayan Adhikari and Sanjeeta Pant
KATHMANDU, May 20 2021 (IPS)

If you live in Nepal, a quick survey of friends and family will quickly prove how rapidly Covid-19 infection rates have spiked. For instance, out of 50 people we called last week, more than half had been infected, with the rest reporting that their extended families or colleagues had tested positive.

Recently, the sister-in-law of one of the authors- just 58 years old- died from the virus. She would have survived COVID-19 but despite a frantic rush around the city, we could not find an ICU bed in any of the hospitals in Kathmandu.

These are the kinds of stories that are now dominating headlines- as our health system buckles under pressure. People are dying while waiting in line not just for treatment, but for COVID-19 tests.

Beyond vaccines, the cure for COVID-19 is citizen engagement. It is too easy- and also simply too slow during an emergency- to simply finger point at national political leaders, as culpable as they are

India has dominated the COVID-19 headlines recently, but Nepal is now the global epicenter of the pandemic. The virus is spreading uncontrollably– on a per capita basis we now have 211 infections per 100,000 people, compared to India’s 130 per 100,000. And once again it is becoming clear that both the causes and symptoms of this disaster are not related to healthcare, but are at their core, issues of corruption and lack of accountability.

While countries like New Zealand and South Korea are clear examples of how coherent leadership, transparency, creative public-private partnerships and ongoing citizen engagement can ensure effective COVID-19 responses, Nepal is the complete opposite.

Petty political infighting, opacity in decision-making, nepotistic contracting and complete disregard for citizens’ concerns have characterized the response. Just last week it became clear that a private company called Hukam Distribution and Logistics refused to deliver vaccines from India because they were not paid a 10% kick-back- venality of the highest order which will lead to hundreds of unnecessary deaths.

Our healthcare system has been undermined by corruption and a lack of integrity for as long as anyone can remember- we have never been prepared for a crisis of this kind. Healthcare has become a commodity only for those who can afford it.

It takes hunger strikes by well-known doctors to catalyze even the beginnings of any discussion about reforms. As a result, in early 2020 when COVID-19 emerged in Nepal, we had some of the worst public health outcomes in the world. You might think that our experience with the dual, devastating earthquakes of 2015 would have built some degree of crisis preparation and management capacity within government, but we are now making all the same mistakes as six years ago.

Beyond vaccines, the cure for COVID-19 is citizen engagement. It is too easy- and also simply too slow during an emergency- to simply finger point at national political leaders, as culpable as they are. Citizen engagement now means three things.

First, it entails an understanding that change needs to begin with all of us. We ourselves need to find ways to collectively organize together to hold the government accountable. There are emerging efforts to do this such as the “Enough is Enough” campaign which forced the government to disclose COVID-19 spending and expand testing facilities.

Other organizations such as Shaasan are finding ways to crowdsource citizen concerns and score the performances of public officials; and our own efforts through our Coronavirus Civic Action Campaign are countering misinformation and ensuring citizen voices are heard as part of decision-making at the local level around the pandemic. These ground-up initiatives can make a difference when citizens get involved on a large-scale.

Second, open data is key to ensure transparency and accountability of the response. Transparency is the bedrock of democracy and accountability and information in Nepal is scattered, incomplete and inconsistent. Organizations run by citizens like Open Data Nepal and Open Knowledge Nepal have tried to open-up government, and the health Ministry’s COVID-19 dashboard provides some information, but it is not updated in real-time and is not in a format that makes it easy to synthesize.

And in any case only just over a 1/3 of our population has access to the internet. We need to find new ways to engage citizens around information about the response and how they can get involved. In Nepalgunj, a city in western Nepal, the government uses digital billboards to disseminate information to the public that citizens are now using to monitor decision-making.

This leads us to the last point, which is that we as citizens need to support and amplify the work of local political leaders who are doing the right thing during the pandemic and demonstrating that citizens come first.

In Dhangadhi municipality in Western Nepal for instance, the local government set up women only quarantine centers during the first wave of COVID-19 after a 31-year old woman was gang-raped while in a shared quarantine space, which should become a model for other towns. In Karnali province recently, the local parliament worked with us to collect data from returnee migrants and is now working to prioritize their concerns.

And in Panauti municipality, local officials are creating a databank of citizen needs so they can decide government plans and programs accordingly. Nepal recently moved towards a federal structure through which more power was devolved to the sub-national level- and we have to use this to engage citizens where government is closest to them; and to maneuver around the central government where that is necessary.

There is a famous quote that “people get the government they deserve”. The implication is that citizens have the power to improve government themselves. As Nepal finds itself the world’s next COVID-19 hotspot, there has never been a better time for citizens to do so.

Narayan Adhikari is the co-founder and Country Director of Accountability Lab Nepal; and Sanjeeta Pant is Programs and Learning Manager at Accountability Lab. Follow the Lab on Twitter @accountlab.

The large part of COVID-19 relief funds is going to big corporation. People who are likely to have been impacted the most by the pandemic in the Global South, such as smaller businesses, marginalised communities, women, and those in poverty, have been left out. Credit: Dionny Matos/IPS

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA , May 18 2021 (IPS)

Poverty and income inequality are being deepened as COVID-19 relief funds are handed out to large corporations instead of social protection programmes in developing countries, groups involved in a new study of COVID-19 bailouts have said.

A report by the Financial Transparency Coalition (FTC) civil society group showed that the vast majority of COVID-19 recovery funds in nine developing countries have gone to big corporations instead of toward welfare, small firms, or those working in the informal economy.

“The way COVID-19 relief has been implemented has worsened marginalisation, poverty, and inequality, including income, gender, and other inequalities, in some countries,” Matti Kohonen, FTC Director, told IPS.

“The large part of these relief funds is going to big corporations, but the people who are likely to have been impacted most by the pandemic in the Global South, such as smaller businesses, marginalised communities, women, and those in poverty, have been left out,” he said.

In what the group says is the first major analysis of public bailout funds disbursed in developing countries during the pandemic, FTC members looked at their use in Kenya, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, Nepal, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and India.

It found that in eight countries, an average of 63 percent of pandemic-related state aid went to big businesses, while only a quarter was spent on social protection schemes. Only 2 percent went to informal sector workers – despite the informal sector often making up a large part of the overall economies in many poor nations. Meanwhile, much of what was allocated to small and medium-sized companies never reached them and was diverted elsewhere, it claims.

India was examined separately because of a change in the government’s definition of a small business during the pandemic.

However, FTC believes that total corporate stimulus is likely to be even larger due to expected revenue shortfalls from tax cuts, especially in Bangladesh and India, or the cost of tax amnesty programmes, as in Bangladesh and Honduras.

Civil society groups operating in some of the countries in FTC’s report say that the findings were not entirely unexpected, but underlined the extent to which poor and marginalised groups had been apparently neglected by governments during the pandemic.

Speaking about the finding that in Kenya 92 percent of bailout funds had gone to large corporations, Chenai Mukumba of the Tax Justice Network Africa advocacy group, told IPS: “It was not surprising because the private sector has a lot of lobbying power to influence policy. But it was surprising that so little was getting to the people that needed it – the vulnerable and marginalised and especially those in the informal sector.”

In many poor countries the informal economic sector forms a large part of the overall economy with millions of people often relying solely on informal work to make a living. In Bangladesh, for instance, cash-in-hand workers make up 85 percent of the country’s labour force. The figure is similar in Kenya.

COVID-19 restrictions, including lockdowns and travel bans, have had a massive impact on such work as people have no longer been able to travel for work, or to sell goods at markets or outside their neighbourhoods. This has had a drastic effect on some families.

“Among vulnerable populations people have seen their quality of life really fall because of movement restrictions. The narrative we are hearing from people on the ground working with these communities is that there is an acceptance that governments need to bring in restrictions to stop COVID-19 spreading, but that those restrictions need to be accompanied by relief measures, and those relief measures have not been provided,” Mukumba said.

The FTC’s study focused on where COVID-19 bailout funds went, but did not go into detail about the exact reasons why they were disbursed in the way they were, nor did it look at individual disbursements to corporations or other entities.

But Kohonen and Mukumba told IPS there were a number of reasons resources did not go to social protection services, including both private sector lobbying and inadequate government capacities to identify vulnerable populations.

The report also does raise a warning about a lack of transparency around the disbursement of the recovery funds.

It cites how in Kenya, for instance, the World Bank provided $50 million in immediate funding to support the country’s emergency response – funds that are now unaccounted for.

Whatever the reasons behind the allocation of funds, the fact that so little went on social protection remains a serious problem which must be corrected, said Kohonen.

“Much more funding should have gone to social protection and too much went to big corporations which don’t need such a large proportion of relief funding,” he explained.

And even in some states where an ostensibly comparatively large part of relief funding was spent on social protection, the most vulnerable members of society still lost out.

Explaining the situation in Guatemala, where just over half of COVID-19 relief funding went on social protection measures, Ricardo Barrientos of the Central American Institute of Fiscal Studies (ICEFI) which worked on the report, told IPS: “The government response, although mainly allocated for social protection, was too little and too late, and critically insufficient to make a meaningful impact for most Guatemalans.”

He explained that as a percentage of GDP, it amounted to 3.07 percent – of the countries surveyed only Honduras and Sierra Leone had a lower figure – and while most of this money was allocated to an emergency cash transfer programme it was concentrated in cities and urban areas, and failed to reach people who needed it most, especially Mayan indigenous people living in poverty and in appalling conditions in rural areas.

“While more than 70 percent of households survive in the informal sector, accounting for around 24 percent of GDP, the relief funds were ridiculously small for this important part of the Guatemalan economically active population. Many Guatemalans found themselves in the dramatic position of having to [decide whether to] go out and try to sell something, or die due to starvation. The saying was: ‘I prefer to die from COVID-19, than from hunger,’” he said.

The FTC is currently preparing reports on the use of COVID-19 bailouts in other countries, including more developing nations as well as developed states in Europe and elsewhere.

However, it is likely, FTC members say, that in at least the developing states a similarly large proportion of the funds is likely to have gone to large corporations.

“In Sierra Leone we saw most of the relief funds going to corporates and expect it will be a similar story in other countries in Africa we are still looking at,” said Mukumba.

FTC has passed its report on to governments and major COVID-19 bailout donors such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. It has yet to receive any direct response.

It has also called for governments and international financial institutions to adopt a series of measures to address what it calls a “dangerous imbalance in existing COVID-19 relief funds”.

These include implementing a minimum corporate tax rate of at least 25 percent, tax hikes for the wealthy, corporations, and high-income earners, setting up public beneficial ownership registries, to know who benefits from recovery spending, and profits made during the pandemic, and introducing greater accountability to provide transparency on the conditions attached and disbursements made of COVID-19 recovery funds, including World Bank funds.

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Reporters Without Borders said press freedom was restricted either partly or completely in two thirds of the globe. It warned that authoritarian regimes had used the pandemic to “perfect their methods of totalitarian control of information”, and as a pretext for imposing “especially repressive legislation with provisions combining propaganda with suppression of dissent”. (file photo) Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Apr 22 2021 (IPS)

Independent journalism is facing a growing crackdown one year into the COVID-19 pandemic as governments around the world restrict access to information and muzzle critical reporting, media and rights watchdogs have warned.

Authoritarian regimes have used existing and new legislation to attack, intimidate, and jail reporters under the guise of acting to protect public health, they say, and fear the situation is unlikely to improve in many states if and when the pandemic ends.

“Dictators and authoritarian leaders exploited the cover of COVID to crackdown on independent reporting and criticism. Some, instead of battling the virus, turned their attention to fighting the media.

“Countries from Cambodia to Russia, Egypt and Brazil all sought to divert attention from their failures to deal with the health crisis by intimidating or jailing journalists,” Rob Mahoney, Deputy Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, told IPS.

Recent months have seen a slew of reports highlighting how media freedom in many places has been curbed during the pandemic.

In February, Human Rights Watch released a report COVID-19 Triggers Wave of Free Speech Abuse showing how more than 80 governments had used the COVID-19 pandemic to justify violations of rights to free speech and peaceful assembly with journalists among those affected as authorities attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, and closed media outlets, while enacting vague laws criminalising speech that they claim threatens public health.

In April, global press freedom campaigners the International Press Institute (IPI), released a report painting a similarly grim picture and detailing the physical and verbal abuse of journalists reporting on COVID-19 across the world.

And just this week, Reporters Without Borders said journalism was restricted either partly or completely in two thirds of the globe.

It warned that authoritarian regimes had used the pandemic to “perfect their methods of totalitarian control of information”, and as a pretext for imposing “especially repressive legislation with provisions combining propaganda with suppression of dissent”.

It also highlighted how some had developed legislation to criminalise publishing of ‘fake news’ relating to coronavirus reporting, and used COVID-19 as a pretence to deepen existing internet censorship and surveillance.

In some states authorities had banned publication of non-government pandemic numbers and arrested people for disseminating other figures. In others, such as Tanzania, they even went as far as imposing a complete information blackout on the pandemic, the group said.

The problems are not confined to any single area of the world, according to the groups’ reports. However, some of the most severe restrictions have been seen in the Asia-Pacific region and Africa.

Journalists on the ground in these regions have said they have seen a deterioration in press freedom over the last year.

IPS’ own correspondent and an award-winning journalist in Uganda, Michael Wambi, said that the government had used pandemic restrictions introduced for the entire population to deliberately restrict journalists’ reporting.

Presidential elections were held in the country in January and, Wambi told IPS, there were “targeted attacks on journalists in an effort to curtail them from giving coverage to leading opposition candidates” in the run up to them.

Journalists were violently attacked by police at the events, and police later accused reporters of violating COVID-19 restrictions by attending them.

Wambi said Uganda’s Police Chief, Martin Okoth Ochola, made a joke of the situation.

“He joked to journalists that ‘security forces would continue beating them to keep them out of any danger [to their own health]’,” said Wambi.

Stella Paul, IPS’ award-winning journalist in India — which RSF describes as one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists — told IPS: “In India, COVID restrictions were basically used as an excuse to intimidate journalists.”

Press freedom groups say the Indian government has taken advantage of the coronavirus crisis to increase its control of news coverage, using legal action against journalists who have reported information about the pandemic which differs from the official position.

Early in the pandemic, the government launched a number of legal cases against journalists for reports about the effects of the government-enforced lockdown on migrant workers while an editor of a local news portal was arrested and charged with sedition for writing about a possible change of state leadership following a rise in coronavirus cases.

“The last year has seen a lot of journalists detained while trying to report the truth about the pandemic, to get to accurate information and find things out,” said Paul.

Paul, who also writes for IPS, co-operates with a number of other journalists across Asia and says the situation for independent media in most other parts of the region is equally perilous.

“It is the same thing in many other countries. What we have seen during COVID is a lot of journalists, not just in India, asking themselves what will happen if I report on something? Will I end up in jail? They are scared of getting arrested,” she said.

One country where media freedom is seen as particularly restricted is Bangladesh. It came in at 152 out of 182 in RSF’s 2021 Press Freedom Index. The group said there had been “an alarming increase in police and civilian violence against reporters” during the pandemic with many journalists arrested and prosecuted for their reporting on it.

This has been made easier by the Digital Security Act (DSA) passed in 2018 under which “negative propaganda” can lead to a 14-year jail sentence, local journalists say.

The DSA was at the centre of the controversial death in police custody of a Bangladeshi writer and commentator earlier this year.

Mushtaq Ahmed, who was detained under the DSA in May last year for allegedly posting criticism of the government’s response to the COVID-19 on Facebook, died in police custody in February. An official investigation found he died of natural causes but others in prison with him at the time claimed he was tortured and some suspect he died of injuries sustained during his incarceration. 

Few local journalists were willing to talk about their experiences of working in the country, but one, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Ahmed’s arrest and death had had a profound effect on the media.

“After what happened to Mushtaq Ahmed, many journalists were immediately less willing to challenge anything the government said about the coronavirus pandemic,” the journalist told IPS.

“The DSA is being used to harass journalists – many have been arrested under the act after publishing news critical of the authorities.

“Doing reporting under the DSA is the main challenge for journalists in Bangladesh right now. News outlets use self-censorship to avoid harassment under the DSA. If anyone sees a single item of news that is negative about them, they can use the DSA to bring legal action against the reporter and the editor,” the journalist added.

But while the COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly allowed governments to crack down on critical media, there is no guarantee the situation will improve once the pandemic ends, press freedom watchdogs say.

Scott Griffen, Deputy Director at IPI, told IPS: “Who will decide when the pandemic is over? Governments for whom the pandemic is a useful tool to suppress civil liberties may be tempted to maintain a state of emergency in some form, even after the immediate health threat is ended.”

He added that there were also fears that measures introduced during the pandemic may not be rescinded at all.

“The aftermath of the September 11 attacks in the US brought with it new anti-terrorism measures including unprecedented civil liberties rollbacks. Countries around the world have used anti-terror laws to crack down on critical speech. Similarly, we fear that emergency laws introduced during the coronavirus pandemic may become part of the permanent legal framework in some states, not to mention a culture of tracking and surveillance of citizens that is very unlikely to be rolled back. This has profound implications for journalists’ privacy and their ability to protect their sources,” he said.

However, despite the bleak outlook for press freedom in many states as the pandemic drags on, there is hope that independent media will continue no matter how severely they might be restricted.

“Journalists will still produce independent reporting even in the most hostile of circumstances. That’s their mission. You can have independent journalism without democracy. But you can’t have democracy without independent journalism,” said Mahoney.

Excerpt:

Continued inequity in COVID-19 vaccination means virus mutations occur and newer variants emerge that may be resistant to currently available vaccines. Credit: United Nations.

By Ifeanyi Nsofor
ABUJA, Apr 2 2021 (IPS)

As richer western nations continue hoarding COVID-19 vaccines to the detriment of poorer nations, there is some light on the horizon. On April 15, 2021, the U.S. will join the Global Vaccine Alliance (GAVI) and co-host the launch of the Investment Opportunity for COVAX Advance Market Commitment.
The aim of the event is to raise more funds to ensure at least 1.8 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines are available to 92 low-income nations. The U.S. recently donated $4 billion to COVAX and this new leadership role is highly commendable.

“The more the virus that causes COVID-19 is out there in the world, the more opportunities it has to evolve—and to develop new ways of fighting our defenses against it. If we don’t get the vaccine out to every corner of the planet, we’ll have to live with the possibility that a much worse strain of the virus will emerge.” 
Bill Gates

However, even if all the commitments are met from the launch, only 20% of people in poorer nations would be vaccinated. Furthermore, it could take until late 2022 for that population to be vaccinated.

Continued inequity in COVID-19 vaccination means virus mutations occur and newer variants emerge that may be resistant to currently available vaccines. Therefore, it is in the interest of every nation (both rich and poor) that everyone everywhere has a fair chance of being vaccinated simultaneously.

Bill Gates alluded to this in his recent Gates Notes: “The more the virus that causes COVID-19 is out there in the world, the more opportunities it has to evolve—and to develop new ways of fighting our defenses against it. If we don’t get the vaccine out to every corner of the planet, we’ll have to live with the possibility that a much worse strain of the virus will emerge.”

Simply put, to end this pandemic, we must vaccinate everyone, everywhere.

As the COVAX investment commitment launch approaches, these are three ways the U.S. especially can ensure more equity in ending the COVID-19 pandemic globally:

First, support the push by the World Trade Organization for temporary COVID-19 vaccine patent waivers so that vaccines can be manufactured locally in Africa and other parts of Asia. Recently, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposed calls for the World Trade Organization to back a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights to speed coronavirus vaccine production in poor countries.

If this continues, it could take until late 2023 or even early 2024 to vaccinate all those eligible across Africa. President Joe Biden has to intervene to authorise these waivers so that vaccine production can take place simultaneously in rich and poor countries.

Local production of vaccine in African countries will also lead to reduction in logistics costs and waiting times in transporting the vaccines from the west to African countries. Egypt has concluded preclinical trial and would soon begin clinical trial for a vaccine locally.

Likewise, Johnson and Johnson pharmaceutical has pledged 400 million of their single-dose vaccine to the Africa Vaccine Acquisition Task Team. Most of the supplies would be manufactured locally by Aspen Pharma in South Africa The U.S. should support more local production across African countries to speed up COVID-19 vaccination on the continent.

Second, block capital flight via corruption from poorer nations. Africa loses an estimated $50 billion yearly due to illicit financial flows. This theft amounts to a staggering $800 billion stolen from 1970 to 2008. These funds are stolen via electronic transfers.

Surely, banks and other agencies are aware as the theft is happening. The U.S. can work with banks and national anti-corruption agencies to stop funds being stolen. We do not have to wait for funds to be stolen and then go through all manners of legal and regulatory bottlenecks to repatriate the funds.

For example, no one really knows how much Nigeria’s former military dictator, General Abacha stole from the country. Twenty-three years after his death, funds he stole are still being repatriated back to the country.

The U.S. should also impose sanctions on banks, bank executives, politicians and civil servants who aid these thefts. With $50 billion yearly, Africa will not be dependent on richer western nations to vaccinate her people. Indeed, at $10 per dose, $50 billion will buy 5 billion doses of the Johnson and Johnson Covid-19 vaccine – more than enough to vaccinate all Africans three times over.

Third, ending the pandemic is not just about vaccines. Therapeutics, personal protective equipment and other commodities are essential. Sadly, the U.S. hoarded these at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. These hoardings must stop.

The African Union’s Africa Medical Supplies Platform (AMSP) chaired by Zimbabwean billionaire, Strive Masiyiwa has succeeded in creating a platform for linking manufacturers with African nations especially for pre-ordering of COVID-19 commodities, including vaccines. The AMSP is an innovative idea to make Africa self-sufficient in COVID-19 response. This should be supported by the U.S.

All lives are created equal. The U.S. government should deepen its global health leadership by ensuring that this COVAX launch is an opportunity to demonstrate the sanctity of lives everywhere. It is the equitable thing to do to end this global pandemic for everyone.

Dr. Ifeanyi McWilliams Nsofor is a graduate of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He is a Senior New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute and a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity at George Washington University. Ifeanyi is the Director Policy and Advocacy at Nigeria Health Watch.

Jaxine Scott displays some vegetables in her backyard garden at her Kingston, Jamaica home. Credit: Kate Chappell

By Kate Chappell
KINGSTON, Jamaica, Apr 2 2021 (IPS)

Last year, Jaxine Scott was off work as a caregiver at a primary school as a result of the pandemic. One day, she noticed a green shoot emerging from some garlic in her fridge. She decided to plant it, and to her surprise, it thrived. “I thought ‘It looks like I have a green thumb, let me plant something else,’” Scott says. She now has a backyard garden, including cucumber, pumpkin, melon, callaloo, cantaloupe, pak choy and tomatoes. “It makes me feel good,” she says. “I can help my family members and neighbours. It has saved me money. I’m not going to stop, I’m going to continue,” she says.

Scott, 45, is just one of thousands of Jamaicans who have found an interest in gardening, both as a way to pass the time and to become more self-sufficient when it comes to food and nutrition.

This is a small yet important step for a country and region in which the trees are laden with an abundance of fruits, yet many people go hungry every day.

An October, 2020 study of eight Caribbean countries found that 40% of people surveyed experienced some form of hunger, with 42% of those saying it was moderate to severe. The survey by the College of Health Sciences at the University of Technology included 2,257 households in eight countries across the region (Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Belize, Barbados, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Antigua and Barbuda.) Another recent study from the Caribbean Research and Policy Institute and Unicef also found that in a survey of 500 Jamaican households, 44% reported that they were experiencing food shortages, while 78% said their savings could last them four weeks or less.

Food security is a technical term referring to the availability of nutritious food, and defined by the United Nations as having “physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life.” The World Bank reports that despite the pandemic, there is adequate supply, however the challenge lies at the national level. The risks to food security include higher prices and reduced incomes, which forces households to rely on smaller portions of less nutritious foods.

“We suspected people were cutting back on their intake, especially households where the breadwinners were losing their jobs. It has shook up some of the households quite a bit. People are cutting back on the number of meals that they were having,” says Dr. Vanessa White Barrow, the Head for the School of Allied Health and Wellness at the University of Technology’s College of Health Sciences.

The effect of this, of course, has many repercussions, including malnutrition, lack of energy, obesity as a result of consuming lower-cost but unhealthy foods and a variety of health issues like diabetes and hypertension.

“What has happened is that the nutrition divide has widened as a result of COVID,” says Prof. T. Alafia Samuels, of at the Caribbean Health Research Institute at the University of the West Indies.

“We also know that before, because of the extent that many household were dependent on processed food, people have cut back (on healthy foods) and are going for cheaper alternatives, and this has long-term health implications,” she says. This especially impacts children, who need nutritious food to grow and learn adequately. In addition, children are confined to their households, doing online learning and missing physical activity they would have had at school.

Food and nutrition insecurity are just one frightening outcome of the pandemic, which has ravaged one of the most tourism-dependent regions in the world. In Jamaica alone, a minimum of 50,000 people have been laid off from the tourism industry, a number that is likely even higher when taking into account indirect employment. An estimated 135,000 people have lost their jobs in total. The country’s real GDP for fiscal 2020/21 is expected to contract by up to 12%, according to the Bank of Jamaica, and the unemployment for Oct. 2020 was 10.7%. According to the World Bank, the percentage of people living below the poverty line was 19.3% in 2017, and while this figure had been improving, it is unlikely to continue this trajectory.

With this hardship in mind, the government has introduced a series of financial stimulus measures to reach the most vulnerable, but these are not sustainable. In addition to financial measures, the government has also focused on increasing food security, an effort that existed prior to the pandemic, but has since been ramped up.

In terms of boosting food security and assisting the farming industry, Jamaica’s Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries Floyd Green says that the government is investing JMD$1 billion this year.

Decreased market demand, in large part from the hotel and restaurant industry, has harmed the farming industry. So while at times there is an excess of supply, a lack of demand has impacted farmers and their production systems, which in turn erodes food security.

“The challenge with COVID is clearly the downturn in the market, which discourages the farmers from producing,” says Green, adding that they worry their supply will not be absorbed. With this in mind, the government created a “buy-back” program, which found new clients for farmers, which has helped.

“We saw an initial decline in production with COVID when it came in, but we went back into a growth position overall, and now year-over-year seeing growth.”

Ultimately, Green says COVID has forced people to examine their self-sufficiency. “Covid has brought back into sharp focus in the minds of people the need to be more self-sufficient when it comes to feeding ourselves.”

The need for self-sufficiency exists on a large scale as well, especially on an island that imports over US$1billion of goods annually. And while some of that cannot be avoided as it is inefficient or impossible to produce everything needed by Jamaicans, Green says there are some efforts to increase the nation’s self-sufficiency, as well as to ramp up exports, which can help to balance the import bill.

“A part of what we have been doing is to have to take a critical approach to analyzing our import bill, and what can we do what can we grow efficiently to reduce the import bill. We have a twofold approach, we don’t only focus onthe import bill, but export revenues. We have to look to raise export revenues as a small island state that wont be able to produce efficiently,” Green says.

To this end, the government is looking to encourage production of ginger, turmeric, cocoa, coffee, castor oil, and mangoes, which are all in demand because of their superior quality, he says. “ We are looking to further encourage incentive some of our farmers to go into some of these crops. What you will see now over the next three years is a determined push towards export stimulation.”

In terms of local food supply, Green says it is sufficient. The issue, however, is with a lack of purchasing power, especially of late as a result of the economic downturn. “Our challenges is to restart the economy to make sure people can get back purchasing power.”

Green mentions a backyard gardening program in which 2,500 families across the country, with a majority focus on urban areas, received a kit containing all the necessary tools to start a garden and become more self-sufficient.

This is one measure towards achieving food security, says Jamaica Agricultural Society vice-president Denton Alvaranga.

“A lot of persons are at home with a lot of time on their hands, the elderly, middle age, they are at home, children are at home, and most times, having very little to do.

It would be very useful at this time to re-emphasize the backyard gardening program,” he says. “This is very, very useful and timely when you look at it a lot of things produce can be grown locally in our backyard and a lot of people have a lot of space.”

In addition to backyard gardening, Both Samuels and Barrow-White add that government programs to identify and reach the most vulnerable communities and families will help increase food security. Samuels is currently working with Jamaican churches to develop a database to identify these people. “The plan is interventions, and we are proposing actually support them to roll out that kind of intervention that has worked in one church so they can have a systematic way to find out who are the vulnerable what needs to get them to the point. You need some kind of organization, you can’t go out there and look for people one by one,” Dr. Samuels says.

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UN Women announces the theme for International Women’s Day, 8 March 2021 (IWD 2021) as, “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world. Credit: UN Women/Yihui Yuan

By 49 UN women Ambassadors*
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 1 2021 (IPS)

March, women’s history month, closes with the Generation Equality Forum in Mexico and against the background of significant setbacks on the empowerment of women caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

From our seats in the General Assembly and our screens at home we have seen it growing: the increase in deaths; gender-based, including intimate partner, violence; abuse of women and girls who speak out; the widening of the gender gap for access to digital technologies; the loss of jobs, the decrease of women’s participation in public life and decision-making; disrupted access to essential health care; increase in child marriage; and the diminished access to education.

Day by day in this yearlong battle against the pandemic we have seen how women are impacted twice: first by the virus, and then by its devastating secondary effects.

We are 49 women ambassadors representing countries from all regions of the world, and we believe that such a reality is simply intolerable. Here, we tell that story and what needs to be done to urgently recover the hard-won gains of recent years.

The COVID-19 crisis has a woman’s face.

The face of women nurses, doctors, scientists, care-givers, sanitation workers, and of those leading the response to the pandemic. Women are on the front line: As leaders delivering effectively with vision and care.

But also, as victims of structural vulnerabilities and of violence and abuse.

The “shadow pandemic” of exploitation and abuse, including domestic and intimate partner violence, should be a jarring wake-up call to us all. The latest WHO data show that 1 in 3 women experience intimate partner violence during their lifetime, while the UN reports that women with disabilities have four times the risk of experiencing sexual violence in comparison to women without disabilities.

Women will also bear the heaviest toll of the socio-economic impact of the pandemic because they often carry the responsibility for unpaid dependent care and are over-represented in jobs most affected by the crisis – hospitality, tourism, health, and trade.

The lack of women’s participation in society threatens to delay the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Politically-motivated gender-based violence online and offline is a barrier to women’s ability to participate fully and equally in democratic processes.

Moreover, the persistently high rate of grave violations of women’s rights worldwide is appalling.

Against this background, this March, the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) focused on two issues: fighting gender-based violence, and scaling up women’s full and effective participation at all levels and in all sectors.

“Gender equality: From the Biarritz Partnership to the Beijing+25 Generation Equality* Forum”, hosted by France and Mexico ahead of the 74th session of the UN General Assembly, 2019. Photo: UN Women/Ryan Brown

Meaningful participation of women in politics, institutions and public life is the catalyst for that transformational change, which benefits society as a whole. Only four countries in the world have a parliament that is at least 50% women.

Worldwide only 25% of all parliamentarians are women. Women serve as heads of state or government in only 22 countries today, and 119 countries have never had a woman leader.

According to UNESCO, 30% of the world’s researchers are women. While 70% of the health and social care workforce are women, they make up only 25% of leaders in the global health sector.

Current projections show that if we continue at the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years. These figures speak of unacceptable barriers and bottlenecks that continue to block women’s participation.

As the Secretary-General of the UN says, parity is ultimately a question of power. As women, we are often reluctant to use this word. But as women ambassadors at the UN, representing countries from around the world, it is a word we cannot and will not be too shy to use.

Power is not an end in itself: it is the power to change things, to act and have equal opportunities to compete. While as women Ambassadors we are still under-represented here in New York – only 25% of Permanent Representatives are women – we are committed to being a driving force to shift mindsets. We are long past the point where women should have to justify their seat at the table.

A large body of research and scientific literature provide unequivocal evidence of the value of integrating women’s perspectives in decision-making. Countries led by women are dealing with the pandemic more effectively than many others.

Peace processes and peace agreements mediated with the active participation of women are more durable and comprehensive. Yet women make up only 13% of negotiators, 6% of mediators and 6% of signatories in formal peace processes.

When women have equal opportunities in the labor force, economies can unlock trillions of dollars. Yet last year, the International Labor Organization found that women were 26% less likely to be employed than men. In 2020 only 7.4% of Fortune 500 companies were run by women.

Worldwide, women only make 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, while the gender gap in internet access grew from 11% in 2013 to 17% in 2019, reaching 43% in the least developed countries.

The so-called “motherhood penalty” pushes women into the informal economy, casual and part-time work. After slow but steady gains over the last few decades, COVID-19 has forced millions of women out of the formal labor market.

The solution to this will not occur spontaneously nor by magic. We need positive action. We need data disaggregated by sex and age so we can better analyze the scope of the problem; we need targeted policies and earmarked investments.

We have to strengthen support services for survivors of abuse, as well as prevent violence and end impunity. And we need to reduce the digital divide and promote access for women to information and public life.

We must rebalance the composition of decision-making bodies. We need to integrate gender into the design and implementation of recovery plans. We need to ensure the availability, accessibility, quality, and continuity of health services for women, including sexual and reproductive health services.

Social protection programmes should be gender responsive and account for the differential needs of women and girls. We need to promote access for women to decent work and overcome the choice between family and work that is too often imposed on women. Women should have targeted support for entrepreneurship and investment in education that guarantees equal access.

This should not only start with women, but with girls. Getting more girls into school, including back into school following the pandemic, improving the quality of education girls receive, and ensuring all girls get quality education: this will enable female empowerment and gender equality, which will be critical for the effective participation of future generations of women. We must make justice accessible to all women and end impunity for sexual violence.

This will also require role models. As women ambassadors, we bear testament to young generations of girls and women across the world showing that, like us, they can make it. No career and no goal are off-limits for them, as they are in all their diversities, nor beyond their capacities.

Parity is not a zero-sum game but a common cause and a pragmatic imperative. Men can be and are our allies in achieving parity. We look forward to continuing momentum on accelerating progress on achieving gender equality through the Generation Equality Forum and its Action Coalitions. Let us together set the stage for an inclusive, equal, global recovery. Let us make this generation “Generation Equality”.

There’s no more time to lose. We’ve lost enough to COVID already.

*List of participating Ambassadors, (including one Chargé d’affaires, a.i.) who co-authored this article (and the day they took office)

AFGHANISTAN H.E. Mrs. Adela Raz (8 March 2019); ALBANIA H.E. Ms. Besiana Kadare (30 June 2016); ANDORRA H.E. Mrs. Elisenda Vives Balmaña (3 November 2015); ANGOLA H.E. Ms. Maria de Jesus dos Reis Ferreira (21 May 2018); ARGENTINA H.E. Ms. María del Carmen Squeff (31 August 2020); BANGLADESH H.E. Ms. Rabab Fatima (6 December 2019); BARBADOS H.E. Ms. H. Elizabeth Thompson (30 August 2018); BHUTAN H.E. Ms. Doma Tshering (13 September 2017); BRUNEI DARUSSALAM H.E. Ms. Noor Qamar Sulaiman (18 February 2019); BULGARIA H.E. Ms. Lachezara Stoeva (17 February 2021); CHAD H.E. Ms. Ammo Aziza Baroud (11 December 2020); CZECH REPUBLIC H.E. Mrs. Marie Chatardová (2 August 2016); DOMINICA H.E. Ms. Loreen Ruth Bannis-Roberts (22 August 2016); EL SALVADOR H.E. Mrs. Egriselda Aracely González López (21 August 2019); ERITREA H.E. Ms. Sophia Tesfamariam (5 September 2019); GREECE H.E. Ms. Maria Theofili (13 September 2017) ; GRENADA H.E. Ms. Keisha A. McGuire (12 April 2016); GUYANA H.E. Mrs. Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett (2 October 2020); HUNGARY H.E. Ms. Zsuzsanna Horváth (16 February 2021); IRELAND H.E. Ms. Geraldine Byrne Nason (18 August 2017); ITALY H.E. Ms. Mariangela Zappia (13 August 2018); JORDAN H.E. Ms. Sima Sami Bahous (22 August 2016); KYRGYZSTAN H.E. Ms. Mirgul Moldoisaeva (12 April 2016); LEBANON H.E. Ms. Amal Mudallali (15 January 2018); LITHUANIA H.E. Ms. Audra Plepytė (18 August 2017); MADAGASCAR Ms. Vero Henintsoa Andriamiarisoa (Chargé d’affaires, a.i.); MALDIVES H.E. Ms. Thilmeeza Hussain (21 May 2019); MALTA H.E. Mrs. Vanessa Frazier (6 January 2020) ; MARSHALL ISLANDS H.E. Ms. Amatlain Elizabeth Kabua (5 July 2016); MICRONESIA H.E. Mrs. Jane J. Chigiyal (2 December 2011); MONACO H.E. Ms. Isabelle F. Picco (11 September 2009); MONTENEGRO H.E. Mrs. Milica Pejanović Đurišić (21 May 2018); NAURU H.E. Ms. Margo Reminisse Deiye (27 November 2020); NETHERLANDS H.E. Ms. Yoka Brandt (2 September 2020); NORWAY H.E. Ms. Mona Juul (14 January 2019); PANAMA H.E. Ms. Markova Concepción Jaramillo (16 November 2020); POLAND H.E. Ms. Joanna Wronecka (19 December 2017); QATAR H.E. Sheikha Alya Ahmed Saif Al-Thani (24 October 2013) ;RWANDA H.E. Mrs. Valentine Rugwabiza (11 November 2016); SAINT VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES H.E. Ms. Inga Rhonda King (13 September 2013); SLOVENIA H.E. Ms. Darja Bavdaž Kuret (18 August 2017); SOUTH AFRICA H.E. Ms. Mathu Theda Joyini (22 January 2021); SURINAME H.E. Ms. Kitty Monique Sweeb (19 June 2019) ; SWEDEN H.E. Ms. Anna Karin Eneström (6 January 2020) ; SWITZERLAND H.E. Mrs. Pascale Baeriswyl (26 June 2020); TURKMENISTAN H.E. Mrs. Aksoltan. Ataeva (23 February 1995); UNITED ARAB EMIRATES H.E. Mrs. Lana Zaki Nusseibeh (18 September 2013); UNITED KINGDOM H.E. Dame Barbara Woodward (2 December 2020); UNITED STATES OF AMERICA H.E. Ms. Linda Thomas-Greenfield (25 February 2021)

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Excerpt:

The world is emerging from the biggest social and economic shock in living memory, but it will be a long time before the deep scars of the COVID-19 pandemic on human well-being fully heal.

In the Asia-Pacific region, where 60 per cent of the world lives, the pandemic revealed chronic development fault lines through its excessively harmful impact on the most vulnerable. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) estimates that 89 million more people in the region have been pushed back into extreme poverty at the $1.90 per day threshold, erasing years of development gains. The economic and educational shutdowns are likely to have severely harmed human capital formation and productivity, exacerbating poverty and inequality.

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana

We know that the post-pandemic outlook remains highly uncertain. The 2021 Economic and Social Survey for Asia and the Pacific released today by ESCAP shows that regional economic recovery will be vulnerable to the continuing COVID-19 threats and a likely uneven vaccine rollout. Worse, there is a risk that economic recovery will be skewed towards the better off – a “K-shaped” recovery that further marginalizes poorer countries and the disadvantaged.

Building a resilient and inclusive future

The good news is that countries in Asia and the Pacific have taken bold policy measures to minimize the pandemic’s social and economic damage, including unprecedented fiscal and monetary support. Last year, developing countries in the region announced some $1.8 trillion, or nearly 7 per cent of their combined GDP, in COVID-19 related budgetary support. But investments in long-term economic resilience, inclusiveness, and green transformation have so far been limited.

The region’s vulnerability to shocks like COVID-19 was heightened by its lagging performance towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, which would have enhanced resilience by reducing entrenched social, economic, and environmental deficits.

The evidence shows that we need a better understanding of the Asia-Pacific region’s complex risk landscape, and a comprehensive approach to building resilience in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. Building resilience into policy frameworks and institutions will require aligning fiscal and monetary policies and structural reforms with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

ESCAP research maps out a “riskscape” of economic and non-economic shocks – financial crises, terms-of-trade shocks, natural disasters, and epidemics – and shows that all adverse shocks have cause severe damage to the region’s social, economic, and environmental well-being. It takes several years for investment and labour markets to return to their pre-crisis levels. Adverse shocks also leave behind long-term scars by widening inequality and increasing pollution. But bold policy choices can reduce setbacks. Governments must implement aggressive policy responses to protect hard-won development gains.

Notably, policy packages should align post-pandemic recovery with the 2030 Agenda. ESCAP recommends a policy package focusing on three areas – ensuring universal access to health care and social protection, closing the digital divide and strengthening climate and energy actions. Estimates show that such an approach could reduce the number of poor people in the region by almost 180 million and cut carbon emissions by about 30 per cent in the long run.

Resilience is largely affordable

Building resilience does not add too much financial burden to the region if such investments are accompanied by bold policy actions, such as ending fuel subsidies and introducing a carbon tax. A range of policy options can meet immediate and medium-term financing needs with great potential for Asia-Pacific countries to leverage these options.

However, it is important to note that several countries will need to engage closely with international development partners and the private sector. Least developed countries with significant “resilience gaps” will also require international assistance. Developed countries that fulfil their Overseas Development Aid (ODA) and climate finance commitments will go a long way in scaling up long-term investments and addressing these countries’ vulnerability to shocks.

COVID-19 has been a trauma like no other. Yet, it offers a unique opportunity for governments and other stakeholders to chart a new path to rebuilding. Whilst being forced to adjust, the Asia-Pacific region has seen fundamental transformations in lives, workplaces and habits. It is high time that the region takes its lessons from this pandemic and commits to a foundation that ensures a solid ability to withstand future jolts to the system without its people, and the planet, having to again pay a high price.

Ms. Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific (ESCAP)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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COVID-19 has set back the uneven progress of recent decades, directly causing more than two million deaths. The slowdown, due to the pandemic and policy responses, has pushed hundreds of millions more into poverty, hunger and worse, also deepening many inequalities.

Anis Chowdhury

COVID-19 has further set back progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As progress was largely ‘not on track’ even before the pandemic, developing countries will need much support to mitigate the new setbacks, let alone get back on track.

The extremely poor, defined by the World Bank as those with incomes under US$1.90/day, increased by 119–124 million in 2020, and are expected to rise by another 143-163 million in 2021.

Fiscal response constrained
Global fiscal efforts of close to US$14tn, plus low interest rates, liquidity injections and asset purchases by central banks, have helped. Nonetheless, the world economy will lose over US$22 trillion during 2020–2025 due to the pandemic.

Government responses have been much influenced by access to finance. Developed countries have accounted for four-fifths of total pandemic fiscal responses costing US$14tn. Rich countries have deployed the equivalent of a fifth of national income for fiscal efforts.

Meanwhile, emerging market economies spent only 5%, and low-income countries (LICs) a paltry 1.3% by mid-2020. In 2020, increased spending, despite reduced revenue, raised fiscal deficits of emerging market and middle-income countries (MICs) to 10.3%, and of LICs to 5.7%.

Government revenue has fallen due to lower output, commodity prices and longstanding Bank advice to cut taxes. Worse, they already face heavy debt burdens and onerous borrowing costs. Meanwhile, private finance dropped US$700bn in 2020.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Meanwhile, the liquidity support, debt relief and finance available are woefully inadequate. These constrain LICs’ fiscal efforts, with many even cutting spending, worsening medium-term recovery prospects!

Debt burdens
In 2019, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) assessed half the LICs as being at high risk of, or already in debt distress – more than double the 2013 share. Debt in LICs rose to 65% of GDP in 2019 from 47% in 2010.

Thus, LICs began the pandemic with more debt relative to government revenue, larger deficits and higher borrowing costs than high-income countries. And now, greater fiscal deficits of US$2–3tn projected for 2021 imply more debt.

Debt composition has become riskier with more commercial borrowing, particularly with foreign currency bond issues far outpacing other financing sources, especially official development assistance (ODA) and multilateral lending.

More than half of LIC government debt is non-concessional, worsening its implications. External debt maturity periods have also decreased. Also, interest payments cost more than 12% of government revenue in 2018, compared to under 7% in 2010.

Riskier financial flows
Developing economies have increasingly had to borrow on commercial terms in transnational financial markets as international public finance flows and access to concessional resources have declined.

Low interest rates, due to unconventional monetary policies in developed countries, encouraged borrowing by developing countries, especially by upper MICs. But despite generally low interest rates internationally, LIC external debt rates have been rising.

Overall ODA flows – net of repayments of principal – from OECD countries fell in 2017 and 2018. Such flows have long fallen short of the financing needs of Agenda 2030 for the SDGs. Instead of giving 0.7% of their national income as ODA to developing countries, as long promised, actual ODA disbursed has yet to even reach half this level.

Although total financial resource flows (ODA, FDI, remittances) to least developed countries (LDCs) increased slightly, ODA remained well short of their needs, falling from 9.4% of LDCs’ GNI in 2003 to 4.3% in 2018. Meanwhile, FDI to LDCs dropped from 4.1% of their GNI in 2003 to 2.3% in 2018.

There has also been a shift away from ‘traditional’ creditors, including multilateral financial institutions and rich country Paris Club members. Some donor governments increasingly use aid to promote private business interests. ‘Blended finance’ was supposed to turn billions of aid dollars into trillions in development finance.

But the private finance actually mobilised has been modest, about US$20bn a year – well below the urgent spending needs of LICs and MICs, and less than a quarter of ODA in 2017. Such changes have further reduced recipient government policy discretion.

Inadequate support
The 2020 IMF cancellation of US$213.5m in debt service payments due from 25 eligible LICs was welcome. But the G20 debt service suspension initiative (DSSI) was grossly inadequate, merely kicking the can down the road. It did not cancel any debt, with interest continuing to accrue during the all-too-brief suspension period.

The G20 initiative hardly addressed urgent needs, while private creditors refused to cooperate. Only meant for LICs, it did not address problems facing MICs. Many MICs also face huge debt, with upper MICs alone having US$2.0–2.3tn in 2020–2021.

World Bank President David Malpass has expressed concerns that any change to normal debt servicing would negatively impact the Bank’s standing in financial markets, where it issues bonds to finance loans to MICs.

The Bank Group has made available US$160bn for the period April 2020 to June 2021, but moved too slowly with its Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF). By the time it paid out US$196m, the amount was deemed too small and contagion had spread.

Special Drawing Rights
Issuing US$650bn worth of new special drawing rights (SDRs) will augment the IMF’s US$1tn lending capacity, already inadequate before the pandemic. But US$650bn in SDRs is only half the new SDR1tn (US$1.37tn) The Financial Times considers necessary given the scale of the problem.

To help, rich countries could transfer unused SDRs to IMF special funds for LICs, such as the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) and the Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust (CCRT), or for development finance.

Similar arrangements can be made for the Bank. A World Bank version of the IMF’s CCRT could ensure uninterrupted debt servicing while providing relief to countries in need. Investors in Bank bonds would appreciate the distinction.

Hence, issuing SDRs and making other institutional reforms at the Spring meetings in April could enable much more Fund and Bank financial intermediation. These can greatly help finance urgently needed pandemic relief, recovery and reforms in developing countries.

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Delegates at the hybrid conference held virtually in Beirut, Lebanon. The conference discussed the impact of COVID-19 the regions’ ICPD25 commitments. Credit: APDA

By Cecilia Russell
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Mar 29 2021 (IPS)

More than eight million people moved onto the poverty line in the Arab region, a conference of Arab and Asian parliamentarians heard.

The hybrid conference, held simultaneously in Beirut, Lebanon, and via video conferencing to delegates in Asia and the Arab region, was a follow up on earlier discussions on the regions’ ICPD25 Commitments.

Dr Luay Shabaneh, Regional Director, UNFPA ASRO, said research showed that women were impacted more than other groups – especially as they made up 70% of front-line workers. Women’s health and reproductive rights needed to be high on the agenda because the pandemic’s mortality rate was higher for women. He called on parliamentarians to take care of reproductive health and rights, ensure laws to punish perpetrators of gender-based violence were enacted, and finance for programmes was available.

“Every two hours, a woman dies while giving birth in Yemen,” Shabaneh said. During a recent visit to the country, he met a divorced woman who was 14 years old and a grandmother of 27. Her husband and her mother-in-law abused the grandmother until she decided to leave.

“These case histories were not unusual in the Arab and Asian region,” he said and needed addressing.

Other delegates at the conference, organised by the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA) and the Forum of Arab Parliamentarians on Population and Development (FAPPD), agreed. The conference heard that in the Arab world, female circumcision impacted 55% of girls aged between 15 and 19 years old, and one in five girls marry before there are 18. The diversion of resources and attention away from ICPD25 commitments impacted child marriages and female circumcisions – with estimates that 13 million child marriages and two million female circumcisions could have been prevented.

Teruhiko Mashiko, a Japanese MP and member of APDA Board of Directors and Vice-Chair of the Japan Parliamentarians Federation for Population addresses a hybrid conference of parliamentarians from Arab and Asian countries on impact of COVID-19 the regions’ ICPD25 commitments. Credit: APDA

Teruhiko Mashiko, a member of the Parliament from Japan, member of APDA Board of Directors and Vice-Chair of the Japan Parliamentarians Federation for Population (JPFP), reminded delegates the means to fight against pandemic were being developed. It was crucial, however, to keep an eye on population issues to achieve sustainable development. More than 115 million people had been affected by COVID-19, and more than 2.5 million people died globally. However, tens of millions of unwanted children were born every year.

Minister Plenipotentiary Tarek El-Nabulsi, representative of the League of Arab States, said a report on the region had shown the dire implications of COVID-19 and the need to prioritise the ICPD and Sustainable Development 2030 plan.

“The report estimated 1.7 million jobs would be lost in the region, and the middle class would decline,” El-Nabulsi said. “Eight million people could move down onto the poverty line.”

Moving education onto digital platforms had not benefited the poor who did not have access to technology, and it also disadvantaged people with visual and audio disabilities.

Minister El-Nabulsi said the Arab League had arranged a meeting of high-level officials to enhance national initiatives to control COVID-19 and its impact on vulnerable people. A 15-point plan was set up to reduce its impact on women and girls, protect women, and support and protect pregnant women. The social sector segment also launched an initiative to protect women in refugee camps and women under occupation.

With the support of the UNFPA, an education campaign to confront the coronavirus under the hashtag #COVID-19TalkAboutYourStory was launched.

El-Nabulsi was one of several delegates who expressed concern over the refugees. The refugees in the region placed a heavy burden on the states because it was crucial to extend healthcare services to refugees and displaced.

Asem Araji, an MP from Lebanon, said 1.5 million displaced Syrian refugees and Palestinian people would need vaccinations. He said this should be international responsibility and not just the responsibility of Lebanon.

The impact of the pandemic on education was high on the agenda of the parliamentarians’ concerns. Elyas Hankash, an MP in Lebanon, said the COVID-19 lockdowns had a social, psychological, and physical impact on the youth.

“Unemployment and the lack of prospects had impacted their psychological health,” he said. This led some to drugs and others to depression.

The disruption to education was a disaster, especially as many youths could not connect to the internet and could not participate in the online educational offerings—this resulted in school dropouts.

Lebanon’s economy was fragile, and many young people work in the informal sector, lacking worker protection.

Forty-one percent of the country’s youth had been negatively affected. Unemployment increased when many businesses closed.

He called on other countries in the region to assist – this was a burden that needed to be shared.

Hankash said that while $50,000 had been set aside for youth development, what was needed was a proper plan, including a cheaper housing plan.

Pierre Bou Assi, an MP in Lebanon, expressed concern that the pandemic’s solution – the vaccine programme was problematic as there was no equality of access between countries. He too feared with two years of education lost, “a generation of children was sacrificed”.

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By Saul Escobar Toledo
MEXICO CITY, Mar 26 2021 (IPS)

A compilation of testimonies collected by Blanca Velázquez Díaz and published by the Ebert Foundation (available at: http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/mexiko/17328.pdf) offers an account of the harsh reality by which some workers of the maquila industry in the Mexican state of Morelos have gone through over these last twelve months. Their words reflect, undoubtedly, similar experiences of millions of workers in different parts of the country.

Saul Escobar Toledo

Their working conditions were already very unfavorable: in the textile sector and specifically in the branch of clothing and footwear, working days exceed eight hours a day, time in which they are permanently seated in non-designed chairs ergonomically, supporting extremely high temperatures in closed places with little ventilation.

The spread of COVID-19 made matters worse. Mainly, the bosses of the maquilas in Morelos did not respect the official recommendations and opted for the dismissal of their employees or cut half of the wages they received weekly.

For example, a worker identified as Lili said, “The company is paying me 280 pesos (14 dollars) a week …” while another, Anita says, “I am now working cleaning houses, the truth is that $ 400 pesos (20 dollars) the factory is giving me now is not enough”. Other interviewees indicated that they have received half of their salary.

Vicky: “Getting only half the salary the situation is bad, what am I going to do with only $ 400 pesos a week? that’s tough for me, and the company has us on hold, no one knows when I will get back to work … ”

Some more, a little luckier, affirmed that “From April 3 they sent us to rest with a base salary, which is really very little, 833 pesos (41 dollars) a week …”

There were also cases in which the workers decided to stop working so as not to get infected, and were fired:

Brenda: “… the company chose me to continue working on contingency days, but I saw that several colleagues went home sick with symptoms of COVID-19 and that was why I decided not to expose myself to the Coronavirus, my supervisor was terribly angry with me for making that decision, but I was sure that what I had decided was the right thing to do, to stay home and protect myself. Now I am fired, I was no longer called. ”

Almost all confessed going through a very tense emotional situation:

Justina: “Well, personally in the mental sphere I want to take things easy, but it is a bit impossible when I watch television or social networks, since they are flooded with what is happening in the pandemic and with bad news. They have been very outrageous at the time of reporting, I think that’s why, so sometimes I can’t get to sleep … ”

Finally, the workers were questioned about government aid. All answered they did not receive any support from the federal, state, or municipal governments:

María: ” No, at least nothing to me, I only remember that once the assistant of the mayor of the municipality (Emiliano Zapata) was distributing pantries, but they had a cost …”

Vicky: “Oops! nothing, not a glass of water …! ”

Anita: “The truth is, nothing, at least not even a pantry has arrived here in my neighborhood. ”

The author of the compilation concludes that, according to the testimonies collected,

“The more important consequences (observed) were unjustified dismissals … during these months of health emergency. The major concern of workers is how to generate an income … since the current employment situation looks increasingly difficult. Their mental and emotional health is in constant tension…, especially due to the low economic resources to support their families; besides, they are fearful about the possible spread of COVID-19 when they must exit their homes and go to the streets looking for an (extra) income … Add to this situation the double and triple work burden. Home education of their minor sons and daughters is generating many more hours of work for them. The care, especially of children, continues to fall primarily on women, just because they are females, with multiple responsibilities and little or no help from their partners, a situation that has led to stress, worry, anxiety, and insecurity, to mention some consequences ”

Another important piece of information refers to the behavior of the unions. According to the testimonies collected, Blanca Velázquez assures that in normal times the unions do not defend their affiliates; neither they have done in times of pandemic since they abided unashamedly business decisions and left the worker abandoned to their fate.

Finally, the text calls our attention about the almost total absence of the Mexican State in this situation, particularly the federal government. Rightly concludes the author of this collection, that:

“The social programs that the federal government has promoted for particular sectors, especially vulnerable ones, should be expanded for the workers laid off or when the bosses did not comply with the full payment of wages. We believe that programs for people who were laid off should be promoted immediately or, failing that, (legislate) unemployment insurance to alleviate this serious situation and train those who require it to be able to be employed in other trades or professions”.

Millions of wage earners have been deprived of any help and it has had a high social cost and become an obstacle to economic recovery. It is difficult to understand the reasons that led the government to this oversight. Perhaps they expected companies would pay total wages or that layoffs could be resolved quickly. However, it was likely that they did not, as indeed happened, due to the behavior of many companies in the past decades, as they have constantly violated labor laws and promoted lack of representative trade unions, especially in industry of maquila.

The absence of a worker protection policy during the pandemic seems to be due rather to an economic project based on budget cuts and austere public spending that does not admit emergency measures. The testimonies collected in the book show the unfortunate effects of these decisions. Waiting for the US economy to be the main factor in the recovery may be successful in the coming months. However, it will not correct the damage done to working class families. Nor will boost employment if it is not accompanied by other measures, such as unemployment insurance and promotion of domestic production and consumption.

The words of grief and pain shown in this publication are a very expressive testimony of what the Government of the Republic could have done (as in other countries and even in Mexico City) but refused to do.

Saul Escobar Toledo, Economist, Professor at Department of Contemporary Studies in INAH (National Institute oh Anthropology and History, México) and President of the Board of the Institute of Workers Studies “Rafael Galvan”, a non-profit organization. His recent work : “Subcontracting: a study of change in labor relations” will be published soon by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Mexico City.
saulescobar.blogspot.com

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Excerpt:

World Food Programme Deputy Executive Director Amir Abdullah says that no matter how much improvement is made in food production, it will all be futile unless the issue of water security is addressed. He said humanitarian and food aid can never be enough to manage cascading climate shocks. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 25 2021 (IPS)

The intersection of crisis, climate change and COVID-19 has resulted in a “rapid rise in hunger”, according to United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) Deputy Executive Director Amir Abdullah.

He was speaking at the “Building Food and Water Security in an Era of Climate Shocks” event organised by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA). The meeting featured representatives from other UN bodies, farmers’ associations and startups working on water security and agriculture around the world.

Abdullah highlighted the numerous disasters that hit globally last year while the world was in the middle of the pandemic: destructive heat waves, wildfires, floods, storms, and locust outbreaks.

“Humanitarian aid can never be enough to manage these cascading shocks that keep breaking down food systems and pushing people into food and water crises,” he said.

He added that no matter how much improvement is made in food production, it will all be futile unless the issue of water security is addressed.

“We can deliver food assistance but if farmers don’t have adequate access to water resources for food production, people will just continue being hungry,” he said. “And if people don’t have access to clean water, they can’t retain the nutrition they need even if we provide them with food assistance.”

Betty Chinyamunyamu, CEO of the National Smallholder Farmers’ Association of Malawi, said the past decade has witnessed an “onset of weather crises” which have made it extremely difficult for farmers to plan their sales.

“Increased incidences of new pests, diseases and unpredictable weather patterns make it more difficult for farmers to plan their farm enterprises. So when they’re not sure whether they are going to have a flood or whether they are going to have drought, it becomes very difficult to engage in initiatives that would otherwise be very rewarding for them,” Chinyamunyamu said. 

“That unpredictability of weather is really making agriculture less profitable for the farmers,” she added.

Cherrie Atilano, CEO and President of AGREA, which works to ensure fair trade in sustainable agriculture in the Philippines, brought up the importance of collaboration between the private and public sector. She pointed to an example that worked in the Philippines at the beginning of the pandemic.

Just a few days after the first lockdown, many farmers were left wondering where to take their produce, as their mobility had suddenly been restricted, she said. At the same time, in Manila, the country’s capital with a population of more than 12 million, people scrambled for groceries as supermarkets shelves were empty.

Her team addressed this by contacting the agriculture ministry asking for farmers’ access to work to be restored so long as they maintained COVID-19 protocols.

Meanwhile, Chinyamunyamu shared the role that digital platforms and innovative technology played during the crisis, especially in giving access to marginalised groups.

The lockdown was especially disruptive for the farmers in Malawi, because it came at a time which was the “only marketing season” for them, she said. Chinyamunyamu explained that farmers were able to address this challenge through innovative approaches, including using digital technology such as mobile phones

Farmers were able to share information with each other on markets, as well as developments about COVID-19 by communicating via mobile phone. This was especially important for marginalised groups because it established an important way to reach vulnerable communities.

“Even though women still have less access than men to mobile phones, if a woman has a mobile phone, it’s theirs — they have control over the usage,” she said. “So if you pass on information to women through mobile phones, that’s information that goes directly to them.”

However, concerns remain about what lies ahead.

“In the coming decades, many regions around the world are expected to experience increased water scarcity driven by climate change and exacerbated by increasing competition for water resources,” Abdullah said. 

“The battle for water will be one of the next ‘great challenges,’” he added.

Samir Ibrahim, co-founder of SunCulture, a startup for solar-powered generators and water pumps in Africa, shared his experience working with innovative technology on the continent.

He pointed out that new ways for the allocation of funds was crucial for the sustenance of such projects.

“What is important for the ‘newness’ is not necessarily new technologies,” he said. “What we’ve seen is that emerging markets were solving problems that have been solved in other parts of the world.”

He said that while their company did not invent solar irrigation, it was “the first to commercialise in Africa”.

“While technology is incredibly important, we had to do a lot of innovation on battery storage,” he added.

Credit: Temilade Adelaja via Communication for Development Ltd/CGAP, Washington DC

By Elisabeth Rhyne* and Eric Duflos*
WASHINGTON DC, Mar 25 2021 (IPS)

Imagine it is 2025 and that, unfortunately, another pandemic is sweeping the world. Much like in the 2020 crisis, borrowers have seen their livelihoods upended and are struggling to repay loans.

One of the questions before policy makers amid this new crisis is whether to extend moratoria to distressed borrowers. In search of answers, they reflect on the world’s experience with the COVID-19 pandemic and whether moratoria were part of the solution. These policy makers conclude that they did some things right in 2020.

Just days into COVID-19 lockdowns, bank regulators in more than 115 countries granted special permission for financial services providers (FSPs) to extend moratoria to millions of borrowers, especially those with small business and consumer loans. These moratoria were the next best thing to cash in the wallet for borrowers who had lost their jobs or seen their business revenue plummet.

For lower-income countries, whose governments could ill afford welfare payments, moratoria became an important form of economic relief. And by relaxing provisioning on paused loans, these special moratoria also shored up FSPs’ balance sheets and prevented panic in financial systems.

Through the moratoria, the world’s economies put the shock-absorbing capacity of financial systems to good use.

But these policy makers also see that moratoria could have worked better in some respects. So, in 2025, as the world once again turns to moratoria, they are determined to learn the lessons of the past and make moratoria work even better. What do they do differently?

Fair burden sharing

As public health authorities shutter the economy to stop the new pandemic, advocates for lower-income people are already calling on policy makers to spread the economic burden among those better able to bear it.

Policy makers know that moratoria on small loans (as well as evictions and mortgages) will shift some economic pain from lower-income families and small businesses onto banks and landlords — at least, temporarily.

But they recall that, in 2020, FSPs shifted the pain back to small borrowers by allowing interest to accrue and compound during moratoria. Ultimately, borrowers paid to pause their loans – often dearly.

Back in 2020, policy makers debated whether to shift some of the long-term burden of accrued and compounding interest away from borrowers, but it was difficult for them to find a workable solution.

In India, after much debate in the Supreme Court over who should pay this additional interest, the government found a remedy when it agreed to pay banks the compounding portion of borrowers’ interest incurred during moratoria. Implicitly, this decision made moratoria part of the government’s overall pandemic response while affirming the right of the banks to charge fully for delayed payments.

Fortunately, in 2025, several governments have included special provisions in their catastrophe protocols that pledge government funding for a portion of the interest that small loans accrue during moratoria.

This pledge helps to ensure policies intended to help low-income people don’t end up harming them. It has the added benefit of providing banks with a small amount of liquidity during the moratoria period.

Moratoria will also be fairer this time around because policy makers have universally agreed that borrowers should have the right to choose whether to accept or reject a moratorium offer. This was not always the case in 2020.

In some countries, regulators — anxious to prevent panic — and FSPs — wishing to avoid tedious case-by-case administration — promulgated blanket moratoria, even before obtaining agreement from borrowers.

However, some borrowers preferred to keep paying to avoid extra interest charges. In response to push back from borrowers on unilateral moratoria, authorities in Peru affirmed consumers’ right to unwind unwanted moratoria. Today, following this example, regulators the world over require FSPs to notify borrowers of moratoria offers and present them with the option to refuse.

Policy makers have also anticipated the challenge of maintaining borrowers’ standing with credit bureaus. When borrowers accept moratoria during a national emergency, it should not hurt their creditworthiness.

In 2020, there was confusion over how banks should report restructured loans to credit bureaus, how credit bureaus were to incorporate these loans into credit scores, and how new lenders were to use the information.

In India, FSPs simply didn’t report many loans for several months. Eventually, those problems were sorted out. Now, in 2025, credit bureaus follow well-understood protocols for handling loans in moratoria during emergencies.

Preparedness

The emergency protocols that the world’s banking authorities and FSPs put in place after the COVID-19 pandemic also address operational continuity and communications.

Back in 2020, economic lockdowns prevented in-person interactions between lenders and borrowers and often led to breakdowns in communication. In Uganda, loan officers could not meet with customers in the field, and transport restrictions prevented adequate staffing of branches and even call centers. FSPs transacting mainly in cash were caught especially flat-footed.

Thankfully, this problem is behind us now. The pandemic accelerated FSPs’ digitization plans across the world, and record numbers of borrowers started using mobile technology. FSPs serving lower-income customers now routinely communicate and transact digitally.

They have also upgraded their internal systems to handle the irregular schedules of loans in moratoria. And the expansion of digital infrastructure during and after COVID-19 now allows staff to work from home.

Consumer protection

As financial regulators and supervisors prepare for the new moratoria in 2025, they are better equipped to mitigate some of the consumer risks that appeared in 2020. They now use market monitoring tools, such as suptech, consumer phone surveys and mystery shopping, to assess consumer risks in real time. They can quickly spot issues such as abusive collections practices.

Nevertheless, both financial authorities and FSPs have learned from the previous crisis that ensuring good communication and transparency will be challenging. Moratoria are unfamiliar concepts, and the math is complicated.

Learning from 2020, when poor communication led to misunderstandings, mistakes and abuse, regulators have already issued consumer protection rules to ensure the public fully understands moratoria offers and their consequences.

Additionally, communications now flow not just to customers, but also from them. Policy makers are widely using tools that give consumers a collective voice and reveal what they are experiencing.

Several regulators have put consultative bodies in place to have a regular dialogue with consumers, and consumer associations regularly convey issues to them. Such tools proved useful in 2020.

In Peru, for example, the consumer protection agency INDECOPI listened systematically to customers and alerted regulators and FSPs to emerging abuses so that they could respond quickly.

Agility

The COVID-19 pandemic lasted much longer than anyone foresaw, and unanticipated implementation challenges arose. If policy makers learned one thing, was is that you can never anticipate all the ways an emergency will unfold.

Accordingly, the countries that were best prepared for the next pandemic were those that had established channels for authorities and FSPs to work together to respond to evolving conditions.

Source: Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) is a global partnership of more than 30 leading development organizations that works to advance the lives of poor people through financial inclusion.

*Elisabeth is the former managing director of the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion. She is a visiting fellow at the Financial Access Initiative and a consultant at CGAP.

*Eric Duflos, Senior Financial Sector Specialist, leads CGAP’s work on consumer protection, from policy, industry and customer perspectives, ensuring that financial services have positive outcomes for customers.

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COVID-19 has amplified the omission of disabled people. Credit: Bigstock

By Sara Rotenberg and Shubha Nagesh
DEHRADUN, India/OXFORD, UK, Mar 24 2021 (IPS)

2020 will be remembered as the year that changed the world, as COVID-19 spared no country, no community, and no person. As the pandemic continues in 2021, there is recognition that some groups are impacted more than others, not just by the virus itself, but also by the socio-economic and access inequities exacerbated by global shutdowns. Globally, countries, and organisations are seeking to build back better and address inequities.

António Guterres, Secretary-General of the UN, highlighted that we have ignored inequality for too long, putting the poor at greater risk during the pandemic.

UK-based studies corroborate this: people in affluent areas are 50x less likely to die from COVID-19, while people of black ethnicity and disabled people are 4 and 3 times more likely to die from COVID 19, respectively.

Only 0.5% of international development funding goes towards disability-inclusive programs.  despite the fact that people with disabilities make up 15% of the world’s population

A third of 18-24 year olds have lost their job–twice the rate of working age adults. The disproportionate impacts on women include reduced reproductive health rights; increased unpaid care responsibilities; more domestic violence; and a record decrease in women leaving the workforce. Together, these trends threaten global gains on equity and inclusion.

India exemplifies the challenges and inequities so many in low- and middle-income countries faced during the pandemic. India’s poor have been hit the hardest in everything from the disease itself to the economic and social impacts of national lockdowns.

Scores of migrants walked hundreds of kilometres to their villages, exemplifying how people in the informal sector lost their jobs, livelihood, and homes. Public and private healthcare facilities tried to support COVID-19 patients, but reports question the accessibility and equity of the services for the poor. Economically, experts expect that millions of people in India will become impoverished due to the pandemic.

For global health more broadly, the pandemic has threatened to drive back progress made in recent decades and highlighted how we neglected calls for health systems strengthening in recent years. Yet, we see opportunities and calls to ‘build back better’, the global health community must first ask itself “What is wrong with Global Health?” so we avoid these systemic issues and build a more inclusive world.

The reality is that many things went wrong within global health prior to 2020. To date, we have seen certain groups forgotten in the global health space. For instance, only 0.5% of international development funding goes towards disability-inclusive programs.  Even less of this goes directly to global health, despite the fact that people with disabilities make up 15% of the world’s population. COVID-19 has amplified the omission of disabled people.

For example, India’s COVID-19 tracker, Aarogya Setu App, public health guidance, and testing sites have remained inaccessible for disabled people. In lockdowns, disabled people also had difficulties accessing essential food, information, medicines, and supplies.

We suggest three ways to address access inequalities in Global Health:

1. Underrepresented and marginalized groups need better, authentic representation. Global health organizations must continually ask themselves who is not represented or reached in their programs, and actively take steps to fix it. Involving advocates and activists from the very beginning will include the needs of at-risk populations and enhancing acceptance, inclusion and belonging.

2. Global health needs better, timely, factual, and accessible communication. Creating accessible and acceptable communication strategies and messages that are deployed to reach even the most remote areas is key to ensuring global health connects everyone.

3. Act in solidarity. Governments, civil society, and international organisations need to come together to distribute resources proportionately to need. Distributive justice can ensure greater security for all–whether that is for health, income, employment–which ultimately impacts our collective ability to weather catastrophes, like pandemics.

COVID-19 has been a pivotal moment and offers a unique opportunity to build back a better, more equitable, healthier world. However, without an explicit focus on inequity, we risk leaving out those who global health has forgotten, despite our moral obligation and duty to protect.

In 2020, we showed that anything is possible with political will, dedicated funding, and global action. In 2021, we need a paradigm shift in our approach to global health so that it captures those who most need it. We must apply what we have learned from collective action for COVID-19 to the greatest challenges facing our society: inequity. By addressing this, we ensure that global health is truly accessible to all.

All views expressed are personal reflections

Shubha Nagesh is a medical doctor and a global health consultant based in Dehradun, India. She strives to make Childhood Disability a global health priority.

Sara Rotenberg is a Rhodes Scholar and DPhil Student in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford.