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

Barbora Bukovská

Why does the cancellation of RightsCon matter?

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

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

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

What does this episode reveal about transnational repression?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does this mean globally?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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U.S. Coast Guard cutter USCGC Aquidneck (WPB-1309) in the Strait of Hormuz, with a large container ship visible in the background as it transits the critical global trade route (Dec. 2, 2020). Credit: MC2 Indra Beaufort

By Lulseged Desta and Jonathan Mockshell
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, May 20 2026 (IPS)

Sharp surges in energy, fertilizer, and food prices triggered by the ongoing conflict in the Persian Gulf strikingly illustrate the deep interconnections between geopolitical conflict, food insecurity, and the fragility of fossil fuel–dependent food systems.

Besides carrying roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day (about 27 percent of global oil exports), the Strait of Hormuz also handles 20–30 percent of internationally traded inorganic fertilizers, which uses natural gas as a key ingredient in its production. Its closure has immediately disrupted the flow of these essential commodities, triggering sharp price spikes in fuel and key agricultural inputs.

This situation demonstrates how geopolitical instability can rapidly disrupt essential agricultural functions under current input-dependent, industrial production systems that rely heavily on external energy and supply chains. This crisis highlights, more clearly than ever, a critical reality: food systems tied to fossil fuels are inherently unsustainable, continually undermine food sovereignty, and disproportionately affect farmers, particularly smallholders in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). World Food Programme estimates warn that, if the conflict continues, the soaring oil, shipping and food costs will push an additional 45 million people into acute hunger, driving the global total beyond its record 319 million¹.

Reducing food systems’ reliance on fossil fuels and external inputs is essential to strengthen our collective resilience to future shocks. The truth is that fossil fuels courses through every stage of the food system – from fertilizers and pesticides to processing, preservation, transportation, packaging, food waste disposal, and even food preparation. Moreover, entrenched economic and political structures lock in this fossil-fuel dependence through massive subsidies and price protections – estimated at over $1 trillion in recent years².

Food systems account for at least 15 percent of total fossil fuel use – mostly through synthetic fertilizers ⁴ – but also to power machinery and vehicles, and generate electricity and heat for key processes like irrigation, grain drying, livestock housing, and food storage.

Agroecological approaches to food production offer an alternative to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels while still meeting the needs of a growing global population. This supports a transition from energy-sink systems to regenerative ones, radically enhancing food systems’ resilience in the face of escalating geopolitical instability and environmental vulnerability.

Agroecology is based on natural processes and local resources for sustainable soil fertility. Crucially, many of these practices draw directly from indigenous knowledge systems, where local communities have long maintained soil health through time. Practical steps include the use of organic fertilization (often blended with minimal synthetic inputs), efficient soil microorganisms, nitrogen-fixing plants, and soil health practices like crop rotation, cover cropping, intercropping, reduced tillage, and crop-livestock integration.

Research consistently shows that agroecological approaches – such as farm diversification and tree integrated systems – outperform conventional systems in climate resilience, nutrient cycling, and soil health^5,6, often while boosting yields^7-9. Agroforestry also provides a source of wood fuel, making it a valuable alternative during fossil fuel shortages and price spikes.

Examples can be found worldwide. Peruvian cocoa farmers are using bokashi and bio-oil amendments to restore soil organic matter, regenerate microbial activity, and enhance nutrient cycling¹⁰. In Vietnam, rice-fish coculture systems optimize nutrient cycling, curb pests, and diversify outputs – lowering costs while stabilizing farmer incomes¹¹. Ethiopian farmers practicing wheat-fava bean rotations are cutting fertilizer needs while improving soil structure and building long-term fertility11. India’s agroecology programme, ‘Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF)’, delivers biodiversity benefits while more than doubling farmers’ economic profits and maintaining comparable crop yields, than chemical-based farming ^12,13.

Other farm-level steps to curb fossil fuel dependence include integrating renewable energy sources for on-site generation and operations – like solar panels, biogas digesters, and wind turbines; solar water pumps, adopting fuel-efficient engines and draft animals; and embracing practices such as minimum tillage, precision irrigation, integrated pest management, and low-input crop-livestock systems.

More fundamentally, shifting from global, industrial commodity chains toward territorial, agroecological food networks can relocalize production, processing, and consumption – shortening supply chains and reducing energy-intensive operations. Shorter, localized supply chains reduce reliance on long-distance transport, lower packaging demand, and promote reusable packaging systems, thereby decreasing fossil fuel consumption.

These efforts can be reinforced by complementary practices that strengthen food sovereignty, such as home gardens and urban agriculture. Crucially, agroecology also aligns with reduced production of ultra-processed foods – among the most energy-intensive products – helping to curb fossil fuel use while potentially improving public health.

In the short term, it is crucial that the allocation of emergency funds are earmarked to procure or purchase organic alternatives to synthetic fertilizers, particularly in the most affected regions. Longer-term, it is necessary to reduce structural barriers to farmers’ adoption of these agroecological approaches including reforms to agricultural subsidies and strengthening support for technical assistance and local governance.

References
1. Farge, E. Iran war may push 45 million people into acute hunger by June, WFP says. Reuters https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-war-may-push-45-million-people-into-acute-hunger-by-june-wfp-says-2026-03-17/ (2026).

2. IPES-Food. Fuel to Fork: What Will It Take to Get Fossil Fuels out of Our Food Systems? https://ipes-food.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/FuelToFork.pdf (2025).

3. FAO, UNDP, and UNEP. A Multi-Billion-Dollar Opportunity – Repurposing Agricultural Support to Transform Food Systems. (FAO, UNDP, and UNEP, 2021). doi:10.4060/cb6562en.

4. Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Power Shift: Why We Need to Wean Industrial Food Systems off Fossil Fuels. https://futureoffood.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/ga_food-energy-nexus_report.pdf (2023).

5. Niether, W., Jacobi, J., Blaser, W. J., Andres, C. & Armengot, L. Cocoa agroforestry systems versus monocultures: a multi-dimensional meta-analysis. Environ. Res. Lett. 15, 104085 (2020).

6. Beillouin, D., Ben‐Ari, T., Malézieux, E., Seufert, V. & Makowski, D. Positive but variable effects of crop diversification on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Glob. Change Biol. 27, 4697–4710 (2021).

7. Dittmer, K. M. et al. Agroecology Can Promote Climate Change Adaptation Outcomes Without Compromising Yield In Smallholder Systems. Environ. Manage. 72, 333–342 (2023).

8. Rodenburg, J., Mollee, E., Coe, R. & Sinclair, F. Global analysis of yield benefits and risks from integrating trees with rice and implications for agroforestry research in Africa. Field Crops Res. 281, 108504 (2022).

9. Jones, S. K. et al. Achieving win-win outcomes for biodiversity and yield through diversified farming. Basic Appl. Ecol. 67, 14–31 (2023).

10. Altieri, M. A. & Nicholls, C. I. Agroecology and the reconstruction of a post-COVID-19 agriculture. J. Peasant Stud. 47, 881–898 (2020).

11. FAO. The State of Food and Agriculture 2022. (FAO, 2022). doi:10.4060/cb9479en.

12. Berger, I. et al. India’s agroecology programme, ‘Zero Budget Natural Farming’, delivers biodiversity and economic benefits without lowering yields. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 9, 2057–2068 (2025).

13. O’Garra, T. Agroecology benefits people and planet. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 9, 1973–1974 (2025).

14. IPES-Food. Food from Somewhere: Building Food Security and Resilience through Territorial Markets. https://ipes-food.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/FoodFromSomewhere.pdf (2024).

15. Einarsson, R. Nitrogen in the Food System. https://tabledebates.org/building-blocks/nitrogen-food-system (2024) doi:10.56661/2fa45626.

Lulseged Desta, CGIAR Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program; Jonathan Mockshell, Alliance Biodiversity International – CIAT

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: Bibbi Abruzzini/Forus - Rabat, Morocco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What must be defended

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

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

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

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

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

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

What must be demanded

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

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

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

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

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

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

What must be declined

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

A thinner agenda that lowers ambition in the name of consensus must be declined. So must any attempt to weaken universality, rights, gender equality, civic freedoms or climate ambition for political expediency.

The continuation of a financial status quo that deepens inequality while speaking the language of partnership must also be declined. So must accountability arrangements that remain symbolic, selective or performative.

And tokenistic participation must be named for what it is. A process that brings civil society into the room for appearance’s sake while excluding it from agenda-setting, decision-making and follow-through is managed exclusion.

Finally, as development governance evolves, the expanding role of private and philanthropic actors must not come without public-interest safeguards, democratic oversight and accountability. Public goals cannot be left to unaccountable power.

We must get out of silos, create spaces of dialogue, of co-responsibility and raise the question of whether the post-2030 framework will be more honest about power, more serious about accountability, more capable of confronting structural inequality, and more open to those whose lives and rights are most at stake.

Our answer is here:
Defend what must not be lost.
Demand what must be corrected.
Decline what would weaken the future.

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: Amnesty International
 
Vanuatu has spearheaded a UN General Assembly resolution, expected to be tabled on May 20, 2026, to endorse and operationalize the 2025 International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion, which confirmed that nations have binding legal duties to prevent and repair climate-related harm. The resolution, supported by a core group including Singapore and the Netherlands, calls for implementing these legal standards to protect vulnerable states from climate disasters, despite resistance from major polluters.

By Shristi Gautam and Simone Galimberti
KATHMANDU, Nepal, May 20 2026 (IPS)

Normally, resolutions voted at the United Nations General Assembly do not make the headlines.

As nonbinding and mostly symbolic, rich in principles yet empty and lacking the power to carry consequences, these statements are shrugged off and ignored.

But there are exceptions, and today’s (May 20) UNGA vote is one of them. The reason is that a positive vote would constitute a significant development in the evolution of international environmental law. To understand what we are referring to, let us allow a small flashback.

Far from South Asia, a trailblazing effort to hold a private corporation accountable for climate-damaging harm played out in a German court in recent years. For the first time, a Peruvian farmer filed a case against a major German energy company, accusing it of gravely damaging his livelihood due to its contributions to climate warming.

Even though this case, known as Lliuya v. RWE, was ultimately rejected in May 2025, it opened a new era in one of the most promising fields for achieving climate justice: climate litigation.

In the words of experts from the Grantham Research Institute, Lliuya v. RWE “established a powerful legal precedent that can be replicated in courts worldwide and will shape the trajectory for future climate litigation: corporate greenhouse gas emitters can, in principle, be held liable for their contribution to climate change impacts.”

Climate litigation, as an approach to pursue justice, is relatively new but is on the rise worldwide. There are more and more legal cases being filed in courts of law to uphold the principles of climate equity and climate justice and to pursue the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, a precondition to the enjoyment of other rights, such as the right to life, health, and an adequate standard of living.

After years of litigation, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the state has an obligation to reduce emissions because adaptive efforts alone are insufficient. More groundbreaking cases followed. In the Los Cedros case, the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court established another pioneering precedent, affirming the primacy of the Right of Nature over mining concessions.

These rulings created momentum for bolder climate action, both in courts and in the streets, where millions of people across the Global South and North protested vigorously against climate injustice.

Within the international climate regime established by the Paris Agreement in 2015, the voices of developing nations, especially small island developing states, grew louder in opposition to unchecked greenhouse gas pollution, mostly from the Global North.

Unfortunately, there have been only very partial advancements within the UNFCCC framework. Last year, Climate COP 30, chaired by Brazil in Belém and supposed to be the COP of action and implementation, ended in another major disappointment. It is difficult to find optimism that the upcoming COP 31 in Türkiye will bear the transformative results humanity so desperately needs.

But an extraordinary legal effort, initially launched by law students from the Pacific in 2021 and later embraced by the Government of Vanuatu, paid off. On 23 July last year, the International Court of Justice issued the landmark Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change. It was a truly game-changing moment for the fight for climate justice, even if the AO is non-binding.

Among its several remarkable aspects, the Paris Agreement’s obligations are not only procedural but also substantive, and states have stringent due diligence obligations. The ICJ also rejected the concept of “Lex Specialis,” clarifying that states’ obligations extend beyond the Paris Agreement, which, as a treaty, does not take precedence over other sources of law.

In plain terms, governments cannot hide behind the negotiations within the various climate COPs. They must do more. The ruling explicitly demands that states do whatever they can, within their means, to meet their commitments to reduce climate change.

It is not enough for a state to submit a Nationally Determined Contribution, its national plan to mitigate greenhouse emissions. A state may also be considered responsible for failing to take regulatory and legislative measures to limit not only its own emissions but also greenhouse gases produced by the private sector within its own borders.

The AO could not be clearer: “A breach by a State of any of the obligations identified by the Court in relation to climate change constitutes an internationally wrongful act entailing the responsibility of that State.”

Today, the Pacific island of Vanuatu, a true trailblazer showing that small developing nations can punch above their weight with moral leadership, is once again attempting to make history by bringing a UNGA Resolution on the AO.

Even without enforceable power, this resolution wants to reaffirm the principles enshrined in the Advisory Opinion, marking another step toward states’ accountability under international law.

According to the Climate Litigation Database, hosted by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, more than 3,000 lawsuits have been filed against governments and private-sector carbon emitters, including banks and asset management companies.

Today’s UNGA Resolution was supported by a diverse coalition including the Netherlands, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Barbados, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Jamaica, the Philippines, and Burkina Faso.

Despite Nepal’s limited international engagement in recent months due to its own political transitions and elections, the new government led by Prime Minister Balendra Shah must join this group of nations.

Nepal must devise a strategy to revamp its climate efforts at the international level and, critically, do so beyond the Paris Agreement negotiations. There must be recognition that future negotiations within the UNFCCC will not be less fraught or complicated.

A series of policy papers published by the British think tank ODI exposed the hypocrisy of many governments that, in theory, are sympathetic and supportive of the climate fight of small island developing states, yet in their own submissions before the ICJ, resisted and opposed further legal obligations beyond the Paris Agreement.

This duplicity is embraced not only by developed nations but also by India and China, two of the most vocal defenders of the rights of developing nations within the Paris Agreement framework.

The incredibly complex politics of climate negotiations mean only one thing: courts of law may end up offering the only realistic venue for climate-vulnerable nations to pursue redress. As explained by The Guardian, Vanuatu was even forced to compromise some of the most progressive and climate-justice-centered aspects of this resolution in order to build the widest possible coalition of supporting nations.

Meanwhile, the ongoing tensions in the Gulf are offering a silver lining: more and more nations are realizing that phasing out carbon emissions is becoming irreversible. A few weeks ago, a pioneering gathering was held in Santa Marta, Colombia, the first-ever conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels. Although Nepal was invited, there was no news of the government’s participation.

While climate negotiations within the UNFCCC should not be dismissed, it is time to embrace another approach to seeking climate justice. The pursuit of climate justice through local and international courts may offer the most effective remedy to ensure the primary goal of the Paris Agreement, limiting climate warming to 1.5°C, is realistically pursued.

Nepal’s government will surely cast the right vote at the UNGA today. At the same time, we hope the new federal government will do whatever it takes to reiterate and expand its commitment to international law to stop climate change in the highest courts and global forums. We also hope it will create a conducive environment for climate litigation to thrive and become a tool for climate accountability that reaches everyone.

Shristi Gautam is the Past Co-Lead of World’s Youth for Climate Justice, Nepal, and Founder of Nyaya Vatika; Simone Galimberti is the pro bono co-founder of The Good Leadership.

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: Osugi / shutterstock.com

By Jordan Ryan
May 19 2026 (IPS)

 
Where does real power reside in the UN development system? A new policy brief from Cepei, a Colombian development policy institute, and the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), presented earlier in May, poses this deceptively simple question. The answer matters because institutions that cannot govern fairly or transparently struggle to sustain legitimacy, and legitimacy is essential for peace.

The Cepei-IDOS diagnosis identifies a “triple disconnect” that structures contemporary development governance. Formal oversight bodies (the Executive Boards, ECOSOC, the General Assembly) set policy directions but control only a fraction of financing. Real resources flow through bilateral arrangements between major donors and agency leadership, operating largely beyond collective scrutiny. The ten largest donors shape system priorities through informal channels of influence. Meanwhile, the programme countries that host the vast majority of UN development operations report significantly weaker upstream influence than traditional donor states. This misalignment between authority, resources and voice is no longer incidental. It has become embedded in the way the system operates.

What transforms this observation from an efficiency problem into a peace imperative is the reality that ungovernable systems cannot respond to prevention and peacebuilding needs. A development architecture shaped disproportionately by donor priorities and limited programme-country voice lacks the legitimacy, flexibility and democratic accountability required to address the structural drivers of conflict. When host countries experience UN operations as imposed rather than negotiated, and when funding priorities reflect donor interests rather than local prevention priorities, the development system becomes an actor in grievance production, not prevention.

The governance–legitimacy nexus works in both directions. Ungovernable institutions erode the multilateral system’s credibility in the Global South. Successive rounds of ineffective UN reform, driven by incremental adjustments within existing power structures, signal to programme countries that the system is designed to resist their inclusion. This perception is strengthened when donors can navigate around formal governance bodies through bilateral arrangements. Over time, institutional opacity breeds delegitimation. The UN is then weakened as a platform for both development cooperation and conflict prevention, because confidence in its democratic character has fractured.

The Cepei-IDOS brief positions the first 1000 days of the next Secretary-General’s term as a narrow window for visible structural change. The argument is neither revolutionary nor naive. It does not propose wholesale redesign of the UN system. Rather, it suggests that an incoming Secretary-General with political capital and an informed strategic agenda can make power visible, realign financial flows with governance decisions, strengthen coordination across fragmented programme delivery, and treat programme country inclusion not as charitable consultation but as an operational requirement. Small shifts in how decisions are made, where resources are allocated and whose voice is heard can accumulate into meaningful redistributions of power.

For those committed to multilateral peace and development, the brief is important precisely because it refuses the false choice between institutional realism and structural ambition. It recognises that the current system is durable and resistant to change. It also demonstrates that durability does not mean immutability. The Secretary-General occupies a unique position to convene, name problems and propose sequenced shifts in practice. Whether that role is exercised for incremental adjustment or for visible realignment of power depends on the strategic choices made in the first 1000 days, when institutional attention is high and political mandates are fresh.

The launch event captured something essential about the moment. Participants acknowledged that the system is ungovernable as presently designed while recognising that accepting that reality is not the same as accepting its inevitability. The brief itself can serve as an anchor for what peace advocates and policymakers need to argue in the months ahead: that the next Secretary-General should treat governance reform not as a technical fix but as a peace imperative. When multilateral institutions are trusted by the countries they purport to serve, they become more effective instruments of prevention and cooperation. When they are experienced as vehicles for donor capture, they become part of the problem they claim to address.

If the next Secretary-General treats governance reform as a peace imperative rather than a technical exercise, the UN development system can begin to rebuild the legitimacy it is steadily losing among the countries and communities it exists to serve.

Related articles from this author:
The Secretary-General This Moment Demands
From Reform to Reinvention: Reimagining the United Nations for the 21st Century
The UN’s Withering Vine: A US Retreat from Global Governance

Jordan Ryan is a member of the Toda International Research Advisory Council (TIRAC) at the Toda Peace Institute, a Senior Consultant at the Folke Bernadotte Academy and former UN Assistant Secretary-General with extensive experience in international peacebuilding, human rights, and development policy. His work focuses on strengthening democratic institutions and international cooperation for peace and security. Ryan has led numerous initiatives to support civil society organisations and promote sustainable development across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. He regularly advises international organisations and governments on crisis prevention and democratic governance.

This article was issued by the Toda Peace Institute and is being republished from the original with their permission.

IPS UN Bureau

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The World Bank Group is consulting publicly on whether to merge its three independent complaint mechanisms. This note explains what is being proposed and how civil society organizations can participate in the consultation.

By Danny Bradlow and David Hunter
PRETORIA, South Africa / WASHINGTON DC, USA , May 19 2026 (IPS)

The World Bank made history in 1994 by creating the Inspection Panel, the first independent accountability mechanism, at any international organisation. Its function is to investigate complaints from communities who allege they were harmed because the bank failed to comply with its own policies and procedures.

By establishing the three-member Inspection Panel, the World Bank showed support for a democrati Soth Arica/c vision of international governance based on the rule of law and the rights of individuals to take part in development decisions that affect their lives.

To date, the panel has received 186 complaints. Fifty-two have been from Africa. They involved projects in 56 countries, including 26 African countries. The complaints have raised issues such as the World Bank’s failure to comply with its own policies regarding public consultations, environmental and social impact assessments and involuntary resettlement in the projects that it funds.

The board has expanded the bank’s accountability process to include both compliance reviews and dispute resolution processes. Today, the World Bank Group has three independent accountability mechanisms:

• the Inspection Panel, which focuses on compliance reviews in public sector projects
• a separate dispute resolution mechanism for public sector projects
• the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, which offers both compliance reviews and dispute resolution services for private sector projects, primarily funded by the International Finance Corporation.

These accountability mechanisms have operated with mixed success. There have been some wins, for example in a case in Uganda involving risks for women and children associated with the building of a road. And some failures. An example is the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman finding against the International Finance Corporation for noncompliance in a coal fired power plant in India that was ignored.

We were involved, as legal academics and working with civil society organisations, in the establishment of the Inspection Panel. We have been following the activities of these independent accountability mechanisms for over 30 years. We are concerned about their future.

The World Bank Group is seeking to become a “bigger and better” bank. This involves promoting more collaboration between the five entities that make up the group. It is doing so under the banner of “One WBG”. This is an important development because the World Bank is the only global multilateral development bank. It offers developing countries both financial and advisory services. For example, it is the biggest funder of development projects in Africa.

The increasing collaboration between the different institutions in the bank raises concerns about which of their policies are applicable to a particular project. It also raises the issue of whether the bank should integrate the group’s independent accountability mechanisms so that there is no question about which mechanism is applicable to the project.

We believe that resolving this issue offers the bank’s board an opportunity to improve the structure of its independent accountability mechanisms and their contribution to the bank’s operations.

The dangers

The board appointed a two-person task force in September 2025 to advise it on the feasibility of integrating the three organisations in a way that does not reduce their independence, accessibility and effectiveness. The task force prepared a thorough and well-reasoned draft report.

The report was finalised after public consultations and is being considered by the board. It shows that integration of the mechanisms is a feasible, but complex exercise. The existing mechanisms have different operating cultures, policies and practices and human resource needs. The report describes various models for integrating the existing mechanisms.

The report also demonstrates that if mishandled, the exercise could result in a less independent and less effective accountability mechanism. To avoid this risk, we propose that the board adopt a model consisting of two separate independent accountability mechanisms. One to cover compliance reviews across the entire group. The other to cover dispute resolution across the group. This will enable both functions to operate independently and efficiently.

Our proposal raises four issues.

First, it is important that each mechanism is independent of the bank’s management. Each mechanism must have sufficient resources to undertake effective compliance reviews or dispute resolutions. Their processes must also be robust enough to result in meaningful outcomes for the complainants.

Second, the new compliance mechanism must retain a three-member panel appointed by and reporting to the bank’s board. The panel should have a permanent chair serving a six-year term. The chair must have the authority to decide which cases need the panel’s attention. The other two panel members should also serve staggered six-year terms.

A three-person panel allows for some geographic, technical and experiential diversity. Gaining a consensus among the panel members improves the quality and increases the credibility of the panel reports. A three-member panel is better able to withstand pressure from the bank’s management and other stakeholders than is a mechanism headed by one person.

Third, the dispute resolution mechanism should be headed by an experienced dispute resolution professional at the vice-president level. This official should report to the president of the bank. Our view is that this arrangement could encourage the institution to play a more proactive role in resolving disputes.

To ensure that the unit has some independence it should also have regularly scheduled meetings with the board. The head of the unit should also be able to request a meeting with the board whenever they deem it necessary and without requiring the prior approval of the bank’s president.

Fourth, the process of consolidating accountability mechanisms will be complex. Consequently, the board should first decide on the basic structure: a compliance review unit headed by a three-member panel and a separate dispute resolution unit headed by a senior professional.

It should delay any decisions on the policies, principles and practices of the mechanisms until it receives advice from a multi-stakeholder working group that includes external stakeholders and management and is co-chaired by one person from each of the units being merged.

An opportunity to fix things

The bank has the opportunity to strengthen its development mission. The changes it makes should be designed to:

• help make the bank a better institution that supports higher quality projects
• make the bank a learning institution that openly accepts criticism and looks to implement solutions
• ensure it becomes an institution that recognises that people affected by bank-funded projects are stakeholders in its operations who may be forced to risk their well-being for the greater good.

Source: The Conversation Africa May 17, 2026

Daniel Bradlow is Professor/Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria; David Hunter is Professor Emeritus, The American University Washington College of Law, American University.

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: Emmanuel Herman/Reuters via Gallo Images

By Hannah Wheatley, Joanna Makhlouf and Taís Siqueira
BAGAMOYO, Tanzania / BEIRUT, Lebanon / WASHINGTON D.C., May 18 2026 (IPS)

In an era when civil society funding is in decline, it’s time to rebel against a broken system.

Today, too much is being asked from the people already doing the most. In a time of multiple and connected global crises – of climate, conflict, democracy, disinformation, global governance, human rights and inclusion – and in a context of intensifying civic space restrictions and collapsing funding, funders and the intermediary organisations that distribute resources somehow expect frontline organisations to transform systemic injustices that have built up over centuries. At the same time, these groups are expected to keep meeting inflexible targets, writing flawless reports and keeping their teams emotionally and physically afloat.

As governments, international organisations, investors, philanthropists, civil society and business leaders meet at the Global Partnerships Conference on the future of international development, it’s time to do things differently.

Let’s stop asking local leaders to transform their communities before they’ve had space to heal. Let’s stop training grassroots organisations to become international clones. Let’s stop intermediaries replicating burnout culture.

No single organisation can undo the long legacy of colonialism or the systemic problems of global capitalism. And they shouldn’t have to. The role of the civil society ecosystem must be to build and protect space, redistribute power and resources and, most of all, stop transferring institutional pressure downwards. If we truly trust local civil society, we must also trust its limits. That means intermediaries must stand their ground with funders, set realistic expectations and champion the right to do less when circumstances demand it.

At CIVICUS’s Local Leadership Labs – an initiative to tackle the barriers that get in the way of local leadership of development – partners often report feeling compelled to deliver ambitious workplans that involve them reaching every district, leading multiple initiatives and facilitating extensive community engagements, even as civic space is closing around them. Driven by passion and the need to prove their worth in a competitive ecosystem, many have overextended without realising the toll on their wellbeing and sustainability.

Burnout is not just about long hours. It stems from impossible expectations in unsafe, high-pressure contexts. Civil society is striving to stretch every grant dollar, prove its worth at every reporting cycle and ensure the survival of communities. In restrictive civic space conditions, these pressures are compounded by harassment, intimidation, surveillance and violence.

The result is a constant feeling of not doing enough, even when the demands are structurally impossible. Over time, this erodes morale, health and leadership sustainability.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, funders proved that another way was possible. They provided unrestricted funding and offered flexibility and simplified reporting. Trust was extended. Partnerships were strengthened. But that willingness to experiment has not lasted.

What must change

It must be recognised that in these conditions, scaling back is not failure. It is how movements endure.

We have seen that investing in healing and reflection is not a luxury. It is what sustains movements. At Local Leadership Labs, partners working with survivors of state violence realised they could not move forward without first addressing exhaustion and trauma. Their care-centred approach showed that the process itself can be the outcome. Taking time for healing and thoughtful collaboration produces more sustainable, transformational results.

This is what the civil society ecosystem should support: not chasing impossible targets, but creating conditions for dignity, reflection and resilience.

Addressing burnout requires more than acknowledgement. It calls for rethinking about how support is structured and how expectations are set. Funders and intermediaries can help break the cycle by:

1. Budgeting time and priority for healing
Leaders are often asked to deliver systemic change while carrying unaddressed trauma. Without space for healing, burnout is inevitable. Intermediaries can normalise pacing, integrate healing into workplans and advocate with funders for timelines that reflect reality.

2. Showing funders the way
Funders need guidance on becoming more adaptable to intensifying civic space conditions and contexts of high volatility. Intermediaries can convene learning spaces where funders reflect on how flexibility and responsiveness protect communities and sustain movements. They can also challenge extractive, funder-driven processes and advocate for spaces where local civil society can lead and influence on its own terms.

3. Bridging, connecting and humanising
Behind funders, intermediaries and frontline civil society are people, all under institutional pressure. Intermediaries can help in both directions, by shielding local partners from unrealistic demands while working with funders to develop an understanding of what’s achievable. By cultivating empathy, they can replace transactional directives with reciprocal accountability, unlocking collaborations that go beyond the extractive.

In many contexts, civil society is holding the line in the face of authoritarianism, even worse attacks on human rights and still stronger repression. The enemies of democracy and human rights thrive when those defending freedoms and demanding social justice burn out. When forced to compete for scarce resources, organisations try to over-deliver to prove their worth, further deepening stress and accelerating exhaustion.

In this context, supporting the wellbeing of local civil society is not optional. It is central to protecting the energy that drives activism. Funders and intermediaries must pause, reflect and reset expectations. If we create space for healing, rest and resilience, movements will survive the current storm, and emerge equipped to resist, transform and win.

Taís Siqueira is Local Leadership Labs Coordinator at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. Hannah Wheatley is CIVICUS’s former Data Analyst and Joanna Makhlouf is a former member of the Local Leadership Labs implementation team.

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Khaled Khiari, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Middle East, Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations, addresses the Security Council meeting on maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, May 18 2026 (IPS)

Four years after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War, 2026 has marked a significant escalation in hostilities, with intensified bombardments from both sides causing immense destruction across the region, complicating humanitarian operations, and deepening an already severe humanitarian crisis. As exchanges of attacks have intensified in recent days, the United Nations (UN) warns that women and girls will be disproportionately impacted as violence disrupts access to basic, lifesaving services.

Last week on May 13, Russian forces launched a massive barrage of approximately 800 drones, targeting western regions of Ukraine, including areas that surround the Hungarian border. Local authorities informed the UN’s country office in Ukraine that the attacks resulted in multiple civilian casualties and extensive damage to critical infrastructure, including energy facilities and railway hubs. Significant destruction was reported in the Rivne, Volyn, and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, where several sites came under fire.

This attack triggered what UN Ukraine described as “one of the most intense and prolonged attacks of the war to date,” with continuous hostilities from Russian forces reported across the country for nearly 24 hours. Violence intensified the following day in Kyiv, where drone and missile strikes targeted major residential neighborhoods and key civilian infrastructure.

Ukrainian authorities reported that at least 140 Ukrainians were killed, including six children, with figures expected to rise as rescue operations continue. Officials also stated that a high-rise residential building in Kyiv’s Darnytskyi district sustained significant damage following a direct strike, leaving numerous residents trapped beneath the rubble.

Approximately 24 civilians were killed and 48 others were injured in the strike, including three children who were found dead. UN Ukraine reported that emergency teams carried out search-and-rescue operations and extinguished fires despite immense risks, as strikes continued to land. That same day, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that a “clearly marked” UN vehicle was struck twice in Kherson City while delivering aid to vulnerable communities.

“Families should always feel safe,” said Bernadette Castel-Hollingsworth, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees’ (UNHCR) Representative in Ukraine. “Mothers should not be waiting to know if their children are alive under the rubble after these missile attacks,” she continued, stressing that attacks that target civilians are a violation of humanitarian law.

According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) , civilian casualties in Ukraine over the first four months of 2026 were higher than any four-month period recorded in any of the last three years. The Mission found that this is primarily due to a massive rise in the use of long-range weapons, which carry a far greater capacity for destruction and civilian harm, especially when used in densely populated urban areas.

HRMMU found that in April of this year, at least 84 civilians were killed and 628 others were injured as a direct result of long-range weapons use, accounting for approximately 43 percent of the total civilian casualties recorded during that period.

“I deplore the resumption of these large-scale attacks which have resulted in civilian casualties across the country,” said the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on May 14. “Attacks by long-range weapons are one of the leading causes of civilian casualties in Ukraine. Their expanded use in populated areas will only increase the already mounting toll on civilians,” Turk added, urging for an immediate de-escalation of hostilities.

Ukrainian women and girls have been severely and disproportionately impacted by the war, with the first three months of 2026 marking the deadliest winter for women and girls since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. According to figures from UN Women, approximately 199 women and girls were killed between January and March of this year. This follows a 27 percent increase in casualties among women between 2025 and 2024.

More than four years into the Russian invasion, women and girls in Ukraine are facing immense stress under the threats of war and subsequent attacks on energy infrastructure. Credit: UN Women/Aurel Obreja

During a press briefing at the Palais des Nations in Geneva on May 12, UN Women’s Representative in Ukraine Sabine Friezer Gunes informed reporters that attacks on energy infrastructure have devastated mental and physical wellbeing for women across Ukraine, particularly those in caregiving roles. Gunes noted that many of these women are struggling to manage increasing household responsibilities, growing financial pressures, and shrinking access to essential resources, such as reliable electricity.

“Women are significantly more likely than men to report having no backup energy supply during disruptions – 73 per cent of women say that they have no alternative energy sources,” said Gunes. “Nearly eight in ten women’s organisations in Ukraine told UN Women that funding reductions are seriously affecting their work, including some organisations reporting having to reduce the number of women and girls supported by their services. Official donor assistance to support women has reduced, and inequalities in Ukraine are increasing.”

Over the weekend, on May 17, Ukraine launched one of its largest long-range drone offensives against Russia in over a year, mainly targeting Moscow. This attack, described by reporters as retaliation for the missile and drone strikes in Kyiv, killed at least three people and injured 12 others, while local authorities reported damage to several unspecified infrastructure and numerous high-rise buildings.

“Our responses to Russia’s prolongation of the war and attacks on our cities and communities are entirely justified,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a statement shared to X (formerly Twitter). “This time, Ukrainian long-distance sanctions have reached the Moscow region, and we are clearly telling the Russians: their state must end its war.”

Nigel Gould Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, warned that Ukraine’s retaliatory strikes against Russia will only work to exacerbate regional tensions going forward.

“There is no ongoing peace process to disrupt. What (the attack) is more likely to do is add to the darkening cloud of anxiety over Russia, which has developed palpably over the last three or four months,” said Davies. “The fact that Ukraine is reminding the Moscow population that it is vulnerable to these attacks is likely to intensify the mix of concerns now. I see no prospect, though, in the shorter term, that even these factors together will induce Russia to consider the compromises that will be necessary for peace negotiations.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Credit: The African Development Bank Group
 
Excerpts from remarks by Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director, International Monetary Fund (IMF), at the Africa Forward Summit, Nairobi, May 11-12.

By Kristalina Georgieva
NAIROBI, Kenya, May 18 2026 (IPS)

It is very appropriate that this Africa Forward Summit is being held in Kenya. Two weeks ago, a Kenyan marathon runner, Sabastian Sawe, did what had been considered impossible: by running a marathon in under two hours! What we have set ourselves here is also a marathon—and we must show the same resilience and perseverance that Mr. Sawe did.

Because Africa is not just another region. It is the future; it is where the world will acquire its next growth engine.

And it must do so in a more complex and uncertain global environment, when imbalances are growing yet again. Export-led economies reduce the space for Africa to integrate into global supply chains. At the other end, countries with large deficits absorb a disproportionately large share of financial resources, limiting the availability of capital for the rest of the world.

But the most dramatic imbalance is in demographics—between aging and youthful societies, with capital mostly in the first group and growth potential in the second.

What should the countries of Africa do to build resilience against a world of more frequent shocks and secure the bright future that this continent so richly deserves?

Kristalina Georgieva

This requires action at home and stepped-up support from Africa’s partners.

At home, building economic and social resilience must be grounded in strong institutions and sound policies, creating the conditions for private sector-led growth. From credible macroeconomic policy to decisive steps against corruption and reforms to slash red tape, countries need to work to win investors’ trust.

Africa also has to speed up trade and economic integration. Just eliminating tariff and non-tariff barriers in line with the continental free trade area can increase income per capita by more than 10 percent—with more purchasing power the continent becomes more competitive.

And Africa must deal decisively with the burden of debt. Restructure or reprofile when debt is unsustainable; avoid non-productive borrowing; and shift the balance from debt to equity as much and as quickly as possible. For this, it is paramount to develop deeper, more diversified capital markets.

Under France’s G7 presidency we have made the issue of global imbalances a priority for our work. Africa benefits when the Fund advocates for fair treatment. To reflect our firm belief in Africa’s growth potential, we have also pursued multiple reforms to expand our support for the continent.

First, we put our money where our mouth is. We have vastly expanded our concessional lending for Africa, from $8 billion pre-COVID to $36 billion today. Thanks to the SDR channeling of $109 billion, which President Macron and leaders from Africa championed, we can deploy substantially more concessional lending. To put it simply, thanks to the SDR channeling we can do more as ODA does less.

And we make sure our financing unlocks support from our development partners and helps attract private funding.

Second, we reformed how we do our programs—as a genuine partnership with our members. We don’t just talk the talk on country ownership; we walk the walk—we listen, we adapt, we show flexibility when warranted.

There are many good examples across Africa of homegrown reform programs that we support, of countries maturing in their policy choices—Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Morocco, Rwanda, Zambia, to name a few.

And yes, good policies pay off. Closing half the gap vis-à-vis emerging market economies in areas like regulation and governance can raise sub-Saharan Africa’s output by up to 20 percent within a decade.

Third, we pursue reforms of the international debt architecture, with our efforts extending to the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable, our new debt playbook for country authorities, the London Alliance, and proactive use of our good offices to help forge consensus.

Lastly, at the IMF we are delivering more voice and representation for Africa in our governance and resource allocation. We have established a third African chair at our Board and a strong focus on the continent in our work.

Our members are committed to addressing underrepresentation in the 17th quota review. And we work with regional institutions—the African Union, the African Development Bank, the Economic Commission for Africa—to ensure their deep local knowledge helps us better serve our members.

In this world of rapid transformations and repetitive exogenous shocks, there is much that individual countries cannot control. But you can, as they say here in Kenya, keep your own house “spick and span.”

You control your policies, you define your future, and your value proposition—which we will help amplify to the relevant audiences, the rating agencies included.

With the people of Africa in the front seat and we, as partners, firmly with them, I am confident that this continent will achieve its golden destiny.

IPS UN Bureau

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CIVICUS discusses the rising trend of social media bans for children with Marie-Ève Nadeau, Head of International Affairs of the 5Rights Foundation, an organisation that promotes children’s rights in the digital environment.

Marie-Ève Nadeau

Are social media bans an effective way of protecting children?

Today, one in three internet users is a child, and digital technologies increasingly mediate all aspects of their lives, from the classroom to the playground, from their first friendships to how they see themselves. As evidence of harms and risks mounts, lawmakers around the world are racing to impose age limits on children’s access to social media. The instinct to act is right, but the current direction risks missing the point.

The real issue is the conditions children face when online. Children are growing up in a digital environment designed without their distinct rights, needs and vulnerabilities in mind. This is a deliberate choice. Tech companies’ business models prioritise commercial gain over children’s safety and wellbeing, deliberately embedding persuasive design, relentless engagement loops and extractive data practices by default. Fixing this requires more than blocking children’s access.

Age restrictions are not new, yet their effectiveness remains inconclusive. Banning children from specific services while leaving the underlying system untouched lets tech companies off the hook for recommender systems that push harmful content, persuasive design that keeps children compulsively engaged and data practices that exploit their attention for profit. Used in isolation, bans create an illusion of protection while the same harmful design practices continue unchallenged. Children are pushed towards other unregulated environments, such as AI chatbots, gaming platforms and educational technology services, where they face equivalent risks with even less scrutiny.

What do these bans mean for children’s rights to expression and information?

Children’s rights are interdependent and indivisible, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child General Comment No. 25 makes clear that all children’s rights apply fully in the digital environment. This includes the right to protection from harm, but also to the rights of access to information, expression and participation. In practice, tech companies have made these rights conditional on the commercial surveillance, exploitation and manipulation of children, eroding their privacy, safety, critical thinking and agency.

Age-based bans that restrict access without addressing underlying design practices create a false choice between freedom and safety. Children need both protection from harm and meaningful access to expression, information and participation. Restricting access without reforming the systems that embed risk fails to uphold the full range of children’s rights.

Who is most harmed by these bans, and what gaps do they create?

Children’s rights apply until the age of 18, yet proposed restrictions often only cover children under 16 and a narrow set of high-risk services. This creates gaps. Children above the age threshold, and those who circumvent poorly implemented restrictions, end up in unregulated spaces outside the scope of bans.

Bans can also entrench inequality. Children are not a homogeneous group, and those facing intersecting vulnerabilities linked to disability, gender, political opinion, race, religion or ethnic, national or social origin may heavily rely on digital spaces for expression, identity safety and support.

At the same time, engagement-based platform design often rewards and amplifies divisive and harmful content, for example on gender-based violence, heightening risks for excluded communities. Blanket bans do not create safer spaces, nor eliminate these harms. Instead, they displace them to less visible, less regulated and even less accountable spaces. Effective protection must ensure children can exercise their rights and have safe spaces of support and community.

How does age verification work, and what does it mean for children’s privacy?

Tech companies routinely invest heavily in targeting advertising and personalising content yet fail to apply the same rigour to protecting children. Age assurance, an umbrella term for both age estimation and age verification solutions, allows companies to recognise the presence of children and act accordingly. It must be lawful, rights-respecting and proportionate to risk. Data collection should be limited to what’s strictly necessary to establish age, and used only for that purpose.

Global privacy regulators found that 24 per cent of services lack any age assurance mechanism and 90 per cent of those relying on self-declaration are easily bypassed. Yet robust solutions exist. Australia’s age assurance technology trial demonstrates that privacy-preserving age verification can confirm age without exposing identity. Technical standards, such as the 2089.1-2024 Standard for Online Age Verification published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, show that independently audited frameworks, like those used in product safety or pharmaceuticals, are both feasible and necessary to ensure age assurance systems are secure, proportionate and compliant.

For low-risk services appropriate for all users, there should be no requirement to establish age. Where services or functionalities present risk to children, companies should address or mitigate specific high-risk features rather than gatekeeping entire services.

What should governments demand from platforms to protect children?

Age restrictions have become part of a global playbook, notably in data protection regimes like the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which sets 13 as the threshold for consent to data collection. Poor implementation and enforcement of COPPA and similar laws have allowed tech companies to hide behind obscure disclaimers while failing to meaningfully restrict access and profiting from embedding risk into children’s digital experiences.

There’s another way forward. The priority should be holding tech companies accountable, not banning children from the digital world. That means banning exploitative practices, regulating risky features such as addictive design, manipulative recommender systems and extractive data practices, and requiring privacy, safety and age-appropriate design as the baseline.

It also means shifting to systemic risk management: companies should be legally required to anticipate, assess and mitigate how their products expose children to risk. This baseline already exists in other high-risk sectors such as aviation, food safety and medicine, where products must demonstrate safety before reaching the market.

A growing global consensus points to a clear path forward: embedding age-appropriate design, requiring child rights impact assessments, mandating privacy and safety by design and default, establishing effective enforcement mechanisms and ensuring independent auditing. Over 55 leading organisations and experts from all continents have endorsed the 10 best-practice principles developed by the 5Rights Foundation.

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

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SEE ALSO
Child social media bans: a growing global problem CIVICUS Lens 05.May.2026
Technology: Innovation without accountability CIVICUS | State Of Civil Society Report 2026
North Macedonia: ‘The solution cannot be to cut children off social media, but to make it safer’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Goran Rizaov 23.Apr.2026

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Farmers in Bangladesh. Credit: Heifer International
 
As conflict in the Middle East disrupts critical fuel and fertilizer supply routes, smallholder farmers across Asia are once again caught in the crossfire of global shocks. This piece argues that repeated crises are exposing a deeper structural flaw in agri-food systems—Overdependence on External Inputs. It presents a compelling case for regenerative agriculture as a pathway to resilient food systems in Asia.

By Neena Joshi
UTTAR PRADESH, India, May 15 2026 (IPS)

The latest shock to global food systems, triggered by conflict in the Middle East and disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz, has once again exposed a fragile truth: the world’s food systems remain highly vulnerable to external shocks.

For Asia, especially South Asia, where agriculture underpins millions of livelihoods, the consequences are immediate and severe. Rising fuel prices, supply chain disruptions, and limited access to fertilizers are pushing already fragile systems to the brink.

The Strait of Hormuz is not just a geopolitical chokepoint; it is a lifeline for fuel and agricultural inputs across Asia. A significant share of fertilizers and their raw materials, including natural gas, transit through or originate from this route.

For countries such as India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, where agriculture employs between 38 and over 60 percent of the workforce, this dependency creates systemic risk. When supply chains falter, the effects cascade quickly: input costs rise, planting cycles are disrupted, and farmer incomes shrink.

Solar panels installed in a farm in Bangladesh. Credit: Heifer International

Even if shipping routes reopen, recovery will be slow

Damage to energy infrastructure and continued geopolitical uncertainty mean price volatility and supply constraints can persist for months. For smallholder farmers, this creates a dual crisis. Exporting produce becomes difficult due to logistical bottlenecks, while fuel shortages hamper domestic distribution. At the same time, the next cropping cycle looms, with essential fertilizers either unavailable or unaffordable.

This is not an isolated disruption. From the COVID-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine, global shocks are becoming more frequent and interconnected. Each crisis compounds the last, pushing smallholder farmers, the backbone of global food production, into deeper uncertainty. The question is no longer whether disruptions will occur, but how prepared our systems are to withstand them.

At the heart of the problem is overdependence on external, input-intensive systems, chemical fertilizers, fossil fuels, and long, fragile supply chains. Reducing this dependence is central to building resilience.

Regenerative Agriculture and Renewable Energy Offer a Compelling Pathway Forward.

At its core, regenerative agriculture restores soil health, enhances biodiversity, improves water retention, and reduces reliance on synthetic inputs. Practices such as crop diversification, organic soil enrichment, reduced tillage, and integrated pest management shift farming from an extractive to a restorative model.

By rebuilding natural soil fertility, these approaches reduce dependence on external inputs. Instead of relying heavily on urea in rice cultivation, regenerative systems promote nutrient cycling and biological nitrogen fixation through legumes, alongside the use of compost and manure to strengthen soil organic matter and ensure a steady, natural nutrient supply.

Integrating renewable energy further strengthens resilience. Solar-powered irrigation replaces fuel-based inputs with clean, reliable energy, lowering operational costs and improving water-use efficiency—especially critical during periods of disruption.

The evidence base for these approaches is both growing and compelling. In Bangladesh, multiple studies show that solar irrigation consistently outperforms diesel systems, delivering higher returns, improving food security, and reducing irrigation costs by 20–50 percent, while significantly boosting profitability (Rana, 2021; Buisson, 2024; Sunny, 2023; Sarker, 2025).

Research also shows that bio-based inputs like compost, biochar, and green manure can partially replace synthetic fertilizers, often without yield loss, while improving soil health (Naher, 2021; Ferdous, 2023; Behera, 2025).

Regenerative Agriculture is Not Just an Environmental Solution—It is an Economic One

By reducing dependence on volatile external inputs such as chemical fertilizers and fossil fuels, regenerative agriculture shields farmers from global price shocks while improving long-term productivity and profits.

Emerging evidence from Nepal and India reinforces this trend: while yields generally remain stable, reduced input costs significantly increase farm profitability (Magar, 2022; Dhakal, 2022; Berger, 2025).

A broader analysis by the Observer Research Foundation (2025) finds that although yields may dip slightly during transition, most cases report higher yields over time, alongside improved income stability driven by lower input dependence.

Similar trends are being observed globally, reinforcing that regenerative approaches can deliver both resilience and profitability across diverse farming systems (link).

Importantly, these outcomes are already visible on the ground in South Asia. Through programs led by Heifer International, smallholder farmers are adopting regenerative and climate-smart practices that reduce costs, improve yields, and strengthen resilience.

In Bangladesh’s Jashore district, for instance, women farmers organized into cooperatives have reduced irrigation costs, improved productivity, and strengthened market access through solar irrigation, organic soil management, and collective action.

As one farmer, Shirin Akter, shares: “Adopting climate-smart practices and pooling resources through my cooperative allowed me to grow diverse crops. When drought hit, I still had harvests to sell, and my cooperative helped me recover quickly.”

For farmers like Shirin, these shifts are transformative, turning vulnerability into resilience through diversified systems, lower input dependence, and stronger collective support. Similar models in Nepal show how regenerative, community-based approaches can reduce resource pressure while improving incomes.

Scaling this Transition Requires Action Beyond the Farm

To transition to a resilient and sustainable food system, a multi-stakeholder approach is essential. Policymakers should realign incentives to support sustainable practices and reduce dependence on imported inputs. Financial institutions and insurers should recognize the lower risk profiles of regenerative systems.

Businesses must embed sustainability into core decisions, prioritizing sourcing from farmers adopting regenerative practices and building longer-term, stable supply relationships. At the same time, marketing teams can shape consumer demand by communicating the value of sustainably produced food. Together, these shifts can align supply chains and markets in support of more resilient food systems.

The stakes are high. The World Food Programme warns that roughly 45 million more people could be pushed into hunger if current disruptions persist, adding to the 318 million people already food insecure.

We cannot continue rebuilding fragile food systems after every shock. We must redesign them. Regenerative agriculture offers a pathway to reduce dependence on volatile external inputs, restore ecological balance, and build resilience where it matters most—at the farm level.

To replenish what has been used up is not just an environmental necessity—it is the foundation of more secure, equitable, and resilient food systems across Asia.

Neena Joshi is the Senior Vice President for Asia Programs at Heifer International. With over 20 years of experience, she leads initiatives to build inclusive, sustainable agrifood systems and empower smallholder farmers, especially women and youth, across Asia.

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Opening plenary session, INC 5.2 of the global plastics negotiations, Palais des Nations, Geneva, 5 August 2025. Credit: Craig Boljkovac

By Craig Boljkovac
GENEVA, May 14 2026 (IPS)

Norway’s reported decision to review and place on hold aspects of its funding to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) should be understood as more than a budgetary matter. It is a political signal. It is also a warning that the global plastics treaty negotiations may now be approaching the point at which governments must decide whether the present UNEP process can still deliver the treaty they promised, or whether a different pathway is required.

There should be no misunderstanding. Norway has been one of the strongest supporters of an ambitious global plastics treaty. It co-leads, with Rwanda, the High Ambition Coalition. It has also been the largest listed contributor to the INC process, with UNEP’s donor table showing more than USD 7.2 million in contributions received from Norway as of 25 March 2026.

Its apparent decision to pause or review funding therefore cannot be dismissed as marginal. It comes from a country that has invested politically and financially in the process and that has consistently positioned itself on the side of ambition.

That is precisely why the signal matters.

If Norway is now forcing a moment of reflection, it may be doing the negotiations a service. A process that cannot conclude, cannot decide, and cannot distinguish between genuine compromise and procedural obstruction needs more than another round of careful facilitation. It needs political clarity.

The original mandate was not ambiguous. In March 2022, the United Nations Environment Assembly agreed to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment, addressing the full lifecycle of plastics, with the aim of completing the work by the end of 2024. That deadline has passed.

The fifth session in Busan did not produce a treaty. The resumed fifth session in Geneva did not produce a treaty. INC-5.3 in February 2026 was essentially an organizational session, including the election of a new Chair. We are now looking toward INC-5.4, possibly at the end of 2026 or in early 2027.

At some point, the numbering itself approaches the point of absurdity. INC-5.4 is not a normal negotiating milestone. It is the fourth attempt to complete the fifth session of a process that was supposed to conclude in 2024. This is not multilateral patience. It is clearly a form of procedural dysfunction.

None of this is intended as disrespect toward Ambassador Julio Cordano of Chile, the newly elected Chair of the INC. On the contrary, he has taken on one of the most difficult environmental negotiations in recent memory.

He inherited a fractured process, an absurdly complicated text, deeply polarized delegations, and an increasingly visible divide between countries seeking a full-lifecycle treaty and those seeking a narrower waste-management instrument. This is despite his stated and admirable determination to get the treaty “over the line.”

The difficulty, however, is that all indications suggest that the Chair is pursuing a highly neutral, process-oriented path. That is understandable. A Chair in this setting is expected to maintain confidence across the room, including among delegations whose positions are far apart. But neutrality is not the same as progress.

At a certain point, a too-neutral process can become a shield for those who prefer no outcome, or only the weakest possible outcome. And his treatment of observers, despite recent indications that he will take their views more fully into consideration, still leaves much to be desired in a UN system that contends to be as broadly inclusive as possible.

The gap between the Like-Minded countries and the High Ambition Coalition is not a drafting problem. It is a political problem. One group of countries wants an agreement that addresses the full lifecycle of plastics, including production, design, hazardous chemicals, products, trade, waste, finance and implementation.

Another group seeks to confine the treaty largely to downstream waste management, recycling and national discretion. These are not merely different textual preferences. They are different theories of the treaty. The mandate for the negotiations clearly states that the former, not the latter, is what should be pursued.

If the process continues to treat these positions as equally bridgeable, it will continue to reward delay. Consensus can be a tool for legitimacy. But in this process, it is increasingly at risk of becoming a veto mechanism for the least ambitious actors.

The result is predictable: more informal consultations, more revised texts, more late-night sessions, more statements of disappointment, and still no treaty.

This is why Norway’s move deserves, at minimum, a measure of credit. It has introduced a hard political question into a process that has become too comfortable with postponement. If countries are serious about concluding a meaningful treaty within UNEP, they should do so now. Not after another “informal” round. Not after another partial session. Not after INC-5.5 or INC-5.6. Now.

But if they are not prepared to do so, then high-ambition countries should begin preparing an alternative. The obvious precedent is the Ottawa Process on anti-personnel landmines. When the established disarmament machinery could not deliver a comprehensive ban, a coalition of like-minded governments, supported by civil society and international organizations, moved outside the blocked forum and negotiated a treaty among those prepared to act.

The Mine Ban Treaty was opened for signature in Ottawa in December 1997 and was later (after agreement was reached) brought back into the broader UN treaty system.

That example is important because it shows that moving outside a blocked UN process is not necessarily anti-UN. It can be pro-multilateralism. The Ottawa Process did not reject international law; it created it. It did not wait for the least ambitious actors to become ready. It allowed the most ambitious actors to move first and then invited others to join.

A plastics “Ottawa Process” would not need to start from zero. The UNEP negotiations have already generated years of technical work, draft text, legal options, coalition positions, scientific input and stakeholder engagement. A like-minded process could take the strongest elements from that work and use them as the basis for an agreed treaty text.

Participation could be open to all states, but on the basis of a minimum level of ambition: full lifecycle coverage; legally binding obligations; controls on problematic products and chemicals of concern; a necessary focus on supply chains; credible implementation financing; and reporting and review mechanisms.

The next stage should therefore be framed as a final test. INC-5.4 should be treated as the last credible opportunity for the UNEP process to produce a treaty that reflects the mandate adopted in 2022.

If that session produces only another procedural continuation, or a weak agreement stripped of lifecycle measures, production-related provisions, and meaningful controls on chemicals and products, then high-ambition countries should move immediately toward an Ottawa-style diplomatic track.

The plastics crisis is not waiting for the INC process to resolve its internal contradictions. Plastic production continues to grow, in accordance with targets set by like-minded countries. Waste continues to leak into rivers, oceans, soils and food systems. Communities continue to bear the health and environmental costs. The purpose of the negotiations was to respond to that reality, not to create an indefinite process for describing it.

Norway’s funding decision may therefore prove useful if it forces governments to confront the obvious. Either the UNEP negotiations now become serious, political and outcome-oriented, or the countries that are serious about ending plastic pollution should create a pathway of their own.

That would not be a failure of multilateralism. It may be the only way left to save it.

Craig Boljkovac is a Geneva-based Senior Advisor with a Regional Centre for the Basel and Stockholm Conventions, and an independent international environmental consultant with over 35 years of experience in relevant fields. His opinions are his own. He has participated in several INCs and related meetings for the global plastics agreement.

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A residential building in Beirut, Lebanon, lies in ruins. Credit: UNICEF/Fouad Choufany

By Alon Ben-Meir
NEW YORK, May 13 2026 (IPS)

Violence has metastasized into humanity’s baseline condition. Yet international institutions remain paralyzed by vetoes and rivalry, offering hollow declarations while dehumanization becomes normalized. Coordinated action, not gestures, is desperately needed.

Global violence today is metastasizing, not contained; over 180,000 violent events reported globally by the International Institute for Strategic Studies signal a world in which conflict has become a baseline condition rather than an exception. More than 130 armed conflicts now rage—over twice the number of 15 years ago—shattering infrastructure, tearing apart social fabric, and normalizing dehumanization as a political weapon.

Women and children bear the brunt: hundreds of millions live within range of armed clashes, with millions of preventable deaths and lifelong trauma caused not only by bullets and bombs but by hunger, disease, and gender-based violence unleashed by war’s chaos.

Yet the UN system and the world’s democracies appear increasingly paralyzed—trapped in vetoes, geopolitical rivalries, and hollow declarations—offering gestures of concern rather than the coordinated, enforced accountability this modern plague of violence so desperately demands.

The global escalation of violence is a structural crisis rather than an aberration—one that reveals the failure of international institutions, exposing the normalization of suffering across political, economic, and societal dimensions.

The proliferation of violence signals not just an increase in armed confrontations but a breakdown in the very mechanisms meant to constrain conflict, rendering dehumanization a routine tool of power, as demonstrated in the following.

The Philosophical Angle

Violence represents the collapse of legitimate political authority and the rise of impotence masquerading as force. Hannah Arendt’s foundational insight remains essential: “Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course, it ends in power’s disappearance” (On Violence, 1970).

This speaks directly to today’s proliferation of conflicts, which indicate not state strength but institutional failure, where violence substitutes for the consent and legitimacy governments can no longer command. The resort to violence signals the exhaustion of political dialogue and the absence of legitimate power structures capable of resolving disputes.

Economic Disenfranchisement

Economic drivers are critical accelerants of contemporary violence through resource competition, commodity exploitation, and systemic inequality. Slavoj Žižek’s concept of systemic violence captures the pervasive economic roots: “Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than the direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their ‘evil’ intentions, but is purely ‘objective,’ systemic, anonymous.”

The greed-driven exploitation of natural resources—from diamonds in Sierra Leone to oil in Venezuela and cobalt and other conflict minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo—finances rebellions and turns conflict into a profitable enterprise. Economic deprivation, geoeconomic confrontation through weaponized tariffs and sanctions, and commodity price shocks directly shape military capacity and conflict outcomes.

The Political Compulsion of Violence

Political violence emerges not merely from divergent interests but from the deliberate choice to pursue objectives through coercion rather than negotiation. The paralysis of the UNSC and democratic institutions reflects what Arendt identified as bureaucratic tyranny: “In a fully developed bureaucracy, there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. … everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act… where we are all equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”

This captures the international community’s inability to enforce accountability—vetoes and geopolitical rivalries create a structural void where violence thrives unchecked. Political fragility and weakening institutions, seen in Syria and Myanmar, make societies vulnerable to breakdown, radicalization, and violent dissent.

Societal Fragmentation

Societal conditions create climates where violence becomes normalized through inequality and the erosion of social cohesion. Thomas Hobbes’s bleak assessment of unconstrained human nature remains relevant: in the state of nature, “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” While Hobbes described a pre-political condition, his insight applies to societies where governance collapses and fear dominates, conditions now afflicting millions living within range of armed clashes.

Social norms that accept violence as conflict resolution, combined with economic inequalities and a lack of community participation, create environments where aggression flourishes. This normalizes dehumanization, where, as in Nigeria, Israel and South Africa, gendered violence, ethnic tensions, and historical grievances fuel recurring cycles of brutality.

Nationalism, Repression and State Complicity

State-level factors amplifying violence include the failure to address ethnic marginalization, resource competition, and the absence of functional governance. Walter Benjamin warned of violence’s relationship to law and state power: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (On the Concept of History, 1940).

This observation underscores how national institutions perpetuate violence through their foundational structures and exclusionary practices. Nations repeatedly falling victim to civil and international wars demonstrate governments’ inability to recognize and address destabilizing issues like political, religious, or ethnic marginalization. The weaponization of state apparatus through totalitarian mobilization of violence destroys the very space where political thinking and resistance might occur, as demonstrated in China and Eritrea.

Religious Instrumentalization

Religion, when co-opted by political actors or stripped of its ethical core, becomes a potent catalyst for violence, sanctifying exclusion and legitimizing brutality. Sectarian divides—whether in the Middle East, South Asia, or parts of Africa—transform identity into a battlefield where compromise is heresy and annihilation becomes duty. René Girard’s insight is instructive: “Religion shelters us from violence just as violence seeks shelter in religion.” When faith is manipulated to justify power or grievance, such as in India, Israel or Iraq, it ceases to restrain violence and instead consecrates it, deepening cycles of retribution and rendering conflicts existential rather than negotiable.

The convergence of these dimensions explains why violence has become a baseline condition rather than an exception. Several measures must be considered to de-escalate global violence. Although effecting change is extremely difficult, every effort must still be made, provided the public leads the charge through sustained protest, continuous advocacy, and relentless pressure on policymakers to enact change.

Reform UN Security Council Veto Power

Governments must constrain veto authority by restricting its use in cases involving genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Permanent members should abstain when directly involved, transforming the veto from obstruction into accountability and addressing institutional paralysis that enables unchecked violence.

Establish Functional Early Warning Systems

International bodies should implement systems linking detection to preventive action, closing the warning-response gap. These must integrate predictive analytics, local expertise, and cross-border coordination to anticipate violence months before eruption, enabling timely diplomatic and humanitarian intervention.

Address Economic Inequality and Insecurity

Governments should implement policies that reduce income inequality—including wage increases, tax reform, and financial assistance—aimed at addressing violence triggers. Targeted lending, job creation, and redistributive policies alleviate financial strain that fuels conflict and crime, making structural prevention more effective than reactive measures.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is President of the Institute for Humanitarian Conflict Resolution.

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The Republic of Korea (Korea), Vietnam and Bangladesh are on three different rungs of the development ladder. While Korea is a member of the rich nations’ club, i.e., the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Bangladesh is still a least developed country (LDC); and Vietnam is in the middle.

Anis Chowdhury

But relative policy independence vis-à-vis donors, among other factors, played a crucial role in separating their development trajectory. Development succeeded in countries that maintained policy independence despite their heavy aid dependence.

Aid dependence and policy independence

Being among the world’s poorest countries, all three had to depend heavily on foreign aid. For example, foreign aid financed around 74% of Korea’s imports on average during 1953-1960, and proceeds from the sales of aid goods (e.g., food aid under the PL480 programme of the US, packaged as “Food for Peace”) constituted on average 38.4% of government revenue.

US aid to Korea was “huge”, contributing about 80% of foreign aid during 1945-1975. Korea received nearly as much economic aid from the US as ALL of Africa during 1946-1978. Excluding military aid, the US economic at its peak was 21% of Korea’s GDP, and financed about 50% of government expenditure.

Source: The World Bank

Yet, the Korean government maintained considerable policy independence regarding the use of aid funds. While the US aid agency insisted on providing non-project assistance for macroeconomic stabilisation rather than growth, the Korean government used non-project aid to rebuild the manufacturing sector for accelerating growth, and demanded more project assistance. The policy conflict was negotiated and coordinated by the Combined Economic Board (CEB, established in 1952). Although CEB was jointly chaired by the representatives of the US aid mission in Korea and the Korean government, Korea prevailed.

The Korean government also maintained its policy independence from the World Bank (WB). For example, when in 1967 the WB rejected Korea’s funding request for the Seoul-Busan expressway, connecting the nation’s capital to its main sea-port, Korea completed the 428km expressway with domestic finance and resources in 1970 as other multilateral and bilateral donors also refused to finance it following the WB’s rejection.

The WB and donors believed the expressway was an excessively grandiose project for a country so poor. Proving them wrong, the expressway not only spurred economic activities along the corridor of two major population centres, its construction was a critical learning opportunity for the Koreans. With the gained capacity, Korean construction companies were able to win major infrastructure projects in the Middle-East, which was a critical source of foreign exchange. Korea is now regarded as a leader in infrastructure construction.

The WB also was very critical of Korea’s Heavy and Chemical Industry (HCI) drive (1973-1979). Ignoring the WB, Korea pushed ahead, and proved the WB and other critics wrong. By the early 1980s, HCI became the nation’s leading export industries. The HCI drive was greatly successful in boosting investment, leading to the rapid growth of the manufacturing sector and its structure change. The manufacturing sector grew 16.2% per annum from 1971 to 1980, much higher than the GDP growth of 9.1% during the same period, while the share of HCIs in manufacturing value added rose to 58.3% in 1980.

No wonder, Korea broke away from the poverty trap in the early 1970s, leaving its “poor cousins” – Bangladesh and Vietnam – behind to become a full member of the OECD in little over two decades in 1996.

Vietnam’s story is not so different from that of Korea. Since initiating reforms in 1986, Vietnam quickly became WB’s one of the top loan recipient countries. But the WB’s influence over Vietnam’s development path has been limited, as the government has always refused to adopt policies imposed by foreign organisations. With strong enough institutions Vietnam achieved “ownership” of public policies.

Here is an interesting story of Vietnam’s determination to pursue its own development strategies. When in 1997, the WB approached Vietnam with an offer of US$300 million in credit in exchange for structural adjustment, à la the Washington Consensus model, including faster privatisation and financial liberalisation, the Vietnamese government declined. The WB returned with a higher offer in 1998, and Vietnam declined again. When the WB came again in 1999 with an even higher offer, the government issued a stern rebuke. The minister of planning and investment, Tran Xua Gia, told WB representatives, “You cannot buy reforms with money . . . no one is going to bombard Vietnam into acting.”

By then the Vietnamese government knew from the experience of Indonesia the risks of yielding too much sovereignty to international markets and institutions. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) had to wind up its last programme in 2004 as Vietnam refused the IMF’s demand for an independent audit of its central bank and disagreed over privatisations of state-owned enterprises.

Vietnam charted its own path of reforms – Đổi Mới, learning from successes and failures of neighbouring East Asian countries, including China as well as its former patron and role model, former Soviet Union.

Vietnam posted remarkable macroeconomic performances following the launch of Đổi Mới, with GDP growing at close to 8% per annum. Since the beginning of the 2000s, it also recorded Asia’s highest rate of growth in exports, half of which were made up of manufactured products, prompting The Economist to hail Vietnam as “Asia’s other miracle”.

Starting in 1975 with a per capita GDP of about US$85 after successfully defeating the US that waged a devastating war on Vietnam for more than two decades, Vietnam became a lower middle-income country in 2009. “Desperately seeking model countries”, unsurprisingly the first country Robert Zoellick visited after becoming President of the WB in 2009 was Vietnam, a country governed by its Communist Party, constructing a ‘socialist-oriented market economy’. One could almost say, “Vietnam is more important for the WB than the WB is for Vietnam”!

Poor Bangladesh lacks self confidence

Bangladesh, in search of development, joined the club of LDCs in 1975 when its GDP per capita was US$230, and still remains a LDC after more than five decades maximising LDC related facilities. Bangladesh is scheduled to graduate out of the LDC category in November this year; but it is asking for a deferment, lacking self-confidence.

On the other hand, self-confident Vietnam with its per capita GDP of only US$82 in 1975 decided not to join the LDC club, despite having to face the challenges of reconstruction and reunification in the most difficult global economic situation – stagflation. It received aid (mostly from the former Soviet Union); but did not blindly follow either its former patron USSR’s reform package or that of the WB/IMF. Its former enemy, the US, which pressured the WB to halt all funding, made a U-turn in the early 1990s, and signed the US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement in 2000.

Korea could have also joined the LDC club in 1971 when the UN created the LDC category for the world’s poorest countries; but it did not. Heavily dependent on US foreign aid for food, fuel and other raw materials, Korea was not seen as a promising place for major investments until the late 1960s. So, the State took the lead to break the vicious circle of low income and low investment.

Of course, Bangladesh is no longer a “basket case”; it is now a lower middle-income country. It also showed some courage to stand on its own feet when the WB declined to finance the Padma Bridge project, citing corruption.

However, Bangladesh could have done better had it not surrendered its policy independence to the donors, as the experiences of RoK and Vietnam demonstrate. Like successful marriages, there are many factors for successful development. Failure in any one of those essential elements can be damning according to Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina principle, even if it has all the other ingredients of success.

Anis Chowdhury, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University (Australia). He held senior UN positions in Bangkok and New York and served as Special Assistant to the Chief Advisor for Finance (with the status and rank of State Minister) in the Professor Yunus-led Interim Government. Anis has written extensively on East and Southeast Asian economies, including The Newly Industrialising Economies of East Asia (Routledge) and The Political Economy of East Asia (Oxford University Press). E-mail: anis.z.chowdhury@gmail.com

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By Mohamed Omar
MOGADISHU, Somalia , May 12 2026 (IPS)

When war erupted in the Middle East in late February, the most visible consequences were playing out in the Persian Gulf, with smoke rising from Dubai’s Jebel Ali port and shipping traffic across one of the world’s most critical maritime routes grinding to a near halt.

What was harder to see was a mother in Somalia, traveling 200 kilometers with a child too sick to sit upright, arriving at a stabilization center that was running low on the one product that could save her child’s life.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most consequential maritime chokepoints, has sent shockwaves through global supply chains that reach far beyond the Gulf. Before the war began, roughly 3,000 vessels transited the strait each month.

In March, that number fell to just 154. The UN has warned that the resulting disruption is triggering a widening humanitarian and economic shock far beyond the Middle East, with rising oil prices and reduced maritime traffic driving up transport and food costs across import-dependent economies. We are certainly feeling that shock in Somalia.

Dr. Mohamed Omar is head of Health and Nutrition at Action Against Hunger in Somalia.

These children are treated with two products: Ready to Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) and therapeutic milk, specifically the formulas F-75 and F-100, which are produced exclusively by Nutriset in France. Before the Strait of Hormuz closure, those products arrived in Mogadishu in 30 to 35 days via the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aden.

Ships now divert around the entire African continent, extending delivery times to 55 to 65 days. That is nearly double the original transit time, and it comes with far less certainty about when shipments will actually arrive.

The cost increases compound the delay. A carton of therapeutic milk that cost $139 in 2024 rose to $186 in 2025 after USAID funding cuts, and has since climbed to $200 in 2026 following the Strait of Hormuz closure, a 44 percent increase in two years.

Fuel costs inside Somalia have surged by 150 percent, raising both the price of food for households and the cost of transporting supplies from Mogadishu to remote program sites like Hudur in the Bakool region. They represent the difference between whether a child receives treatment and whether a facility can afford to stay open.

Action Against Hunger, which operates 10 of the 52 remaining stabilization centers in the country, currently has only 69 cartons of therapeutic milk on hand. That figure covers roughly two weeks to one month of supply under current demand, and demand is rising sharply. Admissions at our facilities increased 35 percent between the first quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026. At the same time, the number of stabilization centers across Somalia has already fallen from 71 to 52, after USAID’s termination order prompted facility closures earlier this year.

In areas such as Wajid, Somalia, Action Against Hunger replaced diesel-powered engines with solar-powered systems to supply water, reducing costs and providing a sustainable, long-term solution. Credit: Action Against Hunger

The funding gap to sustain nutrition interventions through 2026 stands at $2.9 million. That figure covers product procurement and in-country transportation costs. To put that in context: treating a child for severe acute malnutrition costs between $140 and $213. Preventing it costs $35. The math on early intervention is not complicated.

The Council on Foreign Relations has documented how shipping containers at Dubai’s International Humanitarian City now carry a $3,000 emergency surcharge, while the World Food Program has warned that supply chain pressures are driving up the costs of life-saving operations globally. These are systemic failures that compound each other.

There is a specific and urgent timeline here. UNICEF’s in-country stock of therapeutic milk is projected to run out by August 2026. Because of the extended shipping times caused by the Africa diversion route, funding must be committed by May or June for the product to arrive before that deadline.

Iran has agreed, in principle, to facilitate humanitarian aid shipments through the strait, and diplomatic efforts to reopen the waterway to commercial traffic are ongoing. But the ceasefire remains fragile, and even a partial reopening offers no guarantee that the specialized supply chains supporting therapeutic nutrition programs will recover in time.

The supply chain disruptions caused by the Iran war are a new layer on top of pre-existing funding deficits and a withdrawal of US foreign aid that was already forcing closures and rationing across the country.

The children arriving at stabilization centers and outpatient nutrition sites in Somalia did not cause any of these disruptions. They are the downstream consequence of a global logistics network absorbing simultaneous shocks it was never designed to handle. A $2.9 million funding gap is solvable. The question is whether the international community will respond in time.

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Transnational agribusinesses increasingly shape food policies worldwide. Claiming to best address recent food security concerns, they seek to profit more from innovations in food production, processing, and distribution.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The early post-WWII and post-colonial eras saw new emphases on food security, especially following severe food shortages before, during, and after the war.

Many starved as millions experienced acute malnutrition. The wartime Bengal famine in India claimed over three million lives as Churchill prioritised British imperial interests and military priorities.

After WWII, colonial powers weaponised food supplies for counterinsurgency and population control purposes, especially to overcome popular anti-imperialist resistance.

Many who died were not military casualties but victims of deliberate counter-insurgency food deprivation. Unsurprisingly, food security efforts became a popular policy priority after WWII.

Western-controlled research organisations, including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), became highly influential, shaping and even developing post-colonial food security policies.

Felice Noelle Rodriguez

The Green Revolution initially focused on increasing yields of wheat, maize, and rice. These efforts increased cereal production unevenly during the 1960s and 1970s.

Malthusian logic held that rising life expectancies meant population growth outstripped the increase in food supply, constrained by limited agricultural land.

As government funding from wealthy nations declined, powerful corporate interests and philanthropies became even more influential. They often promoted their own interests at the expense of farmers, consumers, and the environment.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) was established in the 1970s, channelling a small share of windfall petroleum incomes into food and agricultural development.

Soon after, the US transformed its Public Law (PL) 480 program into the World Food Programme (WFP). Thus, some FAO functions were ceded to donor-controlled UN funds and programmes also set up in Rome.

Embarrassingly, an FAO report found WFP food supplies were withheld from Somalia to avoid being taken by the ‘Islamist’ As-Shabaab militia. Chatham House also estimated two to three hundred thousand deaths as a consequence.

Neoliberalism
The counter-revolution against national development efforts in the 1980s undermined government fiscal capacities, import-substituting industrialisation, and food security efforts.

Neoliberal structural adjustment policies involving economic liberalisation were imposed on heavily indebted developing countries, mainly in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Global North promoted trade liberalisation, undermining earlier protection of and support for food and industrial production.

Powerful food conglomerates sponsored and promoted import-friendly food security indicators, undermining FAO and other civil society research and advocacy efforts.

Countries hardly producing any food were highly ranked, as civil society organisations tried to counter with their own indicators, mainly focused on food sovereignty.

Trump 2.0
A new phase has begun with Donald Trump’s re-election as US president.

Trump 2.0’s weaponisation of economic policies and agreements, including food supplies, has ominous implications for countries trying to assert some independence.

Economic and military threats have been used for diverse ends, including economic, political, and other ‘strategic’ goals. Tariffs and sanctions are now part of a diverse arsenal of such weapons deployed for various purposes.

Governments have even been threatened with tariffs and sanctions for personal reasons. Trump has demanded Brazilian ex-President Jair Bolsonaro’s freedom following his failed coup after losing the last presidential election.

Deploying such economic weapons has worsened the deepening worldwide economic stagflation, as various Trump economic and military policy threats exacerbate contractionary and inflationary pressures.

The US-controlled WFP was long used to provide food aid selectively. But there is little sympathy left in Washington for other nations’ food security concerns.

To cut federal government spending, Trump has ended official development and humanitarian assistance, including food aid, while the US remains the world’s leading food exporter.

Nevertheless, Trump may take unexpected new steps to boost farmers’ earnings to recover electoral support before the November mid-term election.

Weaponisation of food aid took an ominous turn during the Israeli siege of Gaza, by calibrating food access to enable selective ethnic cleansing.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation attracted hungry residents to its food centres, causing hungry families desperately seeking food to be shot while seeking food.

Poverty is primarily defined by inadequate access to food, while the FAO considers income the main determinant of food insecurity.

Although World Bank poverty measures have generally continued to decline, FAO indicators suggest a reversal of earlier progress in food security over the last decade.

These contradictory trends not only reflect problems in estimating and understanding poverty and food security but also suggest that resulting policies are poorly informed, if not worse.

Professor Felice Noelle Rodriguez is Director of the Centre for Local History and Culture, Universidad de Zamboanga, Philippines.

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CIVICUS discusses Gen Z-led protests in the Philippines with Charles Zander, a 17-year-old climate justice activist from Bohol and youth campaigner for Greenpeace Philippines.

Charles Zander

What brought you to activism?

I grew up in Bohol, an island province in the Philippines where the climate crisis knocks on our doors every week. When I was younger, politics felt distant, but that changed in 2021, when Typhoon Odette hit our province. My home was severely damaged, but others suffered a lot more. I knew people who lost everything. Coastal communities were flattened and some villages were so cut off that it took weeks for supplies to reach them. In my case, it took two years before we had electricity again, and a year before we had water or I could access education.

My two childhood best friends died in the aftermath, and losing them changed me. At first, I didn’t think I was doing activism. It started with relief work: distributing food, organising community support, listening to people who had lost everything. I realised people needed to be heard. But the more you listen, the more questions appear. Why were some communities still waiting for aid?

Eventually, I realised if you grow up in a place where disasters are routine, silence feels like complicity. I joined local groups working on climate justice, community education and disaster response. And I saw protest as the moment when patience runs out.

What are young Filipinos demanding?

For many young Filipinos, the climate crisis is not a policy issue; it is the story of our lives. Climate injustice is therefore at the core of our struggle, but it connects to many other struggles. We live in a country hit by stronger typhoons every year, yet coal plants still get approved. We have coastal communities losing their homes to storm surges, yet development decisions rarely involve them. We have severe flooding everywhere in the country, and our government is pocketing climate adaptation funds.

When disaster hits, wealthy neighbourhoods rebuild quickly and sometimes are not damaged at all, while remote island communities wait for assistance for months, if not years. Disasters expose inequality, so climate protests are about fairness, about whose lives are considered worth protecting.

How were recent protests organised, and what role did social media play?

There are many active organisations, youth groups and community leaders, and when a major event such as a typhoon or a scandal creates urgency, conversations spread through networks and messaging groups. At some point someone proposes a date, which we often tie to a symbolic moment, such as the day of a national hero. The most recent one, in February, was on the 40th anniversary of the 1986 People Power Revolution. This has practical implications: on holidays, people don’t have school or work, so they can participate without worrying about their livelihoods. And because they’re home, people are paying more attention to social media, which increases our reach.

In this sense, nobody owns the protests. Movements grow because many people decide the moment has come. But organising involves logistics, including permits, safety planning, communication, outreach and coordination among groups with different priorities and strategies. That process can be messy, but it also reflects the democratic nature of grassroots movements. Eventually we all come together and get onto the streets.

Social media platforms, particularly Facebook and Instagram, allow young people to organise quickly across islands, cities and movements. Calls for protests can reach people within hours. Organisers can document events, share live updates and counter disinformation.

We use memes a lot. Older generations might respond to more technical explanations, but Gen Z and Gen Alpha are more reachable through humour and jokes. We also link issues to people’s actual lives so they feel compelled to act. But there needs to be more work on making sure people really know what they are fighting for when they join, not joining because it looks cool on social media.

Ultimately, technology is just a tool. A hashtag cannot replace a community. The underlying work is slower and happens when no one is watching. Protests are the visible tip of the iceberg, but below the surface there are community workshops, policy research meetings with local leaders, training of young volunteers and network-building across the country. A protest is just one day, but organising is the thousands of conversations that make that day possible. Without that groundwork, protests would fade quickly.

What risks have you faced?

For me personally, one of the most tangible dangers has been surveillance, online and offline. After participating in a major climate and social justice march, I noticed my online activity and messages being monitored more closely. It’s a subtle kind of pressure, but it makes you think twice about who you trust, how you communicate, what you post.

There’s also intimidation. At one protest, for instance, local authorities questioned volunteers about their involvement, contacts and affiliations. This is meant to create fear.

This has emotional and practical impacts. It can be exhausting and sometimes isolating. But it also shapes how you organise. You become strategic, deliberate, more protective of your peers. The fact that there are risks shows that those in power recognise the potential of youth movements to challenge the status quo. It is a reminder that our struggle matters.

What have the protests achieved, and where have they fallen short of ambition?

Change rarely arrives all at once. Sometimes protests produce policy progress, stronger commitments and greater attention to issues. Sometimes the impact is cultural. A protest can shift what people believe is possible, what people believe is right.

In the Philippines, the most visible achievement concerned the corruption around flood control projects. Although change is slow, we have seen some politicians arrested. A sitting senator is in hiding right now because of an arrest warrant. If we hadn’t spoken up, we would have lost so much more money from climate adaptation projects while our communities continued to suffer.

But movements also face setbacks. Governments delay action, hiding behind procedural issues, and public attention moves on quickly. This is discouraging. What failure teaches, though, is that we should communicate more effectively, build stronger alliances and sustain momentum beyond a single protest. A movement is not defined by the moment it wins, but by whether it continues after losing.

Is it right to call these Gen Z protests?

I have mixed feelings about it. I understand why the label appears. Many of the visible faces in recent movements are young people. The label captures something real: many young people feel the future they are inheriting was shaped by decisions made long before they had any political voice. The climate crisis is the clearest example. Policies that created the crisis were implemented decades ago, yet the consequences will unfold across the lifetimes of today’s young people. That creates a sense of urgency, and calling these protests Gen Z protests signals that a new generation is politically active and unwilling to remain passive.

But movements are rarely that simple. In almost every movement, people from many generations stand together, students marching alongside workers, community elders joining demonstrations, parents bringing their children, veteran organisers who have been fighting for decades showing up alongside people attending their first protest.

When protests are framed only as Gen Z movements, something important gets lost. It can unintentionally erase the contributions of older generations who built the foundation for these struggles. Every movement stands on ground that someone else cleared. Civil rights campaigns, climate movements and labour struggles didn’t start with Gen Z. These are long historical arcs that young people are entering and pushing forward.

The most powerful movements are intergenerational. Older organisers bring experience, historical memory and institutional knowledge. Younger generations bring new energy, new tools and new ways of communicating. One generation can ignite a movement, but lasting change requires many generations moving together.

It is also wrong to call us leaderless. We are not leaderless; we are leaderful. We just refuse to adopt some of the hierarchical ways of organising of previous generations, because sometimes leading collectively works much better than having someone dictate everything.

What keeps you going?

People, particularly young people, keep going because the problems are immediate and impossible to ignore. Protesting means refusing to accept the future we are being handed and making our voices matter.

Hope is not a passive feeling. It’s found in action, not in waiting. I see hope in the movement, because when young people, elders, students and communities stand together, there’s a shared strength, and the possibility of a world that values dignity, justice and sustainability becomes real. We keep moving because we are not alone. I also find hope in history, because it shows that while change is messy, people have always managed to push the boundaries of what is possible.

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

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Bulgaria: ‘We protested against a whole system of corrupt governance and state capture’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Aleksandar Tanev 21.Apr.2026
Philippines: ‘We refuse to stay silent while those in power treat public office like private property’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Raoul Manuel 25.Nov.2025

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Residents in Phú Yên, Vietnam, relied on a small wooden boat during a flood. Climate change and El Niño disrupted the livelihood of millions of people in Asia and the Pacific. Credit: Pexels/Long Bà Mùi Source: ESCAP

By Kareff Rafisura
BANGKOK, Thailand, May 11 2026 (IPS)

Climate models are converging: El Niño is likely to return by mid-2026 and could be strong. According to the World Meteorological Organization, it could emerge as early as May–July 2026, with several national hydrometeorological agencies in Asia and the Pacific already issuing alerts.

El Niño makes headlines not because it is rare, but because it amplifies climate risks. Past events have triggered major humanitarian crises, driving drought, food insecurity and public health emergencies across Asia and the Pacific. While each Niño event differs, their impacts tend to follow recognizable regional patterns.

In countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Timor Leste, strong El Niño events have repeatedly brought drought, forest fires, agricultural losses and water stress, with patterns reinforced even during the weaker 2018–2019 El Niño. These impacts provide clear signals of risks concentrated across food, water, health and livelihood systems.

In practical terms, an El Niño event is only fully established when the atmosphere reinforces the warming of oceans. As not all warmings reach that stage, this is where uncertainty lies, including how strong the event will become. While forecasts will improve in the coming months, historical impacts already indicate where risks are likely to concentrate.

To understand the risks, it helps to look at how past events have unfolded in the region. Strong events in 1971–73, 1982–83 and 1997–98 triggered widespread droughts, forest fires and vector-borne diseases, such as dengue, across South and South-East Asia and the Pacific.

While impacts vary by location, the pattern is consistent: risk intensity is highest where exposure overlaps with underlying vulnerabilities caused by poverty, food insecurity and malnutrition, as well as heavy dependence on subsistence farming.

The 2015–2016 El Niño is the strongest of this century and can serve as a useful reference should current conditions develop into a comparable event, given similar early warming patterns. The joint ESCAP and ASEAN report, Ready for the Dry Years, states that during this event, more than 70% of South-East Asia’s land area experienced drought, exposing over 200 million people to severe drought at its peak.

While El Niño affects large areas, its impacts are most severe where climatic exposure overlaps with structural vulnerability. This year, these risks are unfolding in a more complex climate and socioeconomic context, with tighter fiscal space, higher debt levels and persistent global economic uncertainty, as highlighted in the ESCAP Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific 2026.

At the same time, remittances, an important source of income for countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka are being affected, weakening a key buffer that has historically helped households cope with shocks.

Together, these pressures leave governments and households less able to absorb climate shocks than during previous El Niño cycles.

Climate change is amplifying baseline risks. Higher temperatures increase evapotranspiration (process of heat making water evaporate faster), reduce soil moisture and intensify drought conditions. The Ready for the Dry Years report shows that droughts increasingly occur under warmer conditions, magnifying their impacts.

Climate variability is now interacting with long-term warming trends, increasing systemic risks.

The implication is clear: waiting for certainty can increase exposure to avoidable losses. Historical evidence and current signals already provide a sufficient basis for early, no-regret action.

Because the impacts of El Niño align with extremes expected to intensify under climate change, there is a strong case for investing in resilience across scenarios. Three priority areas stand out.

First, turn climate forecasts into actionable decisions on the ground. Seasonal forecasts provide valuable signals, but decisions require localized insight: where water stress will emerge, where crops are likely to fail and which communities are most at risk. Advances in satellite data and analytics now allow near-real-time monitoring of soil moisture, vegetation health and water availability, and should be used to guide targeted preparedness.

Second, early financing is a no-regret investment in resilience. The impacts of El Niño are cumulative and can outlast the event itself. Acting early through social protection, support to farmers and better water management reduces long-term costs and protects hard-won development gains. In a context of constrained fiscal space, anticipatory action limits downstream losses.

Third, strengthen coordination across sectors. El Niño affects multiple sectors simultaneously, including agriculture, water, energy and public health. Coordinated responses enable faster and more efficient actions with benefits that extend beyond a single event.

Even as uncertainty remains around the strength of the evolving event, historical experience makes a clear case for early action to strengthen long-term resilience.

Kareff Rafisura is Economic Affairs Officer, ESCAP

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: Attila Kisbenedek/AFP

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, May 8 2026 (IPS)

When Péter Magyar took the stage in Budapest on the night of 12 April, he told the crowd they had ‘liberated Hungary’. The hyperbole seemed justified. His party, Tisza, had won a parliamentary supermajority on the highest turnout since Hungary’s first free election in 1990, ending 16 years of increasingly autocratic rule.

An autocracy built in plain sight

Ousted Prime Minister Viktor Orbán boasted of turning Hungary into a model of what he called ‘illiberal democracy’. When he returned to power in 2010, he set about dismantling every institution capable of constraining him. His party, Fidesz, rewrote the constitution, restructured the Constitutional Court and gerrymandered electoral districts so thoroughly that in 2014 and 2018, it won two-thirds of parliamentary seats on under half of the vote.

Public broadcasting became a party mouthpiece, and Orbán-connected oligarchs took over private media. Fidesz captured universities and arts bodies. The government used Pegasus spyware against opponents, demonised migrants and LGBTQI+ people as threats to the nation and passed a law criminalising attendance at Budapest Pride. Civil society organisations faced escalating restrictions on their funding, and the government created a Sovereignty Protection Office to investigate and harass them further. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) index eventually downgraded Hungary to ‘electoral autocracy’ status — the first European Union (EU) member state to receive that designation.

The EU’s blind spot

The EU’s response was inadequate. In 2018, the European Parliament triggered Article 7(1) of the Treaty on European Union, the first step in a procedure that could, in theory, suspend a state’s voting rights. In practice, Article 7 was never fully applied, because doing so requires unanimous agreement among all other member states, and there are always states unwilling to go that far. The Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation, in force since 2022, allowed the EU to freeze up to US$32 billion in funds for Hungary, but this mechanism too was compromised by political calculation. In December 2023, the Commission released around US$12 billion in cohesion funds seemingly in exchange for Hungary lifting its veto on Ukraine aid, effectively trading rule-of-law conditionality for foreign policy compliance.

Ultimately, the EU did not solve its Orbán problem; Hungarian voters did. This suggests structural reforms are still needed to prevent another autocrat from playing the same blocking game Hungary did.

After Orbán

Previous opposition coalitions in Hungary failed partly because Orbán’s machine had a reliable weapon against them: the accusation that they served Brussels, Hungary-born funder George Soros and a cosmopolitan elite detached from Hungarian values. Magyar, a former Fidesz insider who broke with the party in February 2024 following a scandal over a presidential pardon granted to a man convicted of covering up child sexual abuse, was immune to that weapon. His campaign was deliberately post-ideological, focused on corruption, crumbling public services and economic stagnation, while Orbán ran a fear-based campaign centred on the EU and the war in Ukraine. Voters chose economic reality over a manufactured threat. In the end, the electoral architecture Orbán had built to reward the first-placed party converted Tisza’s win into a supermajority of 141 of 199 parliamentary seats.

But Magyar’s victory will not necessarily bring a progressive transformation. He is a conservative politician leading a centre-right party whose platform made no explicit commitment on LGBTQI+ rights. During the campaign, he criticised the Budapest Pride ban as a distraction rather than a rights violation, committing only to protecting freedom of assembly more broadly. His victory speech promised a Hungary where ‘no one is stigmatised for loving someone differently from the majority’, but this was a shift in tone rather than a policy commitment. LGBTQI+ rights are unlikely to regress further under Magyar, but recovery will depend on sustained pressure from civil society.

Orbán may be out of government, but Fidesz appointees remain embedded throughout the state apparatus. Magyar has pledged to invite the European Public Prosecutor’s Office to examine alleged misuses of EU funds, dismantle the Sovereignty Protection Office and drop proposed legislation that would have further extended powers to restrict civil society. Delivering on those pledges and unravelling 16 years of institutional capture will require sustained political will.

Hungarian civil society faces its first genuine opening in 16 years. To make the most of it, it will need to push hard and consistently for the restoration of civic space, the rule of law and LGBTQI+ rights, and not mistake a change of government for a change of direction.

For the EU, Magyar’s victory opens a window to change a decision-making structure that allows a single member state to hold the bloc’s foreign policy hostage. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s call for qualified majority voting for foreign policy decisions may now gain traction. But the broader question of how the EU enforces its democratic standards against a member state determined to flout them remains open. The EU should resolve it before the next challenge arises.

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

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

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Credit: UKBET (UK Bangladesh Education Trust)

By Mohammed A. Sayem
SYLHET, Bangladesh, May 8 2026 (IPS)

When catastrophic floods swept through the Haor wetlands of Sunamganj in 2022, they destroyed far more than homes and crops. They shattered childhoods.

Jannat was only nine years old when floodwater swallowed her family’s house, farmland, and livestock. Like thousands of displaced families in northeastern Bangladesh, they took shelter in a school building converted into an emergency flood centre. But when the water receded, there was nothing left to return to.

The family migrated to a slum in Sylhet city to survive. Her father, once a farmer in the fertile haor lands, began pulling a rented rickshaw. Her mother started working as a domestic worker. Jannat’s school life ended almost overnight. Instead of carrying books, she began washing dishes and cleaning clothes in another family’s home for food and a small income.

Her story reflects a growing reality across climate-vulnerable Bangladesh. The 2022 floods in Sylhet, Kanaighat, Companygonj and Sunamganj were among the worst in more than a century. United Nations agencies estimated that nearly 7.2 million people across northeastern Bangladesh were affected, including around 3.5 million children. Entire villages disappeared under water, electricity collapsed across districts, schools were turned into emergency shelters, and thousands of hectares of cropland were destroyed. UNICEF reported that 1.6 million children were stranded by the floods, while hundreds of educational institutions and community clinics were damaged or submerged.

Credit: UKBET (UK Bangladesh Education Trust)

The crisis did not end in 2022. In 2024, another devastating wave of flooding inundated nearly 75 per cent of Sylhet district, affecting more than two million people across northeastern Bangladesh and displacing thousands of families yet again. More than 800 schools were flooded and large areas of farmland went underwater, deepening poverty and food insecurity. This year again, heavy rainfall and upstream water flows submerged more than 46,000 hectares of standing Boro rice fields in the haor region during harvesting season, threatening livelihoods and increasing the risk of climate migration and child labour. Experts warn that repeated climate shocks are trapping vulnerable families in a cycle of disaster, displacement, and poverty.

Yet hope can still rise from disaster.

The Doorstep Learning Programme (DLP) of UKBET, a UK-based international NGO working in Bangladesh, was created to support children trapped in domestic labour and other vulnerable situations in urban slums. Rather than waiting for children to return to school on their own, the programme brings education, counselling, and rehabilitation support directly to their communities. Through flexible learning support and family livelihood assistance, it helps children return to education while reducing families’ dependence on child labour for survival.

Credit: UKBET (UK Bangladesh Education Trust)

DLP identified Jannat and supported her return to school alongside her younger brother. The programme also helped her father secure his own rickshaw, giving the family a more stable livelihood and a chance to rebuild their future.

As global leaders gather at the Eighth Assembly of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in Samarkand, Uzbekistan in May–June 2026 to discuss climate financing and resilience, stories like Jannat’s must remain at the centre of international attention. (Global Environment Facility) Climate change is no longer only about rising temperatures or environmental loss. It is about children losing education, dignity, and hope.

Credit: UKBET (UK Bangladesh Education Trust)

Local community-led initiatives that protect vulnerable children and strengthen climate resilience deserve far greater global investment and support through mechanisms such as the GEF Trust Fund and international adaptation financing.

Because children like Jannat are not victims to be pitied. They are futures worth protecting.

Mohammed A Sayem is Executive Director, UKBET
Sylhet, Bangladesh
msayem@ukbet-bd.org

IPS UN Bureau

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UNICEF and partners established the first Primary Health Care (PHC) Centre and Child-Friendly Space/Learning Space in Jabalia, North Gaza on 12 January, 2026. Credit: UNICEF/Rawan Eleyan

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, May 8 2026 (IPS)

Despite the implementation of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel last October, Israeli forces continue to launch airstrikes into the Occupied Palestinian Territory. This has resulted in extensive destruction of infrastructure, loss of human life and exacerbating immense health needs amid an increasingly strained health system in Gaza.

Recent months have marked a significant escalation in hostilities, with routine bombardment pushing communities that have been displaced multiple times to the brink, while continued blockages of humanitarian aid hinder relief efforts and deprive thousands of life-saving services.

“Gaza’s crisis is far from over. For millions of civilians, the emergency is ongoing, relentless, and life-threatening. Food insecurity remains widespread and severe,” said Faten, the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) Senior Protection Manager in Gaza. “Gaza’s healthcare system has all but collapsed with 94% of Gaza’s hospitals destroyed or damaged.”

Findings from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) underscore the urgent state of crisis in the Gaza Strip. OCHA experts leading a safety report recorded a significant number of security incidents over the past week, noting that the figures are among the highest reported since the declaration of the ceasefire last year. Experts from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) note that Israeli forces continue to maintain a high level of activity across the Gaza Strip, most notably in the northern region, where the scale of needs is most pronounced.

According to figures from OCHA, between October 7, 2023, and April 29, 2026, a total of 72,599 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip and another 172,411 injured. UNRWA has also reported that over 391 UN personnel have been killed since the start of the war through May 7. Hostilities from Israeli forces remain a routine part of daily life for Palestinians across Gaza, with UN experts recording airstrikes, shelling, and gunfire across all areas, particularly densely populated ones.

In May, a UNRWA school in Jabalia was struck by gunfire, injuring two displaced civilians residing within the school for shelter. OCHA also recorded two separate incidents in which humanitarian facilities came under fire in May, alongside an airstrike landing near a UN warehouse and a stone-throwing incident that damaged humanitarian relief vehicles. The UN continues to underscore the urgency of all actors complying with international humanitarian law, including all parties’ obligations to facilitate humanitarian operations and protect civilians and civilian infrastructure in all contexts.

Displacement also remains widespread, with over 90 percent of the population having been internally displaced. Many communities have been displaced multiple times, with more than half of the displaced population being children. Thousands of families currently reside in poor-quality makeshift shelters, such as damaged residential buildings and schools, where they face increasingly limited access to basic essential services, such as food, water, fuel and sanitation.

It is estimated that UNRWA currently hosts over 65,000 displaced Palestinians across 82 collective emergency shelters throughout the enclave. Approximately 126 UNRWA displacement sites are located with the Yellow Line, as well as areas within the Orange Line, where humanitarian aid remains subject to Israeli monitoring and intervention.

Many of these displacement sites face severe security concerns, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions, while health responses fail to keep pace and mitigate the rapid spread of infectious disease and illnesses.

Gaza’s health system has borne the brunt of the crisis, being on the brink of collapse as the immense scale of needs continues to grow every day. Compounded by Israeli blockades on humanitarian aid deliveries, relief efforts have been severely hindered by a lack of supplies, such as batteries, lubricants, and spare parts.

“51 percent of essential medicines are currently at zero stock in Gaza, which is severely limiting the ability to treat patients with life-threatening conditions, including those requiring intensive care and cancer treatment,” said Faten. “Hospitals are overwhelmed, under-resourced, and increasingly unable to provide adequate care.”

Additionally, humanitarian movement remains severely constricted as armored vehicles break down, posing significant security risks to aid personnel as they attempt to assist vulnerable populations. Furthermore, continued restrictions on generators, engine oil, and other key supplies hinder sanitation efforts, debris clearance, food distribution, water trucking, ambulance services, and the delivery of educational and medical supplies.

Over the past several months, UNRWA teams on the frontlines have recorded a significant uptick in rodent infestations across multiple overcrowded displacement shelters across the enclave, being most pronounced in Khan Younis, as well as areas with large amounts of rubble, including northern Gaza.

Heath facilities have also reported a significant increase in the frequency of rat bites, which are linked to the transmission of rodent-borne diseases such as leptospirosis. Efforts to contain the spread of infection are hindered by a severe shortage of pesticides, anti-lice shampoos, and scabicidal medications. As a result, UNRWA has recorded a significant increase in cases of chickenpox, as well as ectoparasitic skin diseases, such as scabies, over the past few months.

“With designated landfills becoming inaccessible during hostilities, the market has been used as a major solid waste dump, with trash now covering an entire city block and exceeding four flights in height,” said Stéphane Dujarric, UN Spokesperson for the Secretary-General during a press briefing on May 7.

“Our sanitation partners report that Gaza’s two sanitary landfills are near the perimeter fence surrounding the Strip, where access needs to be enabled by Israeli authorities. They also stress the need for permissions to bring into Gaza the machinery to remove the waste, the rubble and explosive ordnance, as well as the spare parts required to operate that equipment. These permissions are also critical to address health risks linked to pests and rodents,” Dujarric continued.

Despite immense challenges, UNRWA remains on the frontlines of this crisis, providing lifesaving services to vulnerable, displaced communities. Since October 2023, the agency has conducted over 17.2 million health consultations, including over 71,800 consultations between April 20 and 26 of this year alone. UNRWA continues to support six health centers, four temporary centers, and 28 medical points across the enclave, and have provided psychosocial support services to over 730,000 displaced Palestinians, including 520,000 children. The agency also continues to provide protection services, which have proved to be instrumental as security concerns reach new highs, particularly around displacement sites.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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LDC Future Forum Banner. Credit: OHRLLS

By Rabab Fatima
UNITED NATIONS, May 8 2026 (IPS)

The future of the world’s least developed countries (LDCs) will be shaped by a critical choice they make today- strategic investment in their youth. Rich in human potential, the young people in LDCs embody ingenuity, resilience and ambition. With the right opportunities, they can transform challenges into opportunities and put their countries strongly on track to sustainable development.

In the 44 LDCs, more than 60 per cent of the population is under 25. That is more than 315 million young people – innovators, entrepreneurs and problem-solvers – in a world being reshaped by technology, climate pressures and shifting economic realities. Their energy, creativity and ambition represent an extraordinary opportunity not only for national development, but for global prosperity and stability.

The question is simple: will we act with the urgency this moment demands? In May 2026, governments, development partners, private sector leaders, researchers and young changemakers will convene in Helsinki for the Fourth LDC Future Forum, under the theme “Transforming LDCs by Empowering the Youth Population through Education, Innovation, and Inclusive Growth.”

Rabab Fatima, USG and High Representative, OHRLLS. Credit: OHRLLS

Opportunity is expanding—but unevenly

The global economy is evolving at speed. Artificial intelligence, digital platforms, green technologies and geopolitical shifts are reshaping how we live and work. By 2030, an estimated 170 million new jobs will be created worldwide, even as 40 per cent of core workplace skills are transformed.

Youth in LDCs are ready to be part of this future. Already, they demonstrate remarkable entrepreneurial initiative: nearly 70 per cent are engaged in self employment, compared to about 50 per cent in other developing countries.

Yet opportunity remains deeply uneven. Tertiary enrolment in LDCs stands at just 11 per cent. Fewer than a quarter of graduates specialize in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Millions of young people—especially girls and rural youth—remain excluded from quality education, digital connectivity and formal employment. Without urgent and targeted investment, demographic strength risks becoming a demographic strain.

The DPOA: Investing in youth as a development imperative

The Doha Programme of Action (DPoA) is unequivocal: investing in people – especially youth – is central to sustainable development and smooth graduation from the LDC category.

It places strong emphasis on education, skills and science, technology and innovation (STI) as engines of structural transformation. Critically, it advances concrete deliverables, including the establishment of an Online University for LDCs, designed to expand access to quality, affordable higher education – particularly in STEM fields. It also promotes digital learning, innovation ecosystems, and stronger linkages between education systems and labour market needs.

The Fourth LDC Future Forum will focus squarely on these priorities. It will advance practical solutions to close skills gaps, expand digital learning, strengthen innovation hubs and promote inclusive growth models that leave no young person behind.

Inclusion must be intentional

True transformation cannot happen if opportunity is accessible only to a few.

Gender gaps in education, skills acquisition and labour force participation continue to hold back progress. The digital divide—between countries, communities and genders—threatens to widen existing inequalities unless deliberately addressed. Inclusive growth requires inclusive design: policies and investments that actively reach girls, marginalized youth and those in rural and underserved areas.

By placing equity at the centre of youth empowerment, LDCs can ensure that growth is not only faster, but fairer—and therefore more sustainable.

A shared responsibility

No country can undertake this transformation alone. Governments must lead by prioritizing youth in national development strategies and aligning education with future economic needs. Development partners must scale up predictable, high quality financing for education, skills and digital infrastructure. Academia must help generate evidence based solutions. And the private sector must play a central role—by investing, mentoring, innovating and creating decent jobs.

The LDC Future Forum exists to forge these partnerships. Through rigorous research, policy dialogue and multi stakeholder collaboration, it aims to deliver actionable recommendations that will inform both national action and the 2027 Midterm Review of the Doha Programme of Action.

The choice before us

History will judge this generation not by the challenges we faced, but by the choices we made. We can allow structural barriers and underinvestment to hold back millions of young people—or we can unlock the dynamism that resides within them.

Empowering youth is not a long term aspiration. It is the fastest, most reliable path to sustainable growth, resilience and global stability.

The message from Helsinki must be clear: invest in young people now – and they will transform their countries, and our shared future.

IPS UN Bureau

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Excerpt:

Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 8 2026 (IPS)

The 10-month-old Middle East conflict—which has triggered a rise in the cost of living worldwide, and an increase in the prices of food, groceries and gasoline—is likely to impose burdens on hundreds of UN staffers, delegates, journalists and civil society representatives– and thousands more, during the General Assembly sessions beginning September.

The proposed increases are mostly due to the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and the battle between the US and Iran, specifically targeting ships entering or departing– and halting oil exports and trade.

The UN’s Department of Operational Support (DOS) has decided “as mitigating cost savings measure to increase café prices by approximately 5% in general, any up to 20% for items, including sodas, cakes, oatmeal, pastries and soups”.

“This cost savings measure is meant to reduce the organization subsidy amount from $2.1M to $1M. The measures also include reduction in the hours of café operations to lower labor cost”.

The UN Staff Union (UNSU), responding to the price hike, said early this week, it “strongly objected to the proposed cafeteria price increases, which places an undue financial burden on staff already facing rising living costs and limited on-site alternatives”.

This concern is amplified by the fact that the cafeteria (run by an outside contractor) “benefits from substantial organizational subsidized support, and bears no overhead cost such as rent, utilities, and maintenance expenses”, says a message from UNSU released early this week.

Moreover, says UNSU, current economic data does not support increases of this magnitude. With year-over-year inflation between January 2025 and January 2026 at approximately 2.3–2.4%, even accounting for higher food and labor costs, there is no credible basis for price hikes in the range of 5–20%.

Fluctuations in oil prices further fail to justify such increases, given their limited impact on overall cafeteria operations. Taken together, these facts point to “disproportionate and unjustified measures passed on the staff, who have not received comparable salary increases”, says Narda Cupidore, President of the UNSU Staff Council.

In this context, shifting additional costs to staff is neither transparent nor justified, particularly in the absence of meaningful prior consultation as required under the Terms of Reference of the Headquarters Catering Advisory Committee.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one UN staffer told Inter Press Service: “At a time when there are reports of proposed salary cuts, as part of UN reforms, this hits us where it hurts us most –in our stomachs”.

Moreover, says UNSU, current economic data does not support increases of this magnitude. With year-over-year inflation between January 2025 and January 2026 at approximately 2.3–2.4%, even accounting for higher food and labor costs, there is no credible basis for price hikes in the range of 5–20%.

Fluctuations in oil prices further fail to justify such increases, given their limited impact on overall cafeteria operations.

Taken together, these facts point to disproportionate and unjustified measures passed on the staff, who have not received comparable salary increases.

The Staff Union calls for a suspension of the proposed price hikes at the Café and encourages the DOS to evaluate alternative financial strategies that could avoid passing on such a significant cost burden to staff.

“We remain committed to constructive engagement and continue to seek opportunities for open dialogue and clear answers from management. UNSU believes it is essential to be a partner in both the discussion and the solution, working collaboratively we can reach an outcome that is fair and minimizes the impact on staff. We will keep you informed of any developments.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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In Guinea-Bissau, malaria continues to place a heavy burden on families and health systems, underscoring the need for prevention, early treatment and stronger development-led responses. Credit: UNDP Guinea-Bissau

By Michael Adekunle Charles and Aissata De
NEW YORK, May 7 2026 (IPS)

If you woke up with severe fever, would you stay home from work? What if the choice meant losing a week’s wages, or deciding if you could afford the trip to a doctor at all?

For families facing financial hardship, these are not theoretical choices. Malaria is not only a health crisis—it is a poverty trap. With 282 million cases in 2024 alone, the consequences are far-reaching, persistent and deeply unequal.

As Africans, we know this story well. Despite significant progress, Africa remains the epicentre of the malaria epidemic. Malaria causes up to half a billion lost workdays each year and slows GDP growth by up to 1.3 percent.

It accounts for half of preventable school absences, undermining learning and opportunity. Health systems already under strain are forced to divert scarce resources, weakening care for all.

We know malaria hinders development. But the reverse is also true: the lack of development fuels malaria.

Recent analysis in Uganda found that districts with low development indicators are five times more likely to experience a high number of malaria cases. Poverty, weak infrastructure, limited services, and environmental risk do not just coexist with malaria; they actively sustain it.

Understanding where and how this vicious cycle bites hardest can help us design smarter malaria responses and accelerate development at the same time.

In Kapelebyong district in Uganda, malaria treatment can cost households a significant 120,000 shillings a year, often requiring long journeys to clinics facing staff and medicine shortages. Even livelihoods are implicated: crops that feed families can also harbour malaria-transmitting mosquitoes, exposing farmers to infection.

“The little money gained from harvests mostly goes to managing disease,” said Paul Omaido Ojilong, a local official supporting environmental health.

Sick workers are less productive—or absent altogether—weakening the very economic activity that builds resilience and prosperity. Families and local leaders are forced into impossible trade-offs, prioritizing immediate survival over long-term prevention.

And so, the cycle continues.

For two decades, countries have delivered life-saving medical innovations that dramatically reduced malaria cases and deaths. Those gains matter—but rising cases in Africa show that health services are no longer enough.

At a time when global aid disruptions are renewing calls for stronger African health sovereignty, this is a moment to rethink how malaria is tackled.

First, integrate malaria action into broader development strategies by embedding it into key sectors such as livelihoods, education, environment, infrastructure and governance. Community leaders, health workers, farmers, educators, executives and policymakers must play a role—working together, not in silos.

Second, promote local leadership as a central pillar of malaria elimination, by empowering district councils and local stakeholders to jointly set health and development priorities, coordinate action, and hold one another accountable.

Through the Pathfinder Endeavour, this approach centres countries in malaria interventions and champions joint global and national efforts, in line with the RBM Partnership to End Malaria’s support for the Big Push.

It promises stronger coordination and national accountability, more efficient resource utilization based on reliable data, and the more effective introduction and acceptance of new malaria solutions.

In Uganda, estimates suggest that the Pathfinder Endeavour’s coordinated multisectoral action could deliver transformative results. With modest investment, about US $60,000 over three years per district, economic and social gains of 11-12 percent are possible.

Malaria incidence could fall by 14 percent, extracting far greater value from existing health spending. Accountability efforts alone account for nearly half the projected gains.

In short, local leadership and multisectoral action can rewrite the malaria story.

But the window is closing. Even with more financing, conflict, climate change and rising drug and insecticide resistance threaten hard-won progress. Promising tools like vaccines will fall short if they are not embedded in development systems that protect health over time.

The prize is enormous. Ending malaria by 2030 could add US $231 billion to African economies and boost global trade by US $80.7 billion, moving millions from vulnerability to opportunity and prosperity.

Achieving the Africa we want by 2063—inclusive, sustainable, peaceful and prosperous—means meeting this moment with new ambition and ways of working. Together, UNDP, the RBM Partnership to End Malaria, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and partners across sectors can support African leaders to write a new story—one where development and malaria elimination advance hand in hand.

Dr Michael Adekunle Charles is the CEO of the RBM Partnership to End Malaria, and
Aissata De is the Deputy Regional Director for Africa at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

IPS UN Bureau

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Students at GH Rusheshe School in Kucikiro District, Rwanda, identified through the monitoring system through the ZERO Out of School initiative.

By Noor Muhammad Ansari
DOHA, Qatar, May 7 2026 (IPS)

In 2024, 273 million children, adolescents, and youth were out of school globally as per the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. While that is a staggering number, the figure is incomplete. The 2026 Global Education Monitoring report warns that the global out of school population may be undercounted by at least 13 million once humanitarian sources are used to correct data gaps in conflict-affected contexts.

When education data fails, the children most likely to be excluded are not just the ones out of school. There are also those who are completely missing from the systems meant to find them.

This is why data gaps are not simply a technical issue, they are a structural driver of exclusion. If a child is not in the dataset, they are less likely to appear in school planning processes, teacher-allocation formula, textbook procurements systems, transport route, or targeted social protection programmes that could have kept them enrolled.

The 2026 GEM Report highlights the depth of the challenge. In primary and secondary education, one in three countries does not report disparities by urban–rural location and one in two does not report disparities by wealth. When such information is missing, education policies that rely on national averages mask the children who are furthest behind.

Why Children Disappear from Education Data

An Education Above All Foundation Occasional Paper on counting out-of-school children explains how administrative enrolment figures can diverge from reality in predictable ways. Systems may undercount children who attend but are not registered; undercount late registrants when data are captured only once at the start of the year; or overstate participation by counting registered children who never attend.

And, these are not minor measurement errors. They are precisely how children slip through institutional cracks, especially those affected by poverty, displacement, disability, language barriers, and gender discrimination.

Finding the Children who are Missing

Consider what happens when programmes treat identification as seriously as instruction.

In our joint project with Educate Girls in rural Rajasthan in India we found that official child-tracking data often missed children in remote hamlets. To address this, community volunteers conducted door-to-door surveys at scale, across more than three million households in over 9,000 villages to identify out of school girls.

The effort enabled the programme to identify, enrol, and retain tens of thousands of girls who had previously been absent from official records. The lesson from this exercise was straightforward: it is hard to serve children you cannot see. But when systems invest deliberately in identification and verification, those learners can be found.

The same challenge applies to children with disabilities, who are too often hidden by stigma and undercounted by systems that do not measure disability consistently. In our ten-country inclusive education programme implemented with Humanity & Inclusion across Africa, we sought to “bring children out of the shadows”, through community outreach, disability-sensitive identification tools, and sustained tracking of participation, the programme successfully enrolled more than 32,000 out of school children with disabilities and supported strong retention outcomes.

These experiences show that exclusion is not only about access to education. It is also about whether systems can identify and track children who face multiple barriers to participation.

What Stronger Education Data Systems Can Do

Across many countries, governments and partners are beginning to recognise that stronger education data systems are essential to identifying and supporting the most excluded learners. For instance, in Rwanda, the Zero Out of School Children initiative uses the Waliku application, a digital monitoring tool developed with partners including Save the Children and the Ministry of Education.

Teachers use the mobile platform to register out of school children, record attendance, and track patterns of absence. When repeated absences occur, the system generates follow-up alerts so schools or community workers can contact families and support re-enrolment.

In partnership with UNICEF and Government of The Gambia, efforts are underway to integrate education data with health and civil registration systems through DHIS2 for Education, helping authorities identify children who are missing from school records and coordinate responses across sectors.

Other partnerships illustrate how digital tools can strengthen identification and monitoring in different contexts.

In Nigeria, a partnership project with UNICEF developed the Tracking Re-entry of Children to Education (TRACE) system that combines community mapping and school records to track children from identification through enrolment and progression.

In Kenya, under EAA Foundation-UNICEF partnership, a Digital Attendance Application enables near real-time monitoring of school attendance, allowing schools to detect patterns of absenteeism and intervene early.

Digital systems are also proving valuable in fragile contexts. In Syria, the EAA Foundation-UNICEF partnership project developed a Self-Learning Programme Child Monitoring System to track children participating in alternative learning pathways when formal schooling has been disrupted.

In Zanzibar, the EAA Foundation-UNICEF partnership project developed a mobile-based monitoring tool that supports community-level identification and follow-up of out-of-school children, while the EAA Foundation-World Bank partnership project in Djibouti developed digital tools that help track participation in alternative education programmes and support transitions into formal schooling.

In Zanzibar, a mobile-based monitoring tool that supports community-level identification and follow-up of out-of-school children.

Taken together, these initiatives illustrate an important shift: Education systems are moving from periodic aggregate reporting toward child-level identification, real-time monitoring, and early-warning systems.

As these systems evolve, particularly with advances in analytics and artificial intelligence, they offer the potential to predict dropout risks and guide targeted interventions, helping ensure that every child remains visible within the education system.

Rwanda’s school attendance register and tracking system, Waliku Application. Teachers use the mobile platform to register out of school children, record attendance, and track patterns of absence.

So, what should change?

Governments must treat education data as an inclusion tool, not only a reporting obligation. This means investing in learner-level education information systems that can uniquely identify learners, track attendance and progression, and safely link education data with civil registration, health, and social protection systems where appropriate.

Governments should also routinely combine and integrate data from various sources to correct blind spots in national statistics.

Secondly, development partners should fund data systems as core public infrastructure. It is untenable to finance classrooms, teachers, and learning materials while leaving ministries without the capacity to know which children are missing, where they are, and what barriers they face.

Results-based financing should also reward governments and implementers for verified inclusion outcomes, not only aggregate enrolment.

Education agencies and partners should standardise how the world counts ‘excluded.’ Globally tested tools already exist. For example, the UNICEF–Washington Group Child Functioning Module, provides a standardised approach for identifying children with disabilities in surveys and administrative systems.

For displaced learners, stronger coordination between education and humanitarian data systems is essential. According to UNHCR, there are 12.4 million refugee children of school age worldwide, and nearly 46% of them out of school.

The takeaway is straightforward: The most excluded children are often the least counted.

Closing the education gap requires closing the education data gap, so that every child is visible, reachable, and supported well before exclusion becomes permanent.

IPS UN Bureau

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Excerpt:

 
CIVICUS discusses the status of political prisoners in Venezuela with Manuel Virgüez, director of Movimiento Vinotinto, a Venezuelan human rights organisation that works for citizen empowerment, democracy and justice.

Manuel Virgüez

What’s the status of political prisoners?

Following the 2024 presidential election, the state detained around 2,000 people as part of what it called Operation Tun Tun. In early 2026, around 1,000 remained in detention, although various organisations put the total at between 950 and 1,200, depending on the classification criteria they use. Since 8 January, when Jorge Rodríguez, President of the National Assembly, announced imminent releases, and following the approval of an amnesty law, that number has fallen to around 450.

Among those released were human rights defender Rocío San Miguel, activist Javier Tarazona and journalist Eduardo Torres. The vast majority of those released were members of civil society or political activists. On 16 April, it was unofficially reported that around 50 former employees of Petróleos de Venezuela, detained in 2025, had been released. If this is confirmed, the current number of political prisoners remaining would be around 380.

The group that remains in detention consists mainly of dissident military personnel and former public officials. The authorities are reluctant to release them because they pose a direct threat to the regime’s stability. They are the ones who have suffered the worst treatment: various organisations, including Movimiento Vinotinto, have documented enforced disappearances, inhuman treatment, torture and persecution of family members. In some cases, people remained missing for weeks or months, with no knowledge of their whereabouts or whether they were still alive. These are some of the most serious violations recorded in recent decades in Venezuela.

How did these arrests differ from previous ones?

Two things distinguished them from previous waves of repression. The first was the abusive use of the concept of ‘eradication’, provided for in the Organic Code of Criminal Procedure, to transfer all cases to courts in Caracas. People detained in states such as Bolívar, hundreds of kilometres from the capital, were required to appear there. This was an unprecedented violation of the procedural principles of Venezuelan law. Not even in the 1960s, in the face of guerrilla movements, was there such a concentration of cases in a single court.

The second thing was the criminalisation of everyday acts. The state used anonymous reports via mobile apps to identify and arrest people, and a simple WhatsApp status update could be treated as an act of terrorism. The presumption of innocence ceased to exist in practice and the burden of proof was reversed: it was the detainee who had to prove they were not guilty.

What does the amnesty law entail and what does it exclude?

The law provides for the closure of cases linked to political events from different periods in Venezuelan history. This is no minor matter. After years of mass detentions and restrictions on freedom, the state implicitly acknowledges that those people should not have been imprisoned. The credit goes, above all, to the detainees’ families, human rights organisations and the international community.

But the law falls short. It does not provide for any mechanism of redress for those who were unjustly detained. Nor does it provide for the restitution of property. Many political prisoners had their businesses, homes and vehicles confiscated and won’t recover them on release. The law also offers no clear guarantees for those in exile. On 16 April, former legislator Alexis Paparone returned to Venezuela and was detained for several hours before being brought before a court, demonstrating that returning remains risky.

The law effectively excludes dissident military personnel and makes no provision for the thousands of politically motivated dismissals that have taken place, in violation of International Labour Organization Convention 111, nor for political disqualifications. As long as leaders such as María Corina Machado are unable to exercise their political rights, there can be no talk of a genuine transition.

What conditions are required for a genuine democratic transition?

There can be no reconciliation without justice. What Venezuela has experienced is one of the darkest periods in South America’s recent history. Bringing victims and perpetrators together without a prior process of accountability is not reconciliation; it is impunity. Where there’s no justice, there’s vengeance, and that generates endless cycles of violence. Societies that have not dealt with their crimes have carried that wound for generations.

For there to be justice, profound institutional reform is needed: in the armed forces, the electoral system, the judiciary and the public prosecutor’s office. Cosmetic changes are not enough. It will be a long-term process, but the first steps must be taken to call general elections and move towards real economic recovery.

What’s possible, and necessary, is a pact of coexistence: an agreement to respect the constitution and live without mutual persecution. But such a pact requires the Chavista regime to acknowledge its mistakes and its crimes. Without that, any transition will remain incomplete.

Even so, I am optimistic. Venezuelan civil society, despite all it has lost, remains standing. There are signs that something is changing, and we must seize this opportunity. I’m confident that we will be able to lay the foundations for a democracy that says ‘never again’ to authoritarianism.

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

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Venezuela: ‘People once again believe they can influence what happens in their country’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Pedro González Caro 29.Mar.2026
Venezuela: democracy no closer CIVICUS Lens 29.Jan.2026
Venezuela: ‘We are seeing an economic transition, but no democratic transition’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Guillermo Miguelena 29.Jan.2026

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A conversation with Toril-Iren Pedersen, Director of the UNDP Global Policy Centre for Governance, and Michael Jarvis, Executive Director of the Trust, Accountability, and Inclusion (TAI) Collaborative

Q1: What is financial integrity and why is it important right now? Why is it relevant to TAI’s members?

Toril-Iren Pedersen

For us, the issue is not limited to one category of wrongdoing. It is about the connection between different parts of economic value, from public revenues to criminal flows, and the loopholes that exist within the regular financial system. Financial integrity cannot be considered in isolation. Weaknesses across tax, corruption, anti-money laundering and the broader global financial architecture all have to be understood together.

Michael Jarvis: At TAI, we see financial integrity as the need for systems to operate transparently, accountably and ethically. That is how people ideally manage their personal finances, and how we hope corporations run their businesses. But we are especially focused on governments and countries: how they strengthen the integrity of their financial systems, minimize corruption, encourage fairness and better steward public resources.

There is a clear development case for why this matters. TAI’s members are primarily U.S.-based philanthropies working internationally, and our work is organized around three priorities: strengthening healthy democracies, advancing climate accountability and improving fiscal accountability through fair and effective financial governance. Financial integrity underpins all three. Without it, progress in each area is weakened.

Michael Jarvis

When financial systems lack integrity, the damage is broad. It undermines trust in government, contributes to democratic disillusionment and weakens citizens’ confidence that public resources are being used fairly. It can also slow the energy transition, as we have seen with concerns around carbon markets. And it directly affects the ability of governments to raise and spend revenue effectively.

Toril-Iren Pedersen: I would add that declining trust in governments and in the multilateral system is higher than we have seen in a very long time. Lack of financial integrity contributes directly to that distrust.

Visible wealth inequality is one challenge, but so is the perception of invisible wealth being accumulated through the global financial architecture. When people sense that wealth is moving in the shadows, outside transparency and democratic control, it creates legitimate grounds for distrust. That is why lack of financial integrity must be understood as a systems failure that requires a systems approach.

Michael Jarvis: That is also the focus of the new paper from your team, the UNDP Global Policy Centre for Governance, which TAI supported. It emphasizes why progress requires action on multiple fronts and why no single actor or institution can solve this alone. Financial integrity is a collective action challenge.

Q2: How has UNDP’s Global Policy Centre for Governance worked on financial integrity over the past few years? What were your most important results and insights?

Toril-Iren Pedersen: The Centre’s work has taken place across several streams, but the most important contribution has been analyzing the system and the relationships among different actors. When we look at corruption and illicit financial flows, we have to ask who enables those flows within countries and across borders. Understanding those relationships is central to financial integrity.

The Centre has also convened actors within the UN and among practitioners, including country representatives involved in the Financing for Development negotiations in Sevilla last summer. That process helped produce stronger commitments to curb illicit financial flows and introduced more substantive language on financial integrity and corruption than we had seen in earlier iterations of the Financing for Development agenda.

The analytical work on the financial integrity ecosystem and the systems approach has also been developed in collaboration with several TAI members, including the MacArthur Foundation and Ford Foundation. Their support has been important both substantively and financially.

Q3: How will the Centre work on financial integrity going forward, under your leadership?

Toril-Iren Pedersen: The Centre has worked on a range of governance frontier issues. Going forward, we will focus on two areas: financial integrity, and data systems and data availability at the country level. The data agenda connects directly to financial integrity, but it also has broader relevance.

On financial integrity, we see a need to problem-solve the systemic challenges that are preventing progress at both the country and global levels. We will continue analyzing what is stopping countries from making substantive progress and what kinds of solutions and policy alternatives can be made available to them.

Some of these solutions already exist, but they are not always accessible. As a UNDP Policy Centre, our role is to make research, policy options and insights into systemic challenges available to UNDP country offices so they can be integrated into country-level programming. We also hope this work will help countries engage more effectively in global processes.

There is currently a disconnect. The Financial Action Task Force, the OECD tax framework and anti-corruption frameworks all rely on data from countries, but they do not always help solve what is fundamentally a systems challenge. We will continue engaging in those processes while breaking the work into more manageable areas where countries can take action nationally, regionally and globally.

Q4: What is the role of philanthropy in strengthening financial integrity against the backdrop of a fast-evolving global development landscape? What collaboration opportunities do you see between philanthropies, multilateral organizations and other stakeholders?

Michael Jarvis: Philanthropy’s role is a nimble one. The volume of finance philanthropy brings is not the same as government donors or what countries can mobilize themselves. The question is how philanthropy can prompt the right conversations and support work that moves the agenda more effectively.

Traditionally, philanthropy has supported civil society groups, independent media and think tanks at the global and national levels. Those actors investigate financial integrity issues, build evidence, raise public awareness and develop policy recommendations for governments and multilateral forums.

Philanthropy also has limits. Individual donors, including TAI members, often focus on a relatively small number of priority countries. They are not operating at a scale that covers all countries affected by these issues. That is where the UN system and international financial institutions can play a different role, because they work with nearly every country and have government relationships built into their mandates.

There are important complementarities. The MacArthur Foundation, for example, has made a major investment in Nigeria around financial integrity and anti-corruption, working with government agencies while also supporting civil society and media. More broadly, different actors bring different relationships, mandates and capacities.

The Financing for Development process in Sevilla is a good example. The outcome was stronger because many players were involved, from civil society groups working in-country to global and regional convenings that reinforced the message. Those efforts helped shape the negotiations and elevate financial integrity on the agenda.

An important opportunity is the Illicit Finance Summit, being hosted by the UK Government in June. It can bring together governments committed to addressing financial integrity challenges and create space for civil society, academia, philanthropy and others to develop practical solutions. Philanthropy should be part of that conversation and think about where its support can amplify or pilot ideas that emerge.

Visibility also matters because it helps attract resources. Funding for financial integrity work remains very limited. In a 2023 analysis, TAI estimated that about $150 million had been directed to illicit financial flows work since 2020, including efforts to address tax avoidance.

That averages roughly $30 million a year across different groups, countries and sectors. Compared with the scale of the problem, and compared with funding for fields such as climate or AI, that is extremely small.

The upcoming summit could serve as a call to action for philanthropy and other funders to invest more. The rise in fraud enabled by crypto and other technologies affects people directly and is creating grassroots demand for action. Partnership will be essential, including with UNDP, the World Bank, national governments, civil society and research networks.

Toril-Iren Pedersen: I agree. We need to mobilize more resources, but it is also important to recognize what has already been achieved with limited funding. Much of the momentum for change over the past 10 to 15 years has come from civil society organizations, journalist networks and collaborative investigations around leaks. Those efforts helped put issues such as tax fairness, transparency and beneficial ownership on national and global agendas.

This field has shown that limited resources can have an outsized effect when actors from different parts of the ecosystem work together. Anti-corruption, tax fairness and anti-money laundering were once treated as separate silos. Bringing those communities together around shared solutions is a cost-effective way of working.

Going forward, we also need to connect financial integrity to other development priorities, including climate finance and health financing. Each sector has its own financial integrity challenges. With the current development financing crunch, we cannot afford to leave money on the table, and we cannot afford to let resources disappear when policy action could prevent it.

Q5: Is there a case for involving the business community? What would the message be?

Toril-Iren Pedersen: Yes. Governance investments are one area we will be looking at closely. There is enormous pressure to mobilize funding from private actors and the private sector. Much of the focus has been on ensuring that specific investments comply with human rights and development standards. That remains important.

But financial integrity is also about longer-term systems de-risking. Investments in anti-corruption mechanisms, laws that reduce corruption risk and dispute-resolution frameworks can make markets more attractive for private investment. The goal is to build systems where private actors face lower real or perceived risk and can operate without relying as heavily on facilitated investment support.

In that sense, we need to distinguish between short-term and long-term de-risking, and between project-level and systems-level de-risking.

Michael Jarvis: There is a strong private sector incentive to support financial integrity, especially for companies operating across borders. But there is also a quid pro quo: corporate actors need to uphold their own standards of financial integrity. That includes thinking responsibly about the taxes they pay in different jurisdictions and avoiding excessive profit shifting.

The private sector benefits from stronger financial integrity systems, but it also has responsibilities within them. Beneficial ownership transparency is one example where progress has helped make it easier to identify who is behind corporate structures. These structures are still misused, but many legitimate private sector actors increasingly recognize that transparency can help distinguish them from bad actors and reduce reputational risk.

All of us have a role in the system. The challenge now is to make a clear case for why financial integrity deserves continued investment, government attention and policy bandwidth, especially at a time of aid cuts, foreign assistance pressures and tight country budgets. That is a collective challenge, and one we need to keep elevating.

IPS UN Bureau

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On the sidelines of the UN Youth Forum, four climate leaders from across the continent and diaspora unite to call for stronger protection of Africa’s environment and vital resources.
 
Sibusiso Mazomba (far left), member of the UN Secretary-General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change; Eugenia Boateng (second from left), Founder and Executive Director of the African Diaspora Youth Hub, FABA Institute; Jabri Ibrahim, also of the UN Secretary-General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change; and Damon Hamman, Graduate Student, New York University, Centre for Global Affairs. Credit: UN Photo

By Alexandra del Castello
UNITED NATIONS, May 5 2026 (IPS)

Africa is on the frontlines of the climate crisis, warming faster than the global average and facing disproportionate climate impacts, despite contributing the least to global greenhouse gas emissions.

This is particularly evident in the growing pressures that climate change is placing on water resources and systems across the continent. As water underpins agriculture, livelihoods, ecosystems, and energy production, water-related climate impacts are deepening inequalities and threatening sustainable development across Africa.

At the forefront of this year’s ECOSOC Youth Forum – the largest annual UN gathering of young people – four African climate youth leaders led a dynamic discussion spotlighting the key role that African youth play in driving climate solutions across the continent, building community resilience, strengthening water security, and advancing locally led adaptation efforts.

Their insights highlighted how young people are not only responding to the climate crisis but reshaping the development agenda through innovation, advocacy, and community rooted action.

African youth are charting bold new pathways for climate leadership and proving that the future of climate action is being shaped by their vision and determination.

Learn more about the speakers:

Eugenia Boateng is an African diaspora strategist and founder of the African Diaspora Youth Hub (ADYH) and FABA, a production strategy lab building systems to make African economies more visible, structured, and investable.

Her work focuses on translating informal economies into institutional intelligence, connecting diaspora resources to African production, and designing systems that enable value retention on the continent.

Jabri Ibrahim is a climate and energy policy expert with an extensive network across Africa, connecting youth movements, policymakers, and private sector leaders. Jabri has played a central role in mobilizing African youth for climate action, particularly through the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change (AYICC).

Sibusiso Mazomba is a climate justice activist, advocate, and researcher. He leads youth advocacy at the African Climate Alliance, driving initiatives to ensure meaningful youth participation in decision-making.

A junior negotiator for South Africa’s UNFCCC delegation since COP26, he has contributed to negotiations on adaptation, oceans, and loss and damage, representing youth and national interests on the global stage.

Damon Hamman is a Master of Science candidate in Global Affairs at New York University, concentrating in transnational security, intelligence, and conflict analysis. His work centers on the intersection of human security, diplomacy, and data-driven policy research.

He has served with the United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on Africa, where he built an AI-assisted thematic analysis pipeline for Voluntary National Reviews, contributed to policy briefs aligned with Agenda 2030 and AU Agenda 2063, and supported diplomatic engagement with African missions.

Source: Africa Renewal, United Nations

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías

By Samuel King
BRUSSELS, Belgium, May 4 2026 (IPS)

In January, the government of Algeria succeeded in locking two civil society groups out of access to the United Nations (UN). It raised questions at the UN Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations, known as the NGO Committee, about two civil society groups with accreditation. It alleged that Italian organisation Il Cenacolo was making politically motivated statements at the UN Human Rights Council and the Geneva-based International Committee for the Respect and Implementation of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (CIRAC) was selling UN grounds passes. Four days later, it called a vote to revoke their status. Other states urged delay, but the no-action motion failed, and 11 of the body’s 19 members voted to recommend that the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) revoke Il Cenacolo’s accreditation and suspend CIRAC’s for a year.

As the primary gatekeeper for civil society participation at the UN, the NGO Committee controls ECOSOC consultative status, which allows organisations to attend UN meetings, submit written statements, make oral interventions, organise side events and access UN premises. Its mandate, set out in ECOSOC Resolution 1996/31, is straightforward: to facilitate civil society access to the UN system.

Such access is particularly valuable for organisations working in repressive contexts, where domestic advocacy is suppressed. It can mean the difference between a community’s concerns being silenced or becoming a matter of international record. In practice, however, the Committee has so consistently worked to obstruct rather than enable access that it is widely known as the ‘anti-NGO Committee’.

On 8 April, in an almost entirely uncompetitive vote, ECOSOC members elected 19 states to serve on the NGO Committee for four-year terms. Only 20 candidates ran for the 19 seats. UN states are organised into five regional blocs, and four of them presented closed slates, putting forward only as many candidates as the number of seats available.

As a result, the Asia-Pacific group selected China, India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), states with consistent track records of silencing civil society. Latin America and the Caribbean is represented by the likes of Cuba and Nicaragua, which suppress dissent and routinely detain critics. Four of the five African states elected have repressed or closed civic space. Two states elected from the Western European and Other States group, Israel and Turkey, have also recently intensified their repression of civic space.

The one exception was the Eastern European group, where Estonia and Ukraine won seats in a three-way contest, keeping out authoritarian Belarus, which received only 23 votes against Estonia’s 44 and Ukraine’s 38. As in 2022, when Russia lost a similar race, the result showed that competitive elections open up scrutiny and produce better outcomes. The problem is they rarely happen.

Overall, 13 of 19 newly elected states are rated as having closed or repressed civic space by the CIVICUS Monitor, our research initiative that tracks the conditions for civil society around the world. Only one, Estonia, has open civic space. Fourteen of the 20 candidates had been named as carrying out reprisals against people engaging with the UN.

In the run-up to the election, the International Service for Human Rights published scorecards assessing all 20 candidates against eight criteria; 12 of the 20 met none. Over 80 civil society organisations called on ECOSOC member states to hold competitive elections and vote for candidates committed to civil society access. Forty independent UN human rights experts, including special rapporteurs on human rights defenders and on countries including Afghanistan, Iran and Russia, issued a statement warning that Committee members were abusing the accreditation process to block access for human rights organisations. All these warnings went unheeded.

The withdrawal of accreditation from Il Cenacolo and CIRAC, which awaits ECOSOC confirmation, was unprecedented, but it sits within a long pattern of obstruction. At the Committee’s latest regular session in January, 618 applications were under consideration, 381 of which had been deferred from previous sessions.

The backlog is no accident. States ask repetitive questions about minor details and make short-notice requests for complex documentation to repeatedly delay applications until future sessions. States that repress civil society at home do the same in the international arena, targeting organisations that work on issues they deem controversial or opposed to their interests. Three states – China, India and Pakistan– stand out as the worst abusers of this mechanism, having asked almost half of the 647 questions posed to applicants during the January session. Repeated deferrals raise the costs for civil society organisations, draining financial resources and time.

The UN’s current financial crisis is compounding the problem. The consequences of funding cuts were visible at the latest session, when the question-and-answer session was cancelled following an early adjournment. The loss of the only opportunity for organisations seeking accreditation to engage directly with the Committee fell hardest on smaller organisations that had travelled to New York to take part.

The UN’s current cost-cutting drive could at least be used as an opportunity to push for online participation and other efficiency reforms to reduce the bureaucratic burden of repeated requests for information. Beyond this, there’s a need to reassert that the Committee’s function is supposed to be that of an enabler rather than an obstructor.

The NGO Committee determines whether the voices of communities facing repression and violence can be heard in the UN system, and it’s been hijacked by states with every interest in ensuring that they cannot. The floor can’t be left clear for states that repress civil society to act as gatekeepers. States that claim to support civil society must be willing to put themselves forward.

Samuel King is a researcher with the Horizon Europe-funded research project ENSURED: Shaping Cooperation for a World in Transition at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation.

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

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The second quadrennial International Migration Review Forum (IMRF) 2026 will be held at the UN Headquarters in New York from 5-8 May 2026, preceded by a multi-stakeholder hearing on 4 May. This forum reviews progress on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) and aims to produce an inter-governmentally agreed Progress Declaration to set future migration policy goals.
 
https://migrationnetwork.un.org/international-migration-review-forum-2026

By Simone Galimberti
KATHMANDU, Nepal, May 4 2026 (IPS)

Migration is a strange thing, hard to pin down. It is a complex phenomenon that transforms communities while shaping people’s identities and it is so multifaceted that individuals perceive it and live it in different ways.

It can turn to be a vehicle to security and prosperity for some but, on other hand, it can be also experienced with anguish and fear.

In short, migration is something personal that intimately affects both those settling into a new land and those communities that are supposed to co-exist with them.

A German’s state, Baden-Württembergwill soon will have its first state premier from Turkish origin, Cem Özdemir, a veteran green politician. In the past, Mr. Özdemir, according to DW report, has rejected the idea that he should be considered a “successful model of integration” because he always felt at home.

Özdemir’s unwillingness to be boxed into a fixed category of migrant contrasts those narratives that simplify and demean migration.

As we know, migration has been a toxic and divisive issue in many parts of the West, a dangerous problem that must be stopped at any cost. It is being portrayed through the lens of illegality as an open door that only invites violations of the law, including dangerous criminal activities.

While it is undeniable that security concerns can arise especially when there are massive flows of foreigners enter without papers into a new country, much less discussions are about the positive impact of migrants in the local economy.

But the level of politicization is so high that it ended up defining the whole issue. Migration has become something to be fixed, controlled in many parts of the Global North.

Such a framing ignores the fact that migration also occurs in large quantities also between developing nations and is not only about hordes of people from the Global South pushing their way into richer North.

It is unsurprising that the same logic also disregards the multiple and diverse “push factors” that bring individuals to migrate.

Poverty, discrimination and climate change are forcing millions of individuals to search for better places to live. This view has become so pervasive that it has delegitimized a different conversation, one based on exploring legal pathways to migration.

A different way of talking, discussing and regulating migration is possible.

The United Nations, over the last decades, have been trying to offer a venue to promote an approach leading to safe migration based on human rights, conducive, at least on paper, to a multilateralism centered governance of migration.

While far from being perfect, these mechanisms underpinning it, address migration in a way that goes past the deafening rhetoric that generally characterizes the debate on migration.

Because, as we know, migration if managed properly, taking into account the rights of migrants and bringing on board local communities in the destination countries with investment in social integration, instead offers a potent instrument to fight poverty while contributing to the economies of the Global North.

The International Migration Review Forum 2026 is one of these tools at the disposal of the UN to reframe the conversation about migration.

The United Nations in New York will host, from 5-8 May an essential conversation aimed at reviewing the Global Compact on Migration, GCM adopted on 19 December 2018.

Instead of being seen as an opportunity to reboot the conversation about immigration, this non-binding global blueprint, intended to offer a 360 degree approach to foster international cooperation to effectively and inclusively manage migration, ended up being instrumentalised by cunny politicians.

Since then, unfortunately the GCM has been overshadowed by the relentless politics of immigration based on the logic of “control” that has become more and more mainstream in the European Union and in the United States.

Making things more complicated is the fact that it is fitting for demagogues to conflate the issues of migrants with those of refugees. While these two categories often overlap, legally, they remain different concepts, a fact conveniently ignored by politicians.

It has not always been like this.

The international community, thanks also to a more favorable politics in the USA, on September 19, 2016, had successfully managed to create a united policy framework that would bring together both migration and the refugee’s related policies.

The New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants led the foundations not only to the Global Compact on Migration but also to another tool, the Global Compact on Refugees approved just two days before the GCM.

These are two examples of soft law designed to ignite international support and cooperation even if they were criticized as attempts by the Global North of watering down the international human rights framework.

Yet in order for them to remain useful without diluting the international obligations of nations, they must remain as close as possible in terms of implementation.

The central question is if they revitalize and re-balance the conversation on immigration and refugee protection with practical cooperation and synergies among nations.

I doubt that IMRF 2026 can do much to elevate a new discussion about migration and challenge the status quo. After all, GCM has been designed to be structurally weak in terms of its governance.

For example, there is no mandatory reporting for its signatories.

A silver lining in the GCM’s framework is the existence of the United Nations Network on Migration that “coordinates system-wide, timely and practical support to Member States implementing the GCM.

Yet this is the only mechanism where the international community can holistically discuss immigration. No matter how battered the United Nations are amid drastic funding cuts and ongoing discussions about its re-organization and restructuring, multilateralism is needed more than ever in the areas of migration and refugees.

Yet it appears that the UN is not fighting the fight at political levels.

Reading the Report of the Secretary General on the Global Compact on Migration, you do not find a strong, vigorous push back against the politics that tackle immigration as a problem to be controlled.

There is only a small section on Dispelling Misleading Narratives and you could have expected a more punchy style and more space to counterattack this mainstream narrative on migration based on fear.

Perhaps the “immigration as a problem” approach has already metastasized and, inevitably, it adversely influences and restrains the United Nations. The International Migration Organization, the guardian of the GCM, remains a marginal institution within the UN system.

The Office of the High Commissioner on Refugees faced substantial funding cuts and underwent in 2025 a profound restructuring despite its essential role in many humanitarian situations.

At least the former Higher Commissioner, Fillippo Grandi who stepped down at the end of 2025, did not mince his words in criticizing the ways many governments in the West have been dealing with immigration.

“Building walls, sending boats back, offloading refugees and migrants on to other countries –, populists assure voters that controlling everything from borders and immigration numbers to job markets and national security will make their lives better” he wrote for The Guardian in 2024

“Few political tactics succeed like fear. But I can also tell you such claims of control are illusory”. he continued. It is not only the USA which has embraced this tactics.

Civil society organizations across Europe have been recently criticizing the European Union for the way it is drafting its Return Directive that, once approved, would streamline the return of non-EU nationals staying irregularly, including those whose asylum requests have been denied.

Yet amid this gloom, there are some best practices emerging.

Local governments have an important role to play.

The Local Coalition for Migrants and Refugees is showing an interest model to promote a bottom approach to migration. Moreover, some countries are stepping up.

For example, in 2025, Brazil approved a National Plan on Refugees, Migrants and Stateless while Kenya also brought in a new policy that would positively impact the more than 830,000 refugees and asylum-seekers that are hosted in the country.

At the same time, Ecuador reached an important milestone in 2025 with its National Implementation Plan (NIP) of GCM. Similarly, Malawi has finalized its first National Implementation Plan on Migration.

It is too early to see if these plans will be enforced and a lot will depend on the availability of international funding. Despite the constraints, the IOM remains steadfast in its mission of protecting the rights of migrants.

In 2024 a new Strategic Plan that aims at saving lives and protecting people on the move, driving solutions to displacement and facilitating pathways for regular migration, was introduced.

In a world in which 8,000 migrants were officially reported dead or missing worldwide in 2025, bringing the total since 2014 to more than 82,000 and with 117.3 million people worldwide are forcibly displaced, the international communities cannot stay indifferent.

Let’s remind ourselves of the real power of the GCM.

This Global Compact does not only recognize that safe, orderly and regular migration works for all when it takes place in a well-informed, planned and consensual manner. It is also a tool that highlights the role of the international community in helping create conducive policies for individuals to be able to lead peaceful and productive lives in their home nations.

In short, migration should never be an act of desperation.

While there are individuals of migrant origins like Cem Özdemir who offer a glaring example of successful achievements that allow himself to openly reject a stereotyped categorization, there is a sea of vulnerabilities and deaths affecting millions of others who voluntarily or forcibly left their homes.

This is the reason why legal tools like the International Refugees Convention, this year in its 75th anniversary and more limited but potentially useful mechanisms like IMRF this coming week and next Global Refugee Forum (GRF) 2027, do matter and we should all pay attention to them.

Simone Galimberti writes about the SDGs, youth-centered policy-making and a stronger and better United Nations.

IPS UN Bureau

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By External Source
May 1 2026 (IPS)

On May 3rd, the world marks World Press Freedom Day – a United Nations observance dedicated to the fundamental principles of press freedom.

First proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in 1993, the day traces its origins to the Windhoek Declaration, adopted by African journalists in 1991, calling for a free, independent and pluralistic press.

In 2026, World Press Freedom Day is observed under the theme: “Shaping a Future at Peace: Promoting Press Freedom for Human Rights, Development, and Security.”

UNESCO says the day is a reminder to governments of their commitment to press freedom. It is also a day of reflection for media professionals, a day of support for media under pressure, and a day of remembrance for journalists who have lost their lives in pursuit of a story.

This year’s global commemoration comes at a time of growing concern.

UNESCO’s latest World Trends Report finds that freedom of expression has declined globally since 2012, while self-censorship among journalists has risen sharply. The report also highlights growing physical, digital and legal threats against journalists.

Between January 2022 and September 2025, UNESCO recorded the killing of 310 journalists, including 162 killed in conflict zones.

The 2026 World Press Freedom Day Global Conference will be held on May 4th and 5th in Lusaka, Zambia, co-hosted by UNESCO and the Government of Zambia.

The conference will bring together journalists, digital rights advocates, policymakers, civil society, researchers and technology experts to discuss how journalism, technology, human rights and information integrity can support more resilient societies.

As conflicts, disinformation and pressures on independent media continue to grow, World Press Freedom Day is a reminder that access to reliable information is not only a media issue.

It is a human rights issue.

A development issue.

And a peace and security issue.

IPS UN Bureau

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Displaced mothers and children at a malnutrition treatment center in Chuil, Jonglei State, South Sudan. Credit: WFP/Gabriela Vivacqua

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

In 2026, the humanitarian situation in South Sudan has taken a considerable turn for the worse, with widespread food shortages, ongoing disruptions to food production systems, and rising rates of malnutrition affecting over half of the population. Compounded by the vast scale of needs and an overwhelming lack of access to basic services, humanitarian experts warn that nationwide levels of hunger are projected to worsen to catastrophic levels if urgent intervention is not secured.

On April 28, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the World Food Programme (WFP) published a joint statement underscoring the escalation of the hunger crisis in South Sudan, noting that approximately 56 percent of the population, or roughly 7.8 million people, are projected to face acute food insecurity by July. They stress that the main drivers of food insecurity are climate shocks, flooding, mass displacement, and protracted armed conflict, all of which hinder effective agricultural yields and reduce food availability for hundreds of thousands of families.

“Hunger in South Sudan is intensifying, not stabilizing,” said Ross Smith, WFP Director of Emergencies and Preparedness. “Between April and July of this year, more than half of the population is projected to face crisis levels of hunger or worse, including people already in catastrophic conditions, where starvation and a collapse of livelihoods are a daily reality. This is among the highest proportions of any country’s population facing crisis levels of hunger today.”

The latest figures from the Integrated Food Security Classification Phase (IPC) show that over 280,000 additional civilians have been pushed into acute food insecurity since late 2025, including 73,000 civilians who are facing catastrophic (IPC Phase 5) levels of hunger. This marks a 160 percent increase from last year’s figures. An additional 2.5 million people face emergency (IPC Phase 4) levels of hunger, and 5.3 million have been reported to rely on unsustainable coping mechanisms to survive.

Children have been hit particularly hard, with UNICEF reporting that approximately 2.2 million children between the ages of six months and five years suffer from acute malnutrition, marking an increase of over 100,000 cases compared to last year. Over 700,000 children are projected to face the highest levels of hunger by July. Roughly 1.2 million pregnant and breastfeeding women are acutely malnourished, which has significantly dangerous, long-term implications for both mothers and children.

“Every day of delayed humanitarian access and supply delivery is a day a child’s life and future hangs in the balance,” said Lucia Elmi, UNICEF Director of Emergencies. “We are calling on all parties to grant timely, safe access to conflict-affected, including areas of displacement, and scale up nutrition interventions. We must act now if we are to save children’s lives.”

Widespread displacement continues to hinder South Sudan’s road to recovery, with rampant insecurity, overcrowding, and a shortage of critical supplies in displacement shelters complicating humanitarian relief efforts. The UN agencies note that nearly 300,000 people have been displaced this year in the Jonglei state alone, with many communities entirely cut off from humanitarian assistance. Numerous families report being unable to access food services due to rising prices, disrupted markets, and economic decline, which has significantly reduced household purchasing power.

Additionally, displaced communities face elevated risks of contracting infectious diseases due to persistent overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. The agencies have recorded a sharp rise in cholera, malaria, and measles infections, particularly among “vulnerable and already acutely malnourished children”. Furthermore, treatment for malnutrition has been severely compromised over the past several months, with a substantial portion of the nation’s healthcare and nutritional support facilities having been damaged or closed entirely due to conflict. Life-saving medical interventions are largely unavailable due to continued shortages of medical supplies.

In April, IPC conducted a detailed Risk of Famine Analysis, assessing hunger conditions across seven counties to determine which regions were at a high risk of developing famine. The analysis identified four counties that are projected to contract famine in the coming months, a significant increase from just one county identified last year. The Upper Nile and Jonglei regions are particularly vulnerable, as the renewed escalation of armed hostilities has driven further displacement and reduced humanitarian reach to the most at-risk communities.

Risks are especially pronounced in Akobo, where IPC projects the return of over 100,000 South Sudanese civilians currently displaced in Gambela and Ethiopia. This large-scale return could further exacerbate hunger conditions, as humanitarian and healthcare personnel face severe shortages of supplies, funding, and staffing in assisting already strained communities.

IPC also warns that hunger conditions could escalate to catastrophic levels (IPC Phase 5) in the coming months across multiple areas, including Doma and Yomding in Ulang County; Pulturuk, Waat, and Thol Lankien in Nyirol County; and Kuerenge Ke and Mading in southern Nasir County. All of these regions remain largely inaccessible due to ongoing conflict, which has limited humanitarian reach.

In response, the UN has called for an end to the isolation of these communities in relief efforts, stressing the urgent need for closer monitoring and a strengthened humanitarian response.

“Now, more than ever, we cannot afford to lose the hard-won gains made in recent years, especially as South Sudan works to strengthen its agrifood systems and build on encouraging signs of local agricultural production,” said Rein Paulsen, FAO Director, Office of Emergencies and Resilience. “These gains remain highly vulnerable to conflict, insecurity, and climate shocks—the very forces driving today’s food crisis. We must act urgently and collectively to protect livelihoods, sustain food production, and prevent millions more people from falling deeper into hunger.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Press freedom is on the retreat across much of the world.

As documented by recent global surveys authored by the UN and media institutes, the erosion of an independent, fearless and diversified press is a trend that has worsened for well over a decade.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Delivering the 2026 Reuters Memorial Lecture on March 9, Carlos Dada, Salvadoran editor of El Faro, now operating in exile, did not mince his words:

“A far-right, populist, autocratic wave is taking the world by storm and breaking all the rules, and journalists, as in every authoritarian regime or dictatorship, no matter its ideological foundations, are labelled as enemies. Journalism is being criminalized, and our colleagues are being imprisoned or killed.”

Just days earlier, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele was described by the Autonomous University of Barcelona as imposing one of the most restrictive environments for press freedom in Latin America through a “model of techno-populist authoritarianism”.

World Press Freedom Day, on May 3, has adopted as its declared theme: “Shaping a Future at Peace: Promoting Press Freedom for Human Rights, Development, and Security” – a challenging title given the wars, turmoil and economic crises currently besetting the world.

UNESCO, co-hosting the 2026 conference with the Zambian government in Lusaka on May 4-5, has itself charted a sharp decline in freedom of expression globally. Its 2022/2025 World Trends Report, Journalism: Shaping a World at Peace cites an increase in physical attacks, digital threats, and a surge in self-censorship among journalists.

This crisis is summed up by UNESCO as a “historically significant and unprecedented shift”, noting that for the first time in 20 years non-democratic regimes outnumber democracies. Some 72 percent of the world’s population lives under “non-democratic rule”, the highest proportion since 1978.

This decline in press freedom, plurality and diversity “mirrors broader patterns: weakened parliaments and judicial institutions, falling levels of public trust, and deepening polarization. It has also coincided with setbacks in equality, alongside rising hostility toward environmental journalists, scientists, and researchers”, UNESCO’s report says.

It also warns how “the growing dominance of major technology companies – and the consequences of their shifting policies and practices – have created fertile ground for hate speech and disinformation to spread online.”

In its World Press Freedom Index for 2025, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says physical attacks against journalists are the most visible violations of press freedom but “economic pressure is also a major, more insidious problem”.

“Much of this is due to ownership concentration, pressure from advertisers and financial backers, and public aid that is restricted, absent or allocated in an opaque manner,” RSF states. “Today’s news media are caught between preserving their editorial independence and ensuring their economic survival.”

“For the first time in the history of the Index, the conditions for practising journalism are ‘difficult’ or ‘very serious’ in over half of the world’s countries and satisfactory in fewer than one in four.”

World Press Freedom Day goes back to a 1993 decision by the UN General Assembly to commemorate the Declaration of Windhoek, a statement of free press principles produced by African journalists in 1991.

But as RSF notes, press freedom in Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing a worrying decline. The economic score of the index deteriorated in 80 percent of countries in the region.

Overall Eritrea (180th) remained the worst-ranking country. The Democratic Republic of the Congo fell 10 places to 133rd as its economic indicator plummeted. Conflict zones saw sharp declines in press freedom in Burkina Faso, Sudan and Mali with newsrooms forced to self-censor, shut down or go into exile.

“The hyper-concentration of media ownership in the hands of political figures or business elites without safeguards for editorial independence remains a recurring problem,” RSF says, citing issues in Cameroon, Nigeria and Rwanda.

Nonetheless higher-ranking countries, such as South Africa, Namibia, Cape Verde and Gabon “provide rays of hope”, RSF adds.

A clear casualty of the toxic combo of autocratic populists, media-owning cronies and dwindling budgets is coverage of climate change. Even normally heavy-hitting media groups are cutting back their reporting of the global climate crisis in another blow to the key SDG Target of promoting public access to information.

China remains the “world’s largest jail for journalists”, ranking 178th on RSF’s global press freedom index, one place above North Korea.

Bangladesh ranked 149th in the World Press Freedom Index. Following the parliamentary elections in February this year, RSF has urged the new Bangladeshi government to put an end to arbitrary detentions, the instrumentalization of the justice system and impunity for crimes against journalists. Such abuses have caused lasting damage to the country’s press.

Summing up the state of the press following Perugia’s annual International Journalism Festival in April, Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist for The Nerve — a “fearless, female-founded, truly independent [UK] media title” – commented: “There’s “not much light in these dark times” while referencing the killing by Israeli forces of over 200 Palestinian journalists and media workers since the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023.

But she did feel an “energy” at the festival held in the Italian hill-top city.

“All across the world, there are journalists doing the hard yards of trying to hold power to account,” she wrote. “And increasingly, this is being done by small, insurgent new outlets that are sprouting up because there is a gap that needs to be filled.”

Or as Dada, editor of El Salvador’s exiled El Faro, declared in his lecture:

“We are journalists in resistance. In resistance to the violation of our rights, the shuttering of public information… resistance to limitless power. We practised journalism in democracy for a quarter century. That era is gone. Today, we are a newsroom in resistance.”

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS Noram; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015-2019. A journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

IPS UN Bureau

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