Mary Wanja, a farmer at Ngangarithi, Kenya, using water from a stream to water her produce. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) indicates that the face of farming is still very much female comprising at least 45 percent of the agricultural labour force in developing countries. In parts of Africa and Asia, women’s representation is much higher contributing at least 60 percent of the labour force. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Sep 21 2018 (IPS)

The world’s most important meeting is underway in New York, providing yet another opportunity for world leaders to discuss a wide array of issues such as peace, security and sustainable development. And experts stress that the role women have to play in addressing these issues cannot be over-emphasised.

“Of the six United Nations organs, it is only at the General Assembly where member states have equal representation with each nation having one vote, so issues discussed at the forum tend to be very critical and central to global development,” explains Grace Gakii, an independent consultant on gender issues in East Africa.

The 73rd session of the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) is being held in New York, United States, starting on Sept. 18th and running through to October.

“There are expectations that the high level meeting will also provide a platform to address issues of gender equality and women empowerment,”Gakii tells IPS.

The meeting comes amidst heighten efforts by the U.N. towards gender parity among its staff across all levels of its employment structure as well as through its work. A number of U.N. entities are already showing impressive progress towards a more gender balanced workforce in the period spanning 2007 to 2017.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. (FAO) has particularly been lauded for progress made towards gender parity within its workforce.

“We have no doubt that gender equality can have a transformative as well as multiplier effect on sustainable development, climate resilience, peace building, and drive economic growth,” Maria Helena Semedo, FAO deputy director general, Climate and Natural Resources, tells IPS.

Since the organisation’s director general Jose Graziano da Silva took office in 2011, it has not been business as usual as gender issues are taking centre stage.

“FAO works to support women as agents of change to help harness this untapped potential. We have been striving to recruit the best possible talent to help meet our gender parity objectives,” Semedo affirms.

A U.N. system wide action plan on gender parity within this organisation indicates that: “As of the close of 2017, 41 percent of all international posts were held by women, the organisation’s highest representation of women in 10 years.” Moreover, when it comes to junior positions within the organisation, FAO has achieved gender parity.

“These trends point to an organisation that is keen on pushing for gender equality, equity and essentially women empowerment in its structures. Such robust efforts to engender its workforce will without a doubt impact greatly on the work that FAO does with rural communities,” Gakii explains.

Against this backdrop, according to the U.N. Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (U.N. Women), the entire U.N. system is not far behind.

One year into secretary-general António Guterres’ strategy to improve gender parity within its system, for the first time in the history of the U.N. there is now gender parity in top leadership.

“We will continue working to translate our success at having more women in senior staff positions. We also strive to have a friendly work environment for both male and female staff, with zero tolerance to sexual and power harassment in line with the secretary-general’s direction,” Semedo says.

Gender expert Wilfred Subbo says that in achieving gender parity, equality and equity within its own system, the U.N. is also able to set the standards for “rural communities and economies whose lives are impacted on a daily basis by policies and strategies set by the global humanitarian body.”

Subbo is an associate professor at the Institute of Anthropology, Gender and African Studies, University of Nairobi.

Nonetheless, there are concerns that overall progress towards gender parity within FAO has been fairly slow. In the last decade, the representation of women has increased by only 12 percentage points.

That notwithstanding, experts are optimistic that as FAO continues its robust push for a more equitable society, this will have a more significant impact on food security, agriculture and rural development—particularly as climate change continues to impact on the world’s ability to feed its people.

FAO’s State of Agricultural Commodity Markets 2018 report states that national agricultural and trade policies will need readjusting for the global market place to become a “pillar of food security and a tool for climate change adaptation.”

The report further details the extent to which climate change will impact on the ability of many world regions to produce food as well as influencing trends in international agricultural trade.

“Today, agriculture and food systems face an unprecedented array of challenges and our most recent numbers show that hunger is on the rise with the greatest vulnerability being amongst rural women and girls,” says Semedo.

Associate Professor Subbo is emphatic that without readjusting labour market structures for better representation of women, it will be impossible to comprehensively address the most pressing global needs.

He says that labour market structures are inherently skewed in favour of men, making it difficult for women to influence policy and decision-making processes.

“There is a need for a global momentum to speak to gender issues and especially the role, place and representation of women in the labour force because women are important pillars of the economy,” Subbo tells IPS.

He says that the fact there are now more women working in many sectors of the economy has served to mask an uncomfortable truth. “You will find these women at the bottom of the career ladder, they are the labourers in farms but absent in the boardroom,” he says.

Take for instance the agricultural sector, FAO indicates that the face of farming is still very much female comprising at least 45 percent of the agricultural labour force in developing countries.

In parts of Africa and Asia, women’s representation is much higher contributing at least 60 percent of the labour force.

The numbers are even higher in countries such as India where 79 percent of the female rural workforce is in agriculture.

“Even though a significant majority of the labour force in the agricultural sector is largely female constituted, women hold only 14 percent of the managerial positions,” Gakii expounds.

She says that as the world grapples with food insecurity, it is worrisome that women are also at the periphery of services that are crucial to the productivity and sustainability of rural economies. According to FAO, only an estimated five percent of women have access to agricultural extension services.

This is despite the significant role that the agricultural extension officers play in bringing advances in technology and better farming practices closer to farmers.

With fewer women in managerial and other such influential positions, compared to men, women receive fewer and smaller loans.

According to FAO, women in forestry, fishing and agriculture receive a paltry seven percent of the total agricultural investment.

Alice Wahome is an elected member of parliament in Kandara Constituency, Murang’a County, Kenya. She is the first woman to be elected to parliament in the county, and tells IPS that there is an urgent need to engender leadership across institutions and in key pillars of the economy.

“Promoting leadership that understands gender issues, the intricacies of gender and development does improve the participation of women at all levels of the workforce,” she observes. More importantly, “their participation accelerates development at all levels,” Wahome says.

By N Chandra Mohan
NEW DELHI, Dec 3 2015 (IPS)

The crash in oil prices is not the only challenge confronting the Gulf States in West Asia. Economic disorder and lack of opportunity are contributing to instability in the region, stated Bahrain’s minister for industry, commerce and tourism, Zayed Al Zayani, while kicking off the recent IISS Bahrain Bay Forum. He emphasized the need for “unprecedented” economic reform across the Gulf in the wake of the lower oil revenues. These policies include the generation of millions of jobs for the youth in these economies that continue to depend heavily on expatriate labour from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Philippines.

N Chandra Mohan

The Gulf States face the prospect of a demographic dividend of a youth bulge in the population rapidly turning into a curse, thanks to high and rising rates of unemployment for those between 15 to 24 years of age. The highest rates are in Saudi Arabia (28.7 per cent), Bahrain (27.9 per cent), Oman (20.5 per cent) and Kuwait (19.6 per cent). India, too, has double digit rates of joblessness among the young like many of these economies. There was a suggestion at the Bahrain Bay Forum that such high rates of youth unemployment are a proximate factor behind the surge in militant terrorism, exemplified by the rise of the Daesh or ISIS.

The prospect of lower oil revenues certainly will constrain the Gulf States to diversify their economies away from dependence on this commodity. Countries like Bahrain seek to focus on education and training, communications and infrastructure and promoting a start-up ecosystem for fostering entrepreneurship. The level of ambition is also high as they intend to generate high skill jobs and build a knowledge- based economy. The technology sector in the Gulf States is likely expected to grow by 10 per cent per annum over the next five years while the spending on technology in the Middle East as a whole is expected to touch $200 billion.

However, the transition to this brave new world requires bridging the skills gap. The labour market in this region depends heavily on low skilled and low wage earning migrant labour. More than 80 per cent of the workforce in private sector employment in Bahrain is comprised of expatriates. It goes up to 96 per cent and 98 per cent in Kuwait and Qatar respectively. In sharp contrast, the nationals are disproportionately represented in the bloated public sector. So, one form of dualism in the labour market is that the private sector is dominated wholly by expatriates while the public sector is largely for the locals in the Gulf.

Another source of dualism is that women are not adequately represented in the labour market due to pervasive gender discrimination in these conservative economies. Although women’s enrolment in higher educational institutions is rapidly rising of late — a case in point are courses in financial services in Bahrain which attract a lot of women — female labour force participation rates are well below 30 per cent as against the global average of 50 per cent. Jobless among young females is as high as 55 per cent in Saudi Arabia which is three-times higher than that of young males, according to the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

Gulf’s labour market thus is “locked in a low skills, low wages and low productivity equilibrium” argued Frank Hagemann, deputy regional director of ILO, at one of the sessions at the Bay Forum. This dualism is reflected in a substantial wage gap between the private and public sector. At the lower end, the living and working conditions of migrants is sub-standard and highly exploitative in nature. Dependency-driven employee-employers relations are rife. The big challenge for the Gulf States is to kick-start the transition from this state of affairs to one driven by higher skills, higher wages and productivity.

What is the impact of abundant supplies of low skilled, low productivity expatriate population queried Ausamah Al Absi, chief executive, Labour Market Regulatory Authority in Bahrain? If an entrepreneur were to make an investment in a state-of-the-art printing press in Germany, he has to employ high technology and productivity tools as the cost of manpower is high. But in Bahrain, he can go for lower technology supported by a low skilled workforce. Pursuing a capital-intensive option in a low wage economy is not on. For such demand-side reasons, this entrepreneur will naturally be rendered uncompetitive in this economy, felt Al Absi.

Low oil prices complicate the efforts of the Gulf States to address these distortions without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If revenues continue to decline, a worry is that it reduces the fiscal space to pay nationals in the public sector. At the same time, there is a compulsion to reduce subsidies on water, electricity and school fees that will disproportionately hit the expatriate workforce. The Gulf economies thus will make it more and more difficult for the expatriates to work in these economies over the near-term Controls on migration appear inevitable, regardless of the heavy dependence on such labour at present.

The transition to a higher skills, wages and productivity equilibrium is far from easy. It entails changes over a generation. For instance, in Saudi Arabia, 40 per cent of the graduates come from humanities or Islamic studies while only 4 per cent are engineers. Stepping up the numbers of engineers takes more time. Yet there is a temptation to look for quick fixes like inviting tech giants in the US to set up cloud computing courses in the Gulf States! At the Bay Forum, Bahrain announced a $100 million venture capital based fund to that will work as the first cloud technology accelerator in the region. Can such moves kick-start hi-tech start-ups? Intermediate steps are perhaps more necessary like vocational and on-the-job training. Only 17 per cent of firms in the Gulf States provide on-the-job training as against the global average of 35 per cent. The best bet for these countries is greater gender empowerment in the labour market than expat-bashing policies to reduce sources of instability.

(End)

Excerpt:

By N Chandra Mohan
NEW DELHI, Nov 11 2015 (IPS)

Times are a-changing for Bihar, a state popularly described as a state of mind. The recent elections have brought back Nitish Kumar as the chief minister for the fifth time. Since his first innings as a developmental CM from 2005, he has transformed Bihar from being an archetype of India’s backwardness to one of its fastest growing states. Besides improving governance, he has also politically empowered women in that benighted state. Not surprisingly, the women’s vote was decisive for his electoral success. He now has the historic opportunity to shift gears towards sustainable gender-based development.

N Chandra Mohan

To encourage more girls to attend school, the state administration provided free bicycles for school-going children. This resulted in an uptrend in female literacy rates, rising over 20 percentage points between the two decennial census years, 2001 and 2011. This was much more than was observed in the case of males in that state or nationally, for that matter. Promoting greater gender parity in school enrolment thus has been a consistent objective of Nitish Kumar’s stints in office as CM. The priority must now include drastically reducing the numbers of girls without access to schooling.

Kumar’s thrust on education must continue with greater vigour as there is a vast unfinished agenda. When his government first took office in 2005, there were 2.4 million children out of school. This has now been halved to 1.2 million in 2014 according to the “National Sample Survey of Estimation of Out-of-School Children in the Age 6-13 in India” done for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, a flagship government scheme for the universalisation of elementary education. This works out to a higher percentage of 4.9 per cent than the 3 per cent of 204 million school-going children at an all-India level.

The fact that Bihar is still a poor state amidst potential plenty – it has a much higher percentage of its rural population in poverty – cannot be an argument for not pushing the limits of development. Bangladesh is also poor when compared to India, but that hasn’t prevented it from improving the socio-economic conditions of women. According to the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, due to the official focus on women in Bangladesh, a much higher proportion of workers such as school teachers, family planning workers, health carers, immunization workers and even factory workers are women as are in garments.

Bihar (and even India) of course has a long way to go to catch up with the higher rates of female labour force participation in Bangladesh. This measures the number of women above 15 years of age who are engaged or are willing to be engaged in economic activity as a share of women’s population above 15 years of age. In Bihar, this is a lowly 9 per cent as against 57 per cent in Bangladesh. A factor that makes it easier for Bihar to encourage more women to work is that the CM has already politically empowered them since 2006 to participate in decentralized administration at the panchayat or village level.

Despite the best agro-climatic conditions, this state is the bastion of semi-feudal agriculture and there is a preponderance of marginal holdings with low productivity. The relations of production act as barrier on technological change. While beefing up rural infrastructure is imperative, technological change will not take place unless the relations of production also change. The hope is that with better governance, a difference can be made on the poverty front that is essentially one of low agricultural productivity. To plug gaps in development works, the CM has made a beginning by appointing more teachers, doctors, engineers, policeman and officials. Tapping the latent energies of women can help him realise these objectives more efficaciously.

While Bihar no doubt has the advantage of faster growth to impact rural poverty, Bangladesh has managed to achieve much more on human development despite slower growth than India. In 1990, the life expectancy at birth was higher in India but that position rapidly reversed in the next couple of decades. Between 1990 and 2014, it rose by 12 years from 59 to 71 years in Bangladesh. They thus have a life expectancy that is four years longer than Indians or Biharis, for that matter. The huge gains in health are reflected in the dramatic reduction in infant, child and maternal mortality rates.

These are the prospects ahead of Bihar’s developmental CM. He needs to accelerate the pace of progress on education and health so that the workforce of the state has the best prospect of taking advantage of the so-called demographic dividend of a predominantly young population. All these possibilities have suddenly opened up with his fifth innings as CM. With a mandate for governance and development, he faces the challenge of converting these possibilities into probabilities and transforming lives of 108 million people in Bihar through improvements in gender-sensitive social sector spending.

The last thing the people of Bihar need is another regime that will trigger another caste war and plunge the state into darkness and anarchy as happened in previous decades. However, there is change in the air. There is hope that this state can economically empower its women as it has done politically. That it can also reap the dividends that its eastern neighbouring country has achieved in bringing about a many-sided improvement in human development in the fastest possible time. Bihar must leverage its faster growth to ensure better outcomes in sustainable development.

(End)

Excerpt:

(IPS Asia-Pacific) – Although it is six years old, few know what the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) does. It has been called toothless, though its creation was seen as a step forward given the principle of non-interference in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

AICHR chair Dr Muhammad Shafee Abdullah

Q: Who are the individuals, groups, organisations or member countries that have approached AICHR to say they needed help for human right violations?

Dr Abdullah: There has been a sizeable number of persons and groups who came forward. But sadly, we are not authorised to receive their complaints and process them so they can go to the next level.

Q: So how did you address the complaints, given your situation?

Dr Abdullah: We asked them to go back to their countries or whoever can help them such as individual lawyers, legal institutions, human rights organisations and advocacy groups. We gave them directions on how to do that, doing all we can to help them find some answers and, we hoped, some form of restitution. But we cannot even interfere. That’s why we feel very inadequate. We are not independent enough. We need to look at our group and see how we can be a better body.

Q: How did these complainants approach you and what were their complaints?

Dr Abdullah: Many of them came to us with papers and documents, but there were more of them who contacted us through emails. Their complaints on human rights violations are very diverse – land rights violations due to seizure and incursion by more powerful people such as politicians and big business. There were those who raised their right to health and a healthy environment because of pollution caused by industries, oil and mine spills, poisoning and others. There were complaints about employment and labour practices, aggression and abuse inflicted by members of their own communities and other parties. But the majority of grievances involve violations of the fundamental rights to freedoms of speech, association and expression.

Q: In the ASEAN Responsible Business Forum (Oct. 27-29, 2015, Kuala Lumpur), you mentioned that you were surprised that ASEAN member states agreed on the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (in 2012). What made you say that?

Dr Abdullah: Yes, I was pleasantly surprised because the 10 countries had their strong suspicions against each other for some reasons. But with this wariness, they still managed to agree that there should be an accord to guide them in human rights issues. But surprised as I was, I tried to understand this decision-making in the context of harmony even in differences in norms and beliefs.

Q: The current issue of the transboundary haze was high in the forum, and you were vocal about the responsibility of companies and industries operating in the region.

Dr Abdullah: Yes, I would say Indonesia should not be blamed for it, or any other country in the region for that matter. It doesn’t even matter which country is responsible, but all the countries should go after the companies causing the haze. They must file complaints against them and make them pay for it. I know countries need to maintain a level of diplomacy on matters like this, and the corporate sector is doing its own PR exercise, but I think each country must enforce its own laws to prevent this thing from happening again. The haze is a health and environmental issue that goes into the centre of human rights. It is a total breach of human rights. And I think the corporate sector should take this issue seriously. Thailand and Singapore have strong securities (guarantees), some sort of entry point for companies wanting to do business to comply with human rights stipulations. This should be a great start.

Q: You also praised Myanmar for initiating efforts to protect the environment.

Dr Abdullah: Myanmar co-organised a workshop on the implementation of human rights obligations relating to the environment and climate change to follow up from a similar workshop in 2014. The workshop enabled member states to understand deeper the human rights obligations relating to the environment in the ASEAN context. I would say it helped the countries look at ways of doing a regional response and charting country obligations involving the business and corporate sectors and other stakeholders, especially in environmental policy-making and protection. There were legal frameworks and environmental impact assessment tools for ASEAN.

Q: What are your next steps?

Dr Abdullah: The AICHR will ascertain that environmental issues that impact on human rights, such as the haze, will be included in discussions in the ASEAN Summit. On complaints that we continue to receive, we will make sure that they are received by the countries in question at the national level, and through specific channels. We will continue to promote human rights. We want to make sure they are in the consciousness of people in the region.

*This is part of the ‘Reporting ASEAN: 2015 and Beyond’ series of IPS Asia-Pacific and Probe Media Foundation Inc. http:www.aseannews.net

The lack of jobs after graduation frequently pushes Cameroonian girls into searching for work opportunities, sometimes overseas and sometimes with horrific consequences. Credit: Ngala Killian Chimtom/IPS

By Ngala Killian Chimtom
YAOUNDE, Jul 15 2015 (IPS)

Her lips are quavering her hands trembling. Susan (not her real name) struggles to suppress stubborn tears, but the outburst comes, spontaneously, and the tears stream down her cheeks as she sobs profusely.

The story of this 28-year-old’s servitude in Kuwait is mind-boggling. Between her sobs, she tells IPS how she left Cameroon two years ago in search of a job in Kuwait.

“I saw job opportunities advertised on billboards in town. The posters announced jobs such as nurses and housemaids in Kuwait. As a nurse and without a job in Cameroon, I decided to take the chance.”"We were herded off to a small room. There were many other girls there: Ghanaians, Nigerians and Tunisians … [then] bidders came and we were sold off like property" – Susan, a young Cameroonian women who escaped from slavery in Kuwait

With the help of an agent whose contact details she found on the billboard, Susan found herself on a plane, bound for Kuwait.

She was excited at the prospect of earning up to 250,000 CFA francs (420 dollars) a month. That is what the agent had told her, and it was a mouth-watering sum compared with the roughly 75 dollars she would have been earning in Cameroon, if she had a job.

“We work in liaison with companies in the Middle East, so that when these ladies go, they don’t start looking for jobs,” Ernest Kongnyuy, an agent in Yaounde told IPS.

But the story changed dramatically when Susan, along with 46 other Cameroonian girls, arrived in Kuwait on Nov. 8, 2013.

“We were herded off to a small room. There were many other girls there: Ghanaians, Nigerians and Tunisians,” then “bidders came and we were sold off like property.”

Susan was taken away by an Egyptian man. “I think I got a taste of hell in his house,” she says, tears streaming down her cheeks.

She would begin work at five in the morning and go to bed after midnight, very often sleeping without having eaten.

Very frequently, she tells IPS, the man tried to rape her but when she threatened to report the case to the police, she met with a wry response from her tormentor. “He told me he would pay the police to rape me and then kill me, and the case wouldn’t go anywhere.”

Cut off from all communication with the outside world, Susan says that she found solace only in God. “I prayed … I cried out to God for help,” she recalls.

Susan’s is not an isolated case. Brenda, another Cameroonian lucky enough to escape, has a similar story. She had to wash the pets of her master, which included cats and snakes.

“I was sharing the same toilet with cats … I called them my brothers, because they were the only “persons” with whom I conversed.”

Pushed to the limits, both girls told their employers that they were not ready to work any longer. Brenda says that when she insisted, she was thrown out of the house.

“At that time I was frail, I was actually dying and I didn’t know where to go.” After trekking for two days, she found the Central African Republic’s embassy and slept for two days in front of it before she was rescued.

Susan was locked in the boot of a car and taken to the agent who had brought her from the airport.

“Events moved so fast and I found myself spending one week in immigration prison and an additional three days in deportation prison,” she says.

When both girls were finally put on a flight bound for Cameroon, all their property had been seized, except for their passports and the clothes they were wearing.

The scale of the problem is troubling. According to the 2013 Walk Free Global Index of Slavery, about three-quarters of a million people are enslaved in the Middle East and North Africa.

The report indicates that for the past seven years, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have been ranked as Tier 3 countries for human trafficking and labour abuses. Tier 3 countries are those whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards in human trafficking and are not making significant efforts to do so.

Apart from Africa, people from India, Nepal, Eritrea, Uzbekistan, etc. … “migrate voluntarily for domestic work, convinced of the employment agencies’ promises of lucrative jobs,” said the report.

“Upon entering the country, they find themselves deceived and enslaved – within the bounds of a legal sponsorship system.”

Susan and Brenda are now back home, but they are suffering from the trauma of their horrible experience in Kuwait.

The Trauma Centre for Victims of Human Trafficking in Cameroon has been working to bring relief to the women. “We try to make them feel at home,” says Beatrice Titanji, National Vice-President of the Centre.

“They have been exposed to bad treatment. They have been called animals. They have been told they stink, and when they enter the car or a room, a spray is used to take away the supposed odour … I just can’t fathom seeing my child treated like that,” she told IPS.

She called on the government to investigate and prosecute the agents, create jobs and mount guard at airports to discourage Cameroonians from going to look for jobs in the Middle East.

Edited by Phil Harris   

70-year-old Chiute Tamang, his wife, daughter and son-in-law lost their house when the earth shook on Apr 25, 2015 in Nepal. They now lives a one-room cabin made of a wooden skeleton encased in corrugated iron. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS

By Robert Stefanicki
KATHMANDU, Jul 12 2015 (IPS)

70-year-old Chiute Tamang was working in his field when the earth shook on Apr 25. He grabbed a tree. His wife and daughter were inside the house at the time, but managed to run out. In the blink of an eye, the building turned into a heap of stones. They were the lucky ones.

“Earthquakes don’t kill, buildings do” – this otherwise common knowledge – had just reached Nepal. Almost all the victims were buried in the rubble of their houses made by untrained masons of stones barely stuck together with mud. It is a very popular method, because it is the cheapest – stones and mud are free, bricks and cement cost.

In Ramche, Chiute’s village scattered over the terraced hills of district Dhading, 38 km northwest of Kathmandu, 168 houses out of a total 181 are no longer inhabitable.”Only time will tell if, in the process of planning reconstruction, the government of Nepal will use an opportunity to find out why the Tamangs are so vulnerable to natural disasters and what can be done to protect them from future calamities”

According to the latest government report, the disaster damaged 607,212 buildings in 16 districts. Of them, 63 percent in areas dominated by Tamangs – the largest and the most destitute group among the Tibeto-Burman speaking peoples of the Himalayan region – although they constitute less than six percent (1.35 million) of Nepal’s population.

”Earthquakes don’t kill, inequity does” – out of 8,844 people who died in the earthquake, 3,012 were Tamangs. Over 50 percent of the victims belonged to the marginalised communities. More than half the victims were women.

Ramche is a Tamang village. Some of the people own small plots of land on which they grow corn and potatoes of walnut size, but crops can feed the farmers’ family only for two to three months. For the rest of the year they live on contracted labour.

The residents of Ramche admit they are very poor. Why? Because, their answer goes, their fathers were poor, as well as the fathers of their fathers. They accept this as a judgment of fate and do not feel discriminated against, only showing how inequity is grown into the tissue of the society, the result of concerted exploitation for centuries.

This brawny hill tribe has always provided a labour reserve pool for the rulers of Kathmandu. In the past, Tamangs were prevented from joining the administration and the military. Even today they may man the barricades but have little role in the upper hierarchy of the armed forces or police, and are unrepresented in the country´s national affairs.

Being Buddhists did not immunise Tamangs from the caste system evolved by ruling Hindus. Those who wield power belong to Brahmin, Newars and Chhetri people and these “well-born” elites look down on the Tamangs.

In the blink of an eye, houses turned into heaps of stones when the Apr. 25, 2015 earthquake hit Nepal. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS

Economic deprivation has increased the influx of indigent peasants to the job markets of Kathmandu, where they make up half of the porters and the majority of three-wheeler tempo (”taxi”) drivers. Prison surveys have shown that a disproportionate number of Tamangs are behind bars for criminal offences.

They have never counted on any government’s help, and this time is no different. After the earthquake, the residents of Ramche helped each other, cooked meals together and joined hands to raise themselves up from the rubble. With a little help from NGOs, the situation was brought under control.

One week after the disaster, the residents of Ramche were given blankets, tarpaulins and mosquito nets funded by the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department (ECHO).

Today, the whole village is queuing at the barracks where ADRA, the Nepalese NGO, is handing out big plastic water jars with the blue logo of the European Union and “sanitary kits”: a few tubes of toothpaste, toothbrushes, water purification tablets, sanitary napkins and birth control pills. A young female activist tirelessly explains to one villager after another how to use these items.

Chiute Tamang’s family spent the first three days after they lost their house in a flimsy hut cobbled together with a few pieces of wood. Then made a tent of tarpaulin, where they moved together with goats, their most valuable asset. Livestock, the old man explains, must not be left outside at night because it could fall prey to tigers or leopards.

After one week, Chiute borrowed some money, bought materials and with the help of his neighbours put a house together for himself, his wife, their youngest daughter and her husband.

It has a simple design – a one-room cabin made of a wooden skeleton encased in corrugated iron, the floor covered with oilcloth, and equipped with simple beds, cupboards and a gas cooker.

”Even if this collapses,” says Chiute ironically, “at the worst, the corrugated sheet would pin us down, not stones.”

Construction took two weeks, because the wood had to be brought from a distance. When the house was already standing, the government finally sent some relief – any Nepalese family who lost a house is entitled to a 15,000 rupee (150 dollars) loan. Chiute could pay off half the loan.

Another Ramche resident, 29-year-old Deepak Bhutel, received 180,000 rupees but he had been less fortunate – his wife and 18-month-old daughter lost their lives under the rubble of their stone house.

The amount would be enough to buy a sturdy house, certain to survive any future earthquake but Deepak, together with his older and now only daughter, says he is also going to end up in a corrugated iron-clad cabin. Having lived from hand to mouth all his life, he says he does not want to spend all his wealth on the house.

Only time will tell if, in the process of planning reconstruction, the government of Nepal will use an opportunity to find out why the Tamangs are so vulnerable to natural disasters and what can be done to protect them from future calamities.

Past mistakes should not be repeated, warned Jagdish Chandra Pokhrel, former Vice Chair of National Planning Commission, quoted by ‘Nepali Times’.

Pokhrel recalled the example of the Tamangs displaced when the reservoir in Makwanpur was built in the early 1980s. Around 500 families whose lands were acquired by the authorities did not want cash compensation but resettlement elsewhere.

“But the government gave them money anyway, and very few bought land with that,” said Pokhrel. “Soon, the money was gone and they were destitute.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Mandeep S.Tiwana
JOHANNESBURG, Jun 10 2015 (IPS)

Whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are hounded – not by autocratic but by democratic governments – for revealing the truth about grave human rights violations. Nobel peace prize winner, writer and political activist Liu Xiaobo  is currently languishing in a Chinese prison while the killing of Egyptian protestor, poet and mother Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, apparently by a masked policeman, in January this year continues to haunt us. 

CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance, has documented serious abuses of civic freedoms in 96 countries in 2014 alone. The annual report of the international advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, laments that the once-heralded Arab Spring has given way almost everywhere to conflict and repression while Amnesty International’s Annual Report 2014/2015 calls it a devastating year for those seeking to stand up for human rights.

Mandeep S. Tiwana

In recent years, there has been a perceptible rise in restrictions on civic space – the fundamental freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly. While the reasons for the eruption of repressive laws and attacks on dissenters vary, negative effects are being felt in both democracies and authoritarian states.

It is increasingly evident that the dangers to civic freedoms come not just from state apparatuses but also from powerful non-state actors including influential business entities and extremist groups subscribing to fundamentalist ideologies. This begs a deeper analysis into the extent and causes of this pervasive problem.

In several countries, laws continue to be drawn up to restrict civic freedoms. They include anti-terror laws that limit freedom of speech, public order laws that limit the right to protest peacefully, laws that stigmatise civil society groups through derogatory names such as ‘foreign agents’, laws that create bureaucratic hurdles to receive crucial funding from international philanthropic institutions as well as laws that prevent progressive civil society organisations from protecting the rights of marginalised minorities such as the LGBTI community.

In this situation, it is indeed possible to identify four key drivers of the pervasive assault on civic space. The first is the global democratic deficit.  Freedom House, which documents the state of democratic rights around the world, has reported declines in civil liberties and political freedoms for the ninth consecutive year in 2015.

In too many countries, peaceful activists exposing corruption and rights violations are being stigmatised as ‘national security threats’, and subjected to politically motivated trials, arbitrary detentions and worse. There appears to be no let up in official censorship and repression of active citizens in authoritarian states like China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Vietnam.“It is increasingly evident that the dangers to civic freedoms come not just from state apparatuses but also from powerful non-state actors including influential business entities and extremist groups subscribing to fundamentalist ideologies”

Freedom of assembly is virtually non-existent in such contexts, and activists are often forced to engage online. But when they do so, they are demonised as being agents of Western security agencies.

Ironically, excessive surveillance and/or hounding of whistle-blowers by countries such as Australia, France, the United Kingdom and United States – whose foreign policies are supposed to promote democratic rights – are contributing to a global climate where close monitoring of anyone suspected of harbouring dissenting views is becoming an accepted norm.

The second driver – and linked to the global democratic deficit – is the worldwide obsession with state security and countering of ‘terrorism’ by all actors except the state. The decline in civic space began after the attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 when several established democracies introduced a slew of counter-terror measures weakening human rights safeguards in the name of protecting national security.

The situation worsened after the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 as authoritarian leaders witnessed the fall of long-standing dictators in Egypt and Tunisia following widespread citizen protests. The possibility of people’s power being able to overturn entrenched political systems has made authoritarian regimes extremely fearful of the free exercise of civic freedoms by citizens.

This has led to a severe push back against civil society by a number of repressive regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. Governments in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have stepped up their efforts to prevent public demonstrations and the activities of human rights groups.

Similar reverberations have also been felt in sub-Saharan African countries with long-standing authoritarian leaders and totalitarian political parties. Thus repression of civic freedoms appears to have intensified in countries such as Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Gambia, Rwanda, Sudan, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.

Activists and civil society groups in many countries in Central Asia and Eastern Europe where democracy remains fragile or non-existent such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are also feeling the heat following governments’ reactions to scuttle demands for political reform.

In South-East Asia too, in countries such as Cambodia and Malaysia which have a history of repressive government and in Thailand where the military seized power through a recent coup, new ‘security’ measures continue to be implemented to restrict civic freedoms.

The third major driver of closing civic space is the rampant collusion and indeed capture of power and resources in most countries by a handful of interconnected political and economic elites.

Oxfam International projects that the richest one percent will own more wealth than 99 percent of the globe’s population by 2016.  Thus civil society groups exposing corruption and/or environmental degradation by politically well-connected businesses are extremely vulnerable to persecution due to the tight overlap and cosy relationships among elites.

With market fundamentalism and the neo-liberal economic discourse firmly entrenched in a number of democracies, labour, land and environmental rights activists are facing heightened challenges.

At least 29 environmental activists were reported murdered in Brazil in 2014. Canada’s centre-right government has been closely monitoring and intimidating indigenous peoples’ rights activists opposing large commercial projects in ecologically fragile areas. India’s prime minister recently urged judges to be wary of “five-star activists“ even as the efforts of Greenpeace India to protect forests from the activities of extractive industries have led it to be subjected to various forms of bureaucratic harassment including arbitrary freezing of its bank accounts.

The fourth and emerging threat to civic space comes from the disturbance caused by religious fundamentalist and evangelist groups seeking to upend the collective progress made by civil society in advancing the human rights discourse.

Failure of the international community to prevent violent conflict and address serious human rights abuses by states such as Israel and Syria is providing a fertile breeding ground for religious extremists whose ideology is deeply inimical to the existence of a vibrant and empowered civil society. 

Besides, religious fundamentalists are able to operate more freely in conflicted and politically fragile environments whose number appears to be rising, thereby exacerbating the situation for civil society organisations and activists seeking to promote equality, peace and tolerance.

Current threats to civic space and civil society activities are a symptom of the highly charged and polarised state of international affairs. The solutions to the grave and interconnected economic, ecological and humanitarian crises currently facing humanity will eventually have to come from civil society through a reassertion of its own value even as political leaders continue to undermine collective efforts.

Beginning a series of conversations on how to respond to common threats at the national, regional and international levels is critical. Establishment of solidarity protocols within civil society could be an effective way to coalesce around both individual cases of harassment as well as systemic threats such as limiting legislation or policies.

Further, the international legal framework that protects civic space needs to be strengthened. The International Bill of Rights comprising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) leaves scope for subjective interpretation of some aspects of civic freedoms.

It is perhaps time to examine the possibility of a comprehensive legally binding convention on civic space that better articulates the extent and scope of civic space, so essential to an empowered civil society.  However, laws are only as good as the commitment of those charged with overseeing their implementation.

Importantly and urgently, to reverse the global onslaught on civic space and human rights, we need visionary political leadership willing to take risks and lead by example.

Over the last few years, analysts have noted with horror the steady dismantling of hard won gains on civic freedoms. Many thought things could get no worse. … but they did.

It is time to start thinking seriously about stemming the tide before we reach the point of no return. Ending the persecution of Assange, Snowden and Liu Xiaobo could be a good start for preventing precious lives such as Shaimaa’s from being lost.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Subsistence-oriented small-scale agriculture is often not the preferred choice of work for many young Africans. Photo credit: FAO

By Kwame Buist
JOHANNESBURG, Mar 27 2015 (IPS)

Over half of the African continent’s population is below the age of 25 and approximately 11 million young Africans are expected to enter the labour market every year for the next decade, say experts. 

Despite strong economic growth in many African countries, wage employment is limited and agriculture and agri-business continue to provide income and employment for over 60 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population.

However, laborious, subsistence-oriented small-scale agriculture is often not the preferred choice of work for many young people.

In an effort to reap this demographic dividend and attract young people into the agri-food sector, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have launched a four-year project to create decent employment opportunities for young women and men in rural areas.

The four million dollar project, funded by the African Solidarity Trust Fund, aims to develop rural enterprises in sustainable agriculture and agri-business along strategic value chains.

Speaking at the project signing ceremony on Mar. 25, NEPAD’s chief executive officer, Dr Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, said: “The collaboration between NEPAD and FAO will go a long way in ensuring that the youth, Africa’s future, are not forgotten.

“It is by creating an economic environment that stimulates initiatives – particularly by conducting transparent and foreseeable policies – and at the same time by regulating the market in order to deal with market failures that we will attain results and impact through the new thrust given to our farmers, entrepreneurs and youth.”

The project – which is expected to see over 100, 000 young men and women benefit in rural Benin, Cameroon, Malawi and Niger – is anchored in the Rural Futures Programme of NEPAD, which is centred on rural transformation in which equity and inclusiveness allow rural men and women to develop their potential.

FAO Assistant Director General for Africa Bukar Tijani said that the project “marks an important milestone in moving forward and upward in terms of empowering youth in these four countries – especially women, as 2015 is the African Union’s Year of Women’s Empowerment.”

The project is seen as part of a drive to stimulate the agriculture and agri-business sectors into becoming more modern, profitable and efficient, and capable of providing decent employment opportunities for Africa’s young labour force.

In 2012, the African Union Commission, NEPAD Agency, the Lula Institute and FAO formed a partnership aimed at ending hunger on the continent. A year later, the four partners organised a high-level meeting of ministers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, leading to a declaration to end hunger and a road map for implementation.

This declaration was subsequently endorsed at the 2014 African Union summit in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, and incorporated into the Malabo Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth and Transformation for Shared Prosperity and Improved Livelihoods as the “Commitment to Ending Hunger in Africa by 2025”.

Edited by Phil Harris   

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jan 22 2015 (IPS)

Every day we receive striking data on major issues which should create tumult and action, but life goes on as if those data had nothing to do with people’s lives.

A good example concerns climate change. We know well that we are running out of time. It is nothing less than our planet that is at stake … but a few large energy companies are able to get away with their practices surrounded by the deafening silence of humankind.

Roberto Savio

Another example comes from the world of finance. Since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2009, banks have paid the staggering amount of 178 billion dollars in fines – U.S. banks have paid 115 billion, while European banks 63 billion. But, as analyst Sital Patel of Market Watch writes, these fines are now seen as a cost of doing business. In fact, no banker has yet been incriminated in a personal capacity.

Now we have other astonishing data from Oxfam – if nothing is done, in two years’ time the richest one percent of the world´s population will have a greater share of its wealth than the remaining 99 percent.

The richest are becoming richer at an unprecedented rate, and the poorest poorer. In just one year, the one percent went from possessing 44 percent of the world´s wealth to 48 percent last year. In 2016, therefore, it is estimated that this one percent will possess more than all the other 99 percent combined.

The top 89 billionaires have seen their wealth increase by 600 billion dollars in the last four years – a rise of five percent and equal to the combined budgets of 11 countries of the world with a population of 2.3 billion people.

In 2010, that figure was owned by 388 billionaires, and this striking and rapid concentration of wealth has, of course, a global impact. The so-called middle class is shrinking fast and in a number of countries youth unemployment stands at 40 percent, meaning that the destiny of today’s young people is clearly much worse than that of their parents.“In a world where the value of solidarity has disappeared (Europe’s debate on austerity is a good example), apathy and atomisation have become the reality. We are going back to the times of Queen Victoria, substituting a rich aristocracy with money coming from trade and finance, not production”

It will probably take some time before those figures become part of general awareness but it is a safe bet that they will not lead to any action, as with climate change. U.S. President Barack Obama is the only leader who has announced a tax increase on the rich, although he stands little chance of succeeding with his Republican-dominated Congress.

In a world where the value of solidarity has disappeared (Europe’s debate on austerity is a good example), apathy and atomisation have become the reality. We are going back to the times of Queen Victoria, substituting a rich aristocracy with money coming from trade and finance, not production. But up to a point: 34 percent of today’s billionaires inherited all or part of their wealth, and – interestingly – “inheritance tax is the most avoidable of levies”, as James Moore noted Jan. 20 in The Independent.

The “father of modern times”, late U.S. President Ronald Reagan, saw it clearly when he said that the rich produce richness, the poor produce poverty. So let the rich pay less taxes.

Well, in a just-released report, the U.S. Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy notes that in 2015 the poorest one-fifth of Americans will pay on average 10.9 percent of their income in taxes, the middle one-fifth 9.4 percent, and the top one percent just 5.4 percent.

Now, 20 percent of the richest billionaires are linked to the financial sector and it is worth recalling that this sector has grown more than the real economy, and has regulations only at national level. At global level, finance is the only activity which has international body of some kind of governance, as do labour, trade and communications, to name just a few.

Finance is no longer at the service of the economy and citizens. It has its own life. Financial transactions are now worth 40 trillion dollars a day, compared with the world’s economic output of one trillion.

At national level, there are now attempts half-hearted attempts to regulate finance. But let us look what is happening in United States. The new bland regulation is the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, commonly known as the Dodd-Frank, and it does not go as far as restoring the division between deposit banks, which was where citizens put their money and which could not be used for speculation, and investments banks, which speculate … and how!

This separation was abolished during the U.S. presidency of Bill Clinton, and is considered the end of banks at the service of the real economy. In any case, the lobbyists on Wall Street are intent on having the Dodd-Frank chipped away at, little by little.

There is some schizophrenia when we look at the relations between capital and politics. The U.S. Supreme Court has eliminated any limit to contributions from companies to political elections, declaring that the companies have the same rights as individuals. Of course, there are not many individuals who can shell out the same figures as a company, unless you’re one of the 89 billionaires!

Meanwhile, banks are not only responsible for the corruption of the political system, and for the illegal activities which have earned them billions of dollars, they are also responsible for funding only big investors, and leaving everybody else out from easy credit. The efforts of the Chairman of the European Central Bank,  Mario Draghi, to have banks give credit to small companies and individuals has gone largely nowhere.

But a new and imaginative initiative comes from the very stern Dutch bankers. All 90,000 bankers in the Netherlands are now required to take an oath: “I swear that I will endeavour to maintain and promote confidence in the financial sector. So help me God”.

This is not so much oriented towards the customer, and it is very self-serving; and it brings God in as the regulator of the Dutch banking system. Perhaps the Dutch bankers have been paying heed to the words of Goldman Sach’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein who said at the time of the financial crisis in 2009 that bankers were “doing God’s work”.

Well God will have to be actively involved. All the three biggest Dutch banks – Rabobank, ABN Amro and ING Groep – have been involved in scandals that have hurt consumers, or were nationalised during the financial crisis, costing taxpayers more than 140 billion dollars. In one case, Rabobank was fined one billion dollars.

New York’s Wall Street and London’s City are said to be open to the idea of introducing a similar oath.

It is probably only that kind of Higher Power which could turn the tide in this world of growing inequality and lack of ethics. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

The author can be contacted at utopie@ips.org

Excerpt:

Samah Shaheen (right), one of Gaza’s many disabled young people, joined the Irada programme to acquire expertise, learn computerised wood carving and escape social marginalisation. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

By Khaled Alashqar
GAZA CITY, Jan 17 2015 (IPS)

The Israeli attacks that the Gaza Strip has suffered in recent years have left in their wake a large number of young people who have come up against a further barrier to their creative energies – physical disability caused by military aggression.

Institutions here are increasingly facing the challenge of developing rehabilitation programmes to help support these physically disabled Gazan youth cope with living under the existing harsh political, economic and social conditions.

One of these programmes – known as “Irada” (“will” in Arabic) – is providing young people who have been disabled by war with vocational training with the ultimate objective of helping them earn their own livelihoods.

Launched by the Islamic University of Gaza, the Irada programme aims to support, train and reintegrate physically challenged young people in social and economic terms and boost community trust in the abilities of this so far marginalised group. More than 400 persons with all types of disabilities have already received rehabilitation and training.“After I joined the [Irada] programme and learnt computer skills for carving and decoration on wood, I now have a career, earn well and I am seriously thinking of opening a workshop” – Samah Shaheen, a 33-year-old physically disabled woman from Al-Bureij refugee camp

Irada project director Emad Al Masri told IPS that the project concept was initially developed for the massive number of young people who became disabled as a result of the Israeli war against Gaza in 2008. The project received support from the government of Turkey for the building construction to house Irada’s academic and vocational training programmes.

“The basic idea of the project is to help disabled people and reintegrate them into the community and help them to be productive instead of being seen as a burden,” Al Masri said.

Samah Shaheen, a 33-year-old from Al-Bureij refugee camp, has a physical disability that makes it difficult for her to engage in community activities. She joined the Irada programme in an attempt to acquire expertise and learn computerised wood carving. She spent more than six months in training before moving on to practice her new skills within the community under Irada supervision.

“I spent several years of my life jobless due to my disability, and also because I had no experience,” Samah told IPS. “After I joined the [Irada] programme and learnt computer skills for carving and decoration on wood, I now have a career, earn well and I am seriously thinking of opening a workshop because of the overwhelming response to the ornate wood furniture products that I have made.”

Central to the Irada rehabilitation programme is to follow up with the disabled people who have received training after leaving the programme in order to ensure their integration and participation in the labour market.  Part of this follow-up strategy also includes monitoring their progress in the workshops and factories where they are employed, and offering professional support if needed.

Because of its success, the Irada programme has been awarded funding by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to help programme graduates start up small business projects, develop their economic independence and enhance their production profile.

Tariq Sha’at, NGO Coordinator for UNDP, told IPS that “UNDP allocated 150,000 dollars to establish centres for the production of home furniture throughout the governorates of the Gaza Strip and help 90 disabled trainees to manage their own businesses, continue their lives and reintegrate into the society naturally.”

Adding further success to the promising and successful Irada programme, three female information technology (IT) students from the Islamic University of Gaza have designed the first application to enable visually impaired people to write in Braille language on smart phones in Arabic.

Seen as a major breakthrough, visually impaired people can now download and install the application for performing all operations, including calls and text messaging. It also allows physically impaired people to use smart phones with high efficacy and facilitates communications with people in the wider society.

Dr. Tawfiq Barhom,  Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology, explained to IPS that “this group of female students was able to provide a great service to the community of visually impaired people, in addition to winning a global competition in which the application was selected as one of the five best projects for developers from among 2500 projects.”

Students are now trying to develop this application even further by increasing the number of languages supported to facilitate use by larger groups worldwide. Israa Al Ashqar, one of the students on the project team told IPS that the project came about because of the marginalisation experienced by visually impaired people in society and their increased isolation as a result of their inability to use social media and smart phone applications.

“The application will provide a Braille keyboard for every programme used by visually impaired people on mobile phones which will allow them to use social media and communicate with their community naturally. This will in turn increase the chances for this marginalised group to integrate into local and global society,” she said.

Together, the Irada programme and the Braille smart phone application represent a serious attempt by universities and students in Gaza to support an important section of the community that has not only suffered from wars and traumas but also hopelessness and isolation within Gazan society.

They are a tangible demonstration that the people of Gaza have the will and the talent to work together and develop opportunities, where possible, for an inclusive society.

Edited by Phil Harris   

President Rafael Correa Delgado of Ecuador does not mince words when it comes to development. ”Neoliberal policies based on so-called competitiveness, efficiency and the labour flexibility framework have helped the empire of capital to prosper at the cost of human labour,” he told a crowded auditorium at the 15th Raul Prebitsch Lecture.

The Raul Prebitsch Lectures, which are named after the first Secretary-General of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) when it was set up in 1964, allow prominent personalities to speak to a wide audience on burning trade and development topics.

This year, President Correa took the floor on Oct. 24 with a lecture on ‘Ecuador: Development as a Political Process’, which covered efforts by his country to build a model of equitable and sustainable development, “Neoliberal policies based on so-called competitiveness, efficiency and the labour flexibility framework have helped the empire of capital to prosper at the cost of human labour” – President Rafael Correa Delgado of Ecuador

Development, he told his audience, “is a political process and not a technical equation that can be solved with capital” and he offered a developmental paradigm that seeks to build on “people-oriented” socio-economic and cultural policies to improve the welfare of millions of poor people instead of catering to the “elites of the empire of capital”.

Proposing a “new regional financial architecture”, he said that “the time has come to pool our resources for establishing a bank and a reserve fund for South American countries to pursue people-oriented developmental policies in our region” and reverse the “elite-based”, “capital-dominated”, “neoliberal” economic order that has wrought havoc over the past three decades.

“We need to reverse the dollarisation of our economies and stop the transfer of our wealth to finance Treasury bills in the United States,” Correa said. “South American economies have transferred over 800 billion dollars to the United States for sustaining U.S. Treasury bills and this is unacceptable.”

According to Correa, people-centric policies in the fields of education, health and employment in Ecuador have improved the country’s Human Development Index (HDI) since 2007. The HDI is published annually by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education and income indices used to rank countries into tiers of human development.

Ecuador’s HDI value for 2012 is 0.724 – in the high human development tier – positioning the country at 89 out of 187 countries and territories, according to UNDP’s Human Development Report (HDR) for 2013.

Explaining his country’s achievement, Correa said that public investments involving the creation of roads, bridges, power grids, telecommunications, water works, educational institutions, hospitals and judiciary have all helped the private sector to reap benefits from overall development.

“At a time when Hooverian depression policies based on austerity measures are continuing to impoverish people while the banks which created the world’s worst economic crisis in 2008 are reaping benefits because of the rule of capital,  Ecuador has successfully overcome many hurdles because of its people-oriented policies,”  he said.

Correa argued that by investing public funds in education, which is the “cornerstone of democracy”, particularly in higher education or the “Socrates of education”, including special education projects for indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian people, it has been shown that society can put an end to capital-dominated policies.

“We need to change international power relations to overcome neocolonial dependency,” Correa told the diplomats present at the lecture.  “Globalisation is the quest for global consumers and it does not serve global citizens.”

The Ecuadorian president argued that developing countries have secured a raw deal from the current international trading system which has helped the industrialised nations to pursue imbalanced policies while selectively maintaining barriers.

He urged developing countries to implement autonomous industrialisation strategies, just as the United States had done over two centuries ago.

Developing countries, he said, must pursue ”protectionist policies as the United States had implemented under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton [U.S Secretary of the Treasury under first president George Washington] when it closed its economy to imports from the United Kingdom.”

Citing the research findings of Cambridge-based economist Ha-Joon Chang in his book ‘Bad Samaritans:  The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism’, Correa said that protectionist policies are essential for the development of developing countries.

He stressed that developing countries, which are at a comparable of stage of economic development as the United States was in Hamilton’s time, must devise policies that would push their economies into the global economic order.

The strategy of “import-substitution-industrialisation [ISI]” and nascent industry development is needed for developing countries, he said. “However, the developing countries must ensure proper implementation of ISI strategies because governments had committed mistakes in the past while implementing these policies.”

“Free trade and unfettered trade,” continued Correa, is a “fallacy” based on the Washington Consensus and neoliberal economic policies. In fact, while the United States and other countries preach free trade, they have continued to impose barriers on exports from developing countries.

Turning to the global intellectual property rights regime, which he said is not helpful for the development of all countries, Correa said that these rights must serve the greater public good, suggesting that the current rules do not allow equitable development in the sharing of genetic resources, for example.

In this context, he said that governments must not allow faceless international arbitrators to issue rulings that would severely undermine their “sovereignty” in disputes launched by transnational corporations.

President Correa also called for the free movement of labour on a par with capital. “While capital can move without any controls and cause huge volatility and damage to the international economy, movement of labour is criminalised. This is unacceptable and it is absurd that the movement of labour is met with punitive measures while governments have to welcome capital without any barriers.”

He was also severe in his criticism of the financialisation of the global economy which cannot be subjected to the Tobin tax. “Nobel Laureate James Tobin had proposed a tax on financial transactions in 1981 to curb the volatile movement of currencies but it was never implemented because of the power of the financial industry,” he argued.

Concluding with a hint that his government’s social and economic policies are paving the way for the creation of a healthy society, Correa quipped: “The Pope is an Argentinian, God may be a Brazilian, but ‘Paradise’ is in Ecuador.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Roberto Azevêdo
GENEVA, Jul 29 2014 (IPS)

In the 1960s, there were high hopes for the development of the newly-independent sub-Saharan African countries but these hopes were quickly dashed following a series of shocks which began in the mid-70s, with the first oil price spikes, followed by a severe decline in growth and increase in poverty in the 80s and early 90s. However, by the mid-1990s, economic growth had resumed in certain African countries. Economic reform, better macroeconomic management, donor resources and a sharp rise in commodity prices were having a positive effect.

WTO Director General Roberto Azevêdo. Credit: WTO/CC BY SA-2.0

In the 2000s, many African countries witnessed high economic growth performance and during that period some of the world’s fastest growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa. Angola, Nigeria, Chad, Mozambique and Rwanda all recorded annual growth of over 7 percent.

In 2012 Africa’s exports and imports totalled 630 billion dollars and 610 billion dollars respectively, ­ a fourfold increase since the turn of the millennium. And the long term prospects for growth are good. The Economist Intelligence Unit has forecast average growth for the regional economy of around 5 percent yearly from 2013-16.

Despite all this, the continent still plays a marginal role in the global market, accounting for barely 3 percent of world trade. One significant reason – although, of course there are others – is that African economies are still narrowly based on the production and export of unprocessed agricultural products, minerals and crude oil.“There is little doubt that the regional [African] market offers good scope for African firms to diversify their production and achieve greater value addition”

Now, due to relatively low productivity and technology, these economies have low competitiveness in global markets – apart from crude extractive products. The low productivity of traditional agriculture and the informal activities continue to absorb more than 80 percent of the labour force. And growth remains highly vulnerable to external shocks.

This story of half a century of struggle, set-backs and progress shows two things:

One, the road to meaningful and inclusive development still seems long.

Two, we are in a better position than ever to make real, sustainable progress.

Many countries are striving to do more in turning their strength in commodities into strengths in other areas,­ using commodities as a means of spurring growth across various sectors. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa’s 2013 Economic Report echoes this ­ calling for the continent’s commodities to be used to support industrialisation, jobs, growth and economic transformation.

In line with this, I think there are a number of essential steps to take:

– diversification of economic structure, namely of production and exports;

– enhancement of export competitiveness;

– technological upgrading;

– improvement of the productivity of all resources, including labour; and

– reduction of infrastructure gaps.

Only by delivering in these and other areas can policymakers ensure that growth enhances human well-being and contributes to inclusive development. But how can we take these steps?

Of course I should say that although African countries share some common features, no unique set of policies, including those on trade and industrial policy, could ever fit for all in a uniform way. Even among the least-developed countries (LDCs), some are already exporters of manufactured products, although often they rely on a single product  while others are more dependent on commodities. Nevertheless, I think it is clear that some preconditions of success are universal.

African regional integration is of course very high on the policy agenda. There is little doubt that the regional market offers good scope for African firms to diversify their production and achieve greater value addition. Already now, manufactures constitute as much as 40 percent of intra-African exports, compared with 13 percent of Africa’s exports to the rest of the world.

The Bali Package, which World Trade Organisation members agreed in December last year, will help to resolve some problems. Inclusive, sustainable development was at the heart of the whole Bali project ­ and our African members played a crucial role in making it a success. It brought some progress on agriculture. It delivered a package to support LDCs. It provided for a Monitoring Mechanism on special and differential treatment.

And, in addition, Bali delivered the Trade Facilitation Agreement and this is a direct answer to some of the problems of fragmentation. Costly and cumbersome border procedures, inadequate infrastructure and administrative burdens often raise trade-related transaction costs within Africa to unsustainable levels, creating a further barrier to intra-African trade.

This Agreement will help to address some of these bottlenecks. It will support regional integration, and therefore complement the African Union’s efforts to create a continental free trade area. And it will begin to remove some of the barriers which prevent full integration into global value chains. As such it will create an added impetus for industrialisation and inclusive sustainable development.

And it is worth noting here that the Trade Facilitation Agreement broke new ground for developing and least-developed countries in the way it will be implemented.

Another vital issue here is the importance of agricultural development in industrialisation, and the role of industrial collaboration through regional cooperation. The contribution of the agriculture sector is of utmost importance for the establishment of a sound industrial base. It can provide a surplus to invest in industrial capacity building, and supply agricultural raw materials as inputs to the production process, especially for today’s highly specialised food processing industry.

Moreover, it can also significantly contribute to industrialisation by providing an ample supply of food products. This is because food constitutes a large share of what wage earners in African countries spend their money on. Its availability at low prices contributes to increase the purchasing power of wages, and therefore raise the competitiveness of a country in international markets. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Excerpt:

Relatives of victims of workplace fatalities have been staging monthly vigils in central Istanbul for the past two years, asking for those responsible for the deaths to be identified and held accountable. Photo courtesy of Worker Families in Pursuit of Justice

By Jennifer Hattam
ISTANBUL, Jun 8 2014 (IPS)

The half-built Metsan Nexus complex towers over Istanbul’s Kartal district, just one of dozens of massive, high-end, multi-use development projects that are transforming the city’s skyline. On May 31, three men were working outside the building’s 16th floor when the construction scaffolding beneath them gave way, sending them plummeting to their deaths.

“The scaffolding does not collapse spontaneously, when it is erected properly. The workers do not crash on the ground, unless there is lack of safety precautions,” urban researcher Yaşar Adanalı wrote following the incident in a scathing post on his Reclaim Istanbul blog.

Worker safety issues in Turkey’s mining industry have been the subject of a national outcry following the mid-May deaths of at least 301 workers in one deadly incident in a coal mine in Soma, a town in western Turkey. But the country’s construction sector, which has been a key driver of Turkey’s economy as it boomed over much of the last decade, is no less perilous for workers.“[Turkey’s current] model of growth based on construction has triggered further dangers in terms of health and safety [due to] the speed of construction and a desire to reduce costs in a competitive environment” – activist Demet Ş. Dinler

“Construction workers [in Turkey] face hard and dangerous working conditions, with very long work hours, insufficient usage of protective equipment, and low salaries,” says Dr. Ercan Duman, an occupational physician and member of the Istanbul Occupational Health and Safety Council.

He identified “falls from height” as the leading cause of worker death on Turkish construction sites and “being struck by objects” as the top source of injuries.

According to the Istanbul-based advocacy group Worker Families in Pursuit of Justice, many fatal falls happen because proper mechanisms for attaching safety harnesses are never installed, forcing workers to clip and unclip themselves to the scaffolding as they move around the building.

Turkey’s construction sector accounted for 34.4 percent of worker deaths – 256 out of a total of 744, the most of any industry – in 2012, according to data from the national Social Security Institution; construction ranked third, after the metal industry and mining, in terms of workplace injuries.

The Turkish government has touted its progress in reducing workplace deaths. Speaking at the 7th International Conference on Occupational Health and Safety, which Istanbul hosted in early May, Labour and Social Security Minister Faruk Çelik pointed out that the Turkish workforce had grown by 128 percent between 2002 and 2012 and the number of new workplaces by 111 percent. “Despite these increases, the number of fatalities per 100,000 workers has decreased from 17 to 6,” Çelik said.

That number is still significantly higher than the EU15 average of 1.5 fatalities per 100,000 workers, and workers’ advocates in Turkey say death and injury rates are underreported due to the large number of unregistered workers – who make up an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the country’s total workforce – and the growing prevalence of subcontractors, who now account for more than 1 million workers.

“The widespread use of labour subcontracting [in Turkey] is one of the reasons for the decline in workplace safety, as subcontractors fail to provide the necessary training or equipment to workers and refuse to observe occupational health and safety measures in the workplace,” says Makbule Sahan, a Human and Trade Union Rights Officer at the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which ranked Turkey among the world’s worst countries for workers in its Global Rights Index 2014.

Thirteen subcontracting firms employ approximately 2,000 workers at the Maslak 1453 project site, another luxury multi-use development currently under construction in Istanbul. A worker employed by one of these subcontractors died there on May 27 after being hit on the head by a piece of iron. Fellow workers told Turkish press outlets that an ambulance was not standing by at the site as required, and that netting was not in place to catch falling objects [or persons].

Work has continued on the Maslak 1453 site despite a court order in April ruling that it should be halted over environmental concerns. The project’s owner, construction mogul Ali Ağaoğlu, was called in for questioning in December as part of a sweeping probe alleging widespread corruption in the building sector.

Ağaoğlu, who was released without charge, has become one of Turkey’s richest men over the country’s decade-long building boom, which has seen nearly 600 billion dollars invested in new construction, and the land area approved for building projects increase by almost fivefold, according to a Bloomberg report in January.

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has repeatedly vowed to make the country one of the world’s top 10 economies by 2023. But that emphasis on rapid growth comes at a cost, according to researcher and activist Demet Ş. Dinler.

“[Turkey’s current] model of growth based on construction has triggered further dangers in terms of health and safety [due to] the speed of construction and a desire to reduce costs in a competitive environment,” says Dinler, a PhD candidate in the Department of Development Studies at the University of London.

“Health and safety is the responsibility of the main employer but the fragmented structure of the work process makes it difficult to check whether measures have been taken and apply to all workers on the site,” she adds.

“[And] main employers put pressure on subcontractors, who in turn put pressure on workers to complete the projects in a [shorter] period of time and with the lowest costs.”

Although Turkish labour law obliges employers to “provide for the work-related health and safety of workers,” Dinler says there is “little incentive for employers to take the necessary measures” due to the lack of enforcement mechanisms or serious legal sanctions for non-compliance.

Unions that might have pushed for stronger protections have seen their right to organise and strike limited further over the past decade and their membership numbers have dwindled by 40 percent.

Even when workplace deaths occur en masse, fault-finding investigations proceed slowly, according to the Worker Families in Pursuit of Justice. Members of the group have been holding monthly vigils in central Istanbul for two years, displaying photos of lost loved ones such as the 11 workers killed in March 2012 when a fire broke out among the dormitory tents where they were living on the construction site for the Marmara Park shopping mall in the city’s Esenyurt district.

According to Dinler, the use of tents as worker housing was prohibited after this deadly blaze, but a report by the Association of Construction Workers found them still in common use a year later, and frequently overcrowded and unsafe.

And although inspectors from the Labour and Social Security Ministry identified various safety violations at the Esenyurt site, including an improperly installed electrical system and a lack of emergency exits or fire-fighting equipment, no one has yet been held legally responsible.

An expert report presented at a new court hearing this week on the incident suggested that the workers bore “secondary responsibility” for their own deaths because they had stacked up foam mattresses on a bed next to the tent’s only doorway, impeding their exit when the fire broke out.

When Ko Mynt fled poverty in Myanmar for a job in neighbouring Thailand, the thought of labouring long hours in a shrimp peeling shed was far from his mind. So was this seaside town south of Bangkok. The 29-year-old had set his sights on employment in a garments factory.

Yet the route towards the job he had dreamt of was beyond his control – even though he had paid 500 dollars to a network of brokers operating along the Thai-Myanmar border. After promising work in a factory a year ago, they dumped him in one of Mahachai’s shrimp peeling sheds, where many accounts of labour rights violations have surfaced.

“I have no choice because I am in debt to the broker, who promised me a good job at a garments factory but then brought me here,” Ko says after days of hesitation before speaking. “The brokers control our salary, our life, everything.”

Such fear of brokers stems from his national status: he is one of more than two million migrant workers in Thailand who lack proper documents for employment in a range of fields from construction and farming to factories and fishing. Mahachai reflects this, with only a reported 100,000 of its estimated 400,000 migrant workers being legally registered to work in the sea food factories and the smaller shrimp peeling sheds spread across this town.

“The shrimp peeling sheds run by big companies are okay for the workers; the problem lies in the smaller sheds where workers are forced to peel shrimp from early morning till 10 at night,” Aung Myo Kyaw of the Migrant Workers Rights Network, a group monitoring the plight of foreign workers in Mahachai tells IPS. “The brokers constantly threaten the workers with police arrests and confiscating their passports if they disobey orders inside the sheds.”

Aung Myo Kyaw describes Ko Mynt as “a victim of human trafficking.” Similar accounts abound in many of the estimated 700 shrimp peeling sheds in this town, he tells IPS. “They are the most vulnerable workers here.”

But now these victims have a powerful ally: the United States government. Washington has turned its annual ‘Trafficking in Persons Report’ (TiP), into a diplomatic tool to combat modern day slavery, and to warn Bangkok that human trafficking has to end.

Over the last three years Thailand is ranked on the Tier 2 Watch List of countries under scrutiny by the U.S. State department. Failure to convince the U.S. over standards could see one of its oldest allies downgraded to the diplomatically and economically damning Tier 3 category, that includes countries the U.S. government frequently reprimands, such as Iran and North Korea.

The possibility of such a stain on a booming Thai export industry is not lost on the government and the Thai Frozen Food Association (TFFA). The Southeast Asian country has been shipping close to 7 billion dollars worth of fish and fish products annually, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, a United Nations agency.

Among the top destinations of the country’s renowned tiger prawns is the U.S. market, which accounts for 36 percent of the exported shrimps. They are sold at supermarket chains such as Wal-Mart or offered on the tables of restaurants such as Red Lobster.

“A U.S. ruling will hit the brand and image of Thai shrimp,” Panisuan Jamnarnwej, TFFA president, tells IPS in an interview. “Nobody wants to eat shrimp produced in the Dark Ages.”

And some efforts by his organisation to clean up abusive labour practices have worked, he says, pointing to the drop in the use of child labour in the shrimp peeling sheds. “That was the result of monitoring our members, but not all shrimp peeling sheds are part of our association.”

Thai Foreign Minister Surapong Tovichakchaikul has got into the act, recently leading a delegation of Bangkok-based diplomats on a tour of seafood factories in the Mahachai area to convince them that reports of human trafficking are unfounded. The allegation of the “Thai fishery industry’s involvement in human trafficking, as well as child labour and forced labour, is a cause of grave concern,” he told the envoys.

Thailand also made efforts to convince former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton to give Thailand more time to implement its Anti-Human Trafficking Plan. “We asked Clinton to wait till we do something and I think now the U.S. will be fair in assessing us for this year’s TiP report,” Surapong tells IPS.

The U.S. government is funding a nine million dollar programme led by the International Labour Organisation to end human trafficking in Thailand. “This shows how much the U.S. wants to see the abuse end in places like the shrimp peeling sheds, where there has been little improvement, despite what the government says,” says Andy Hall, a migrant rights activist and author of a recent report, ‘Cheap Has A High Price’ on exploitation of migrant workers in sections of the Thai food industry. (END)

Lahandapurege Ariyawathie feels she got off lightly – if returning home with 24 nails embedded in your body is lucky.

Ariyawathie, 52, from the southern Sri Lankan district Matara, had left to work as a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia in early 2011 with hopes of building a house back home. She worked only five months, and returned home with oozing wounds after burning iron rods were inserted into her skin by her employers.

“I feel I got off lightly, worse things could have happened to me,” Ariyawathie told IPS standing in front of her new house – built by the Foreign Employment Bureau and the National Housing Authority after her return and the ensuing controversy.

She has reason to feel lucky. On Jan. 10 this year Rizana Nafeek, a 25-year-old maid jailed in Saudi Arabia for the accidental death of an infant in her care was beheaded without any notification to the family or Sri Lankan authorities.

“The same would have awaited me,” says Ariyawathie, who says she still has six metal objects in her body.

Nafeek was in prison since 2005 and on death row since 2007. She was sent to Saudi Arabia on a forged passport when she was 17. According to her family and others familiar with her case, job agents manipulated the poverty-stricken family and sent the young girl to Saudi Arabia for household work.

Rizana Nafeek

She ended up caring for a four-month-old infant, work she was untrained for. The infant choked while Nafeek was bottle-feeding her. Activists say that Nafeek received neither proper trial nor the appropriate consular and legal support.

Her family from the remote village Muttur in the north-eastern Trincomalee district is resigned to their fate. “What can we do, we have to go on, nothing more can be done,” her father Abdul Mohammed Nafeek told IPS.

Researchers say such helplessness is instilled into domestic workers and their families by recruitment agencies and scouts who travel to remote villages to locate women like Nafeek.

“That is what people have been led to believe, that there is no protection, that they are in a foreign land without any protection,” Miyuru Gunasinghe from the Law and Society Trust, a national human rights advocacy body told IPS.

Gunasinghe said some countries like the Philippines have signed bilateral agreements with Saudi Arabia to safeguard the rights of workers. “The Philippines is a great example, it suspended sending workers to Saudi Arabia for a year till it could negotiate an agreement.”

Bilateral agreements do more than guarantee minimum pay, stipulated working hours and living conditions; they include worker rights. Sri Lanka has such agreements in place with Bahrain and Jordan. The agreements also make sure that all workers are treated equally and not according to individual contracts or tribal laws.

Despite the public outcry over the beheading, the Sri Lankan government is yet to indicate that it is lobbying the Saudis for a bilateral agreement.

Following a proposal made by foreign employment minister Dilan Perera two weeks after the beheading of Nafeek, the Cabinet approved a proposal to raise the age limit for domestic workers seeking employment in Saudi Arabia to 25 years. For the rest of the Middle East it remains 23 years.

The workers also have to complete a residential training programme of 21 days and obtain a national level housing keeping certificate.

Gunasinghe said that increasing the age bracket hardly serves the purpose. “You can be 25, but if you have studied up to only level 5, don’t know English and cannot operate any appliances, we are left with the same problem.”

The researcher said that the government should stress training and sending qualified workers at a higher pay.

Ariyawathie went to the Gulf after the three-week government programme that included language training.

But she got into trouble with her employers because she could not communicate with them, nor could she operate electrical household appliances. “I was abused because I could not understand what they were telling me.”

Law and Society Trust’s Gunasinghe said that the government should consider stringent laws to govern recruitment agencies, and redraft the foreign employment bureau act to include workers’ rights. In its current form the act only deals with promoting foreign employment.

She says if the millions who work overseas are given voting rights, politicians will become more attentive to their needs.

Despite the low skills and low pay (some domestic workers are paid as little as 100 dollars per month), worker remittances are the highest foreign revenue earner for the island. This year they are likely to bring as much as five billion dollars.

There are an estimated two million Sri Lankans working abroad. At least 800,000 are female domestic workers, most in the Gulf. Saudi Arabia still remains their most favoured destination.

But there are subtle changes taking place. Since late 2011, when reports of abuse spread in the media, some workers have shown a reluctance to fly to Saudi Arabia. Agents have been paying a premium of 800 dollars for any woman who departs.

In Muttur, Nafeek’s home village, women have led a signature campaign seeking a ban on sending domestics to Saudi Arabia.

“People think Muttur remained silent. It did not, we did not get justice. We do not want Rizana’s death to be just another statistic,” said Mohammed Jihad, a social worker from the village.

After one of the six males under trial for the rape and subsequent death of a 23-year-old woman was deemed an adolescent and therefore entitled to leniency, juvenile rights activists have found themselves pitted against irate members of the public demanding death sentences for all the perpetrators.

The brutal rape committed on Dec. 16 aboard a bus plying in the Indian capital sparked widespread outrage and calls for summary trial and maximum punishments, including for the adolescent, a member of the attackers who was yet to reach 18 years of age and cannot be tried as an adult under existing Indian law.

The incident prompted calls to reduce the age when an offender may be considered a juvenile delinquent to 16. A petition filed in the Delhi High Court by political leader Subramanian Swamy demanded that the adolescent (who may not be named under the law) be tried as an adult. The demand was turned down.

“What is being missed here is that the accused was one of the more than 80,000 child labourers in the capital and never had a chance to get an education or a decent life since he was ten years old,” says Bhuwan Ribu, a lawyer known for his work with the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) or the ‘Save Childhood Movement’.

According to Ribu, the adolescent was also a victim of trafficking, that the BBA has been fighting alongside its campaigns over child labour. It has been demanding that the government implement existing laws that guarantee the right to education for all Indian children.

“The laws exist only on paper and these include laws passed in 2006 seeking to prevent children from being employed as domestic help and in roadside restaurants,” said Ribu.

Surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) do show a declining trend. While the NSSO estimated that there were nine million child workers in India in 2005, the numbers had declined to about five million by 2010.

Over the last three years the ministry, under its National Child Labour Project (NCLP), says it has rescued and rehabilitated 354,877 child labourers and launched 25,006 prosecutions that resulted in convictions for 3,394 employers.

“Most offenders get away with token fines because they bribe officials to apply laws that carry punishments that are not as tough as those prescribed for violating child labour laws,” said Ribu.

Swami Agnivesh, an activist who leads the Bandhua Mukti Morcha (BMM), or Bonded Labour Liberation Front, says there are practical difficulties in securing convictions for violating child labour laws. “The judicial process is tardy and our focus is on rehabilitating the victims and getting them back to school.”

Agnivesh who has served as chairperson of the United Nations Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery told IPS that the government appeared unable to implement laws that deal with child labour although various studies have shown that it is a factor in perpetuating poverty, illiteracy and unemployment in India.

Agnivesh said that but for international pressure factory owners would have continued to employ children in industries that involve hazardous substances such as glass, matches, fireworks, tobacco, cement and bricks.

“We believe that in spite of the laws more than 12 million children below the age of 14 are still working as domestic help or in stone quarries, mines or in the hospitality business,” Agnivesh said.

“The NSSO figures are gross underestimations and there are no government mechanisms for carrying out inspections on industries that employ children and prosecute influential employers,” he said.

One difficulty in prosecuting erring employers, said Agnivesh, is the difficulty in proving the identities and age of children who are trafficked to cities like Delhi from remote villages.

In the case of the adolescent facing rape charges investigators relied on records provided by the principal of the school where he studied in the district of Badaun, 220 km east of the capital, to establish his age. But that did not stop calls for having him tried as an adult.

In an open letter published in the Hindustan Times newspaper on Jan. 15, Minna Kabir, a child rights worker and wife of Altamas Kabir, India’s chief justice, said “every society is responsible for the well being and care of its children up to the age of 18 years, especially if they are marginalised, helpless and powerless to do anything for themselves.”

According to Kabir, most children come into crime “because we have failed to provide them with even a basic support system.” She listed poverty, faulty peer groups, dysfunctional families, an empty stomach and exploitative adults among the reasons.

Child rights activists are now looking to amendments due to be made in existing child labour laws through the child and adolescent labour bill that is expected to be passed in Parliament during the budget session which opens on Feb. 22.

The bill seeks to prohibit employing anybody below 18 years in hazardous occupations and all employment of children below the age of 14. Children between 14-18 years are to be defined as “adolescents” in the amended law.

With child labour a major obstacle in getting children into education, the amended laws are expected to help implementation of free and compulsory education up to the age of 14, under a 2009 law.

More than 100,000 Indian citizens have signed an e-petition by the BBA and the Global March Against Child Labour supporting the new child labour law as part of a campaign to get India to ratify International Labour Organisation conventions. (End)

Bicycles are adding to Cambodia’s export basket, but at a price to workers. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS.

By Michelle Tolson
PHNOM PENH, Jan 28 2013 (IPS)

Cambodia’s export business is in the process of changing due to shifts in manufacturing in Asia. A business publication in the country has reported unexpected growth in the “machinery and transport equipment” sector and speculated it was as “probably bicycles.” But when Cambodia jumped into the top ten exporters of bicycles to the EU in 2012, it prompted the European Bicycle Manufacturers’ Association (EBMA) to investigate.

In 2011, 366,000 bikes were exported from Cambodia to the EU but “in the first half of 2012 the country managed to almost triple its bike export to the EU. Cambodia’s exports totaled close to 520,000 units in the first six months of 2012 compared to 140,000 in the same period of 2011,” according to Bikeeu.com.

The EBMA discovered that bicycle companies had moved their production to Cambodia from Thailand and China, citing increased expenses. The move is estimated to save 14 percent on taxes. A favourable scheme is in place for Least Developed Countries (LDCs) under the Generalized Scheme of Preferences (GSP) known as the Everything But Arms (EBA) agreement. The EBA allows countries ranked among the 48 LDCs to export products duty-free to the EU, except arms and ammunition.

Introduced at the beginning of 2011, it ushered in a surge of 53 percent in export growth to European countries that year, making the EU Cambodia’s second largest export partner after the U.S., according to local business reports.

Increasing expenses in China and Thailand have been attributed in part to rising wages. The minimum wage in Thailand was recently raised to 300 baht per day (10 dollars) and salaries in China in this business have risen to 400 dollars per month.  By contrast, minimum wages in Cambodia are set at just 61 dollars per month.

Strongman and A & J – listed as a subsidiary of Atlantic Cycle Co. – was reported to have originally opened their factory in Cambodia in 2005.  A government website listing investments into the country shows three bicycle factories in the “Tai Seng zone” in the Svay Reing province – A &J, Atlantic Cycle Co. and Smart Tech – and a fourth bike factory, Best Way Industry, in the ‘Manhattan zone’ in Svay Reing.

The Special Economic Zone (SEZ), according to a USAID report, offers pro-business perks to investors, a quick turnaround on red tape, low taxes, low wages, ease of doing business and a “young and educated” population. The report listed 1,500 workers in the bicycle industry. The minimum monthly salary then for factory work was 60 dollars a month, or 33 cents per hour, which would necessitate working six days per week to make 60 dollars monthly.  Dated 2008, this shows that wages have not risen in four years.

Local media recently revealed that a minimum wage increase for garment factories was in the works due to a labour shortage. Manufacturing overall has been shifting from China and Vietnam to Cambodia, and there are not enough workers in this country. The social affairs ministry has called for a wage increase but asked unions to agree on an amount – with suggested salaries ranging from 93 dollars to 150 dollars per month.

Bicycle factory workers face similar labour issues to garment workers.  Srun Srorn, activist and NGO consultant, explained how factory workers live on wages which amount to just two dollars per day.

Workers pool money and share a single meal. “Usually they do this: four friends x 500 riels (12 cents) = 2000 riels (50 cents). Then they eat some food which costs 500 riels or less. Usually the maximum is 5000 riels (1.25 dollars) for three or four people.”

Some factories include a meal stipend with the monthly salary.  Workers have short meal breaks and eat from vendors located just outside the factory gates.  Some employers include a transportation stipend.  There is no public transportation system in Cambodia, requiring workers to pay for motorbike taxi rides which cost 50 cents to a dollar.

In mid-December 2012, local media reported 1,000 workers at a Smart Tech bike factory in Svay Rieng went on strike to raise their salary. Two months prior, another strike had been reported at A& J.

Moeun Tola, a lawyer at the labour programme of the Community Legal Education Centre (CLEC) said he assisted the workers with legal advice. He said they were not part of a union but had organised the strike on their own. “They are not advised by anyone but we would give legal assistance and advice.”

Better Factories, an International Labour Organisation (ILO) programme, was created to help factory workers but at this time only assists garment factories, according to a spokesperson contacted by IPS.

IPS spoke with Nhanh Kosol, one of the workers, about the strike for an update. Kosol said that their wage is still just 61 dollars a month but the factory had agreed to a transportation subsidy of 13 dollars per month and overtime pay. They can work overtime between two hours and five hours a day, depending on the factory. Overtime of five hours earns an additional three dollars.

He thought the bike factory was “not too bad, because I have a job. The working conditions are some days good, and some days bad but the salary is not sufficient to support living and everything is always going up.” In his two years working there, the workers went on strike two or three times already and “it can help, but not too much.”

Bike EU listed the per unit price imported from Cambodia as about 200 euros. The U.S. has also recently had an upsurge in imports in bikes from Cambodia, according to foreign trade statistics. In 2009, 2.06 million dollars worth of goods were imported from Cambodia under the label “toys, shooting and sporting goods, and bicycles.” In 2010, the amount tripled to 6.8 million dollars and by 2011 it was 10.3 million dollars.

When asked how much he thought the bikes he helped make sold for, Kosol said workers thought between 1,400 dollars and 3,000 dollars, the low end of which is 25 times his monthly salary.

Condom promotion campaign in Male: Credit: SHE

By Feizal Samath
MALE, Sep 22 2012 (IPS)

For an orthodox Islamic country, the Maldives has made remarkable progress in halting the spread of HIV in the Indian Ocean archipelago through bold awareness programmes and the distribution of condoms.

A few years ago, condoms were available in the Maldives only at drug stores and on production of a doctor’s prescription. Anyone found carrying a condom in the streets  was liable to be arrested by police.

But, a five-year project mounted by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), reports progress in creating awareness of safe sex issues and the use condoms by providing them free. The GFATM is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The GFATM programme in the Maldives addressed the sexually active among the 300,000 Maldivians, but focused on the 110,000 foreign workers in the country – mostly Bangladeshis, Indians and Sri Lankans employed in construction and in the country’s famed luxury resorts.

“We did a lot of work in the five years of the programme, which ended in August,” Ivana Lohar, HIV/AIDS project manager at the United Nations Development Programme in the Maldives, told IPS. “We believe that one more round of global funding would help to sustain the momentum.”

The challenge, Lohar said, is to ensure that the Maldives remains a low HIV prevalence country despite the presence of high-risk groups. As of December 2011, only 15 HIV cases were reported among Maldivians, while there were 289 cases among the foreign  labour force.

At the spanking new Voluntary Counselling and Testing Centre set up in the heart of capital by the Society for Health Education (SHE), a local non-government organisation (NGO), both local residents and foreign workers can avail of the free services.

Asna Luthfee, programme associate at SHE, says her work has included training 40 migrant workers as peer educators to promote awareness at hotspots where foreign workers congregate and provide condoms on request.

SHE offers a range of services through a sexual and reproductive health clinic, including screening for thalassaemia, DNA testing, counselling and psychosocial support. “We distribute oral pills, emergency contraceptives and condoms. We don’t ask people whether they are married or not – we distribute on request,” Luthfee said.

“There is also counselling if testing for HIV shows positive, and these cases are referred to the government,” Luthfee said. The programme, in which SHE and UNAIDS are partners, has been successful enough to be seen as a model for the region, she added.

Mohamed Yahiya, an accountant from Bangladesh who also works as HIV peer educator, said a government decision made earlier in the year to allow workers who contract HIV in the country to stay on and get free treatment, has helped immensely.

“Many were scared to talk about their HIV status fearing deportation, but the new government guidelines have eased those concerns,” he said. Foreign workers, however, undergo mandatory testing on arrival and those testing positive are refused entry.

The campaign has had its ups and downs because of pressure from the public and  religious groups that accused organisers of promoting promiscuous sexual behaviour.

“Though religion has its own inhibitions, Maldivian society is open and able to understand the need for awarenesss,” says Lohar. “We are not trying to interfere with religious beliefs, but flagging a serious public health issue. AIDS is a devastating condition that can impact the economy.”

A spokesman (officials may not be named under briefing rules) for the National AIDS Programme (NAP) said stigma and discrimination are still prevalent and public surveys in 2008 and 2009 showed that them to be  barriers to effectively addressing HIV and AIDS.

The UN-funded Biological and Behavioural Survey on HIV/AIDS – 2008 had noted that the potential for HIV transmission is “accelerated by non-use of condoms and the sharing of unsterile needles and syringes among injectors.”

Unprotected sex is high in all the risk groups. Aside from the risk behaviours themselves, a growing concern is the early age at which commercial sex and injecting drug use start in the Maldives, the study found.

The Maldives, warned the report, “is showing signals of a possible future epidemic which need to be closely monitored by the national programme, including injecting drug use in prisons and rehabilitation centres and risk behaviours found among the 18-24 year age group (selling and buying of sex, group sex, male-to-male sex, sex with non-regular partners, and injecting drug use).”

The NAP spokesman said that religious groups and scholars are supportive of public health efforts to prevent diseases and in this context using condoms is advised. “Prevention efforts are well supported by the religious scholars, and recently they have been involved as partners in HIV prevention work,” he added.

A major component of the programme was the conduct of migrant fairs where free testing for HIV/AIDS was provided. The latest of these fairs, which was held in August,  had collaboration from  government agencies, embassies and high commissions.

“Though most workers don’t understand English, these cultural shows break barriers and provide foreigners access to services, overcoming stigma and discrimination,” Luthfee said.

“Workers are provided information in their own language and when they return to their home countries they go back armed with knowledge on health issues,” said Yahiya.

Striking miners who were relased from police custody on Sep. 3 vowed to continue fighting for a minimum monthly wage of 1,495 dollars. Credit: Nat Nxumalo/IPS

By Siyabulela Debedu
JOHANNESBURG, Sep 7 2012 (IPS)

The South African Police Service members who were involved in a bloodbath with striking workers at the Marikana mine in North West Province could face murder charges, sources close to the investigation told IPS.

The possible charges follows the death of 34 mineworkers after police opened fire on them using automatic rifles and pistols on Aug. 16.

According to procedure, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) was brought into investigate the police conduct. However, sources close to the investigation have revealed to IPS that because an autopsy report found that many of the victims were shot in the back while fleeing from the police, the police involved are expected to be charged with murder.

“We have gathered evidence showing that the miners were killed by police. We are going to complete the investigation and they will be charged,” the source told IPS.

“The report indicates that the majority of the miners were running away and they were shot at the back. At least two of the victims were shot and killed by one bullet. It was only a few, who had direct contact with the police, who have been shot from the front,” the source added.

About 3,000 miners, armed with pangas and spears, had been protesting and demanding a minimum wage of 1,495 dollars monthly outside the Lonmin-owned platinum mine when police attempted to break up the demonstration. The incident was the culmination of several days of violent strikes, which saw the death of 10 people, including two police officers.

It is unclear why the police fired, but police officials claimed that the strikers had rushed at them and they responded in self defense. It resulted in the country’s first ever massacre since the advent of democracy 18 years ago.

At the time, 270 mineworkers were arrested for public violence, illegal possession of dangerous weapons, illegal possession of firearms, murder and attempted murder.

But on Sep. 3 the state withdrew the charges against them and they will only appear in court in February 2013.

However, Shawn Hattingh, a researcher and education officer at the International Labour Research and Information Group, told IPS that even if the police are charged with murder, those in power who were responsible for giving the police permission to use live ammunition would most likely not be brought to justice.

“The whole thing was incredibly badly handled or incredibly ineffective, but I don’t think the state will answer for this. I don’t think there is an interest in the state to prosecute high up in the state. We’ve seen it before with politicians being charged and given light sentences or having had them dropped.”

He added that the priority in mining is to protect the mined resources from the mineworkers “and it was clear that violence would be used to protect it.”

“The police was there to protect the mine, our constitution is based on the protection of private property, so in general the state is going to react in the same way,” he said of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry set up by President Jacob Zuma to investigating the killings.

“There are people who aren’t going to answer for this. The Lonmin management won’t be charged with this. The guy who did the shooting will be charged, but he was following orders. There were orders to break the strike that day, the police commissioner made that clear,” Hattingh said.

He said what needed to be clarified was who gave the order to fire on the miners.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions’ spokesperson Patrick Craven told IPS that there were many unanswered questions that the Judicial Commission of Inquiry needed to address.

“Certainly the role of the police absolutely has to be central to this – we already know from the television footage that they played a role in this and this can’t be dodged. Again it seems from the coverage that these weren’t individual police officers loosing their heads and firing,” he said.

However, the IPID spokesman Moses Dlamini would not confirm the possible charges or the contents of the autopsy reports.

“Once the investigation is completed, the dockets will be forwarded to the Directorate of Public Prosecution (DPP) for a decision on whether anyone should be prosecuted or not.

“If the decision of the DPP is to prosecute, the suspects will then be charged and be put on trial. Our investigation has not been completed and we have not even discussed the case with the DPP,” Dlamini said.

Meanwhile, Hattingh said that the massacre at the mine had been inevitable as there was a history of violent conflict between miners and owners in South Africa.

“The scale (of violence) at Lonmin is vastly bigger that what has happened in the past, but it is not that first time that workers have been killed … The whole history of mining is confrontational and harsh,” he said.

“If you look at what the security on the mines is like, it’s very strict. Communities are kept off their own land with barbwire, workers every day have to go through though security check, there are armed guards all over. You are watched over a lot of the time – it is a militarised environment,” he said.

He said that in South Africa the system of capital accumulation had been about oppressing all workers, especially black workers, and nothing much had changed.

“The ruling classes have changed in the mining industry but the stuff on the ground hasn’t changed … the lowest paid workers – the rock drillers who earn R4,000 (482 dollars) and work deep underground in the most dangerous of jobs – are still black,” he said.

Meanwhile, the miners have vowed to continue to fight for a minimum wage of 1,495 dollars from Lonmin mine owners.

Lungisile Lutsheto was among the miners arrested. He told IPS of his alleged abuse by police while in custody.

“It was bad in the cells. The police special units came to our cells and started to assault us for no reason. Initially, they searched us saying they were looking for cellphones in our possession. When they could not find any, the beating continued repeatedly,” Lutsheto said.

Already 150 statements have been made and cases opened against the police by miners who claimed to have been assaulted while in custody.

*Additional reporting by Nalisha Adams

At eleven years old, Thema, a native of Kumasi, hopes to be a nurse when she grows up. Currently, however, she is employed wandering between taxis and tro-tros or minibus taxis at rush hour, carrying packs of ice water on her head and selling them for 10 pesewas apiece. She manoeuvres through traffic in Ghana’s second-largest city with practiced ease; she has been doing this for four years.

Child labour is on the rise in Ghana, particularly in urban areas. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) 2012 State of the World’s Children Report, 34 percent of Ghanaian children aged between five and 14 years are engaged in child labour – up from 23 percent in 2003. Emilia Allan, a Child Protection Officer at UNICEF Ghana, noted that Kumasi alone makes up eight percent of that figure.

She described some of the harmful impacts of child labour.

A young boy carries ice water on his head in Amakom, Kumasi. Any work that is detrimental to a child’s development is considered child labour in Ghana. Credit: Portia Crowe/IPS

“It infringes on the rights of children, it affects their health, and it may result in injury,” she said. “It prevents and interferes with their education, and it leads to other protection concerns such as sexual exploitation, violence, and child trafficking.”

But working children are generally accepted in Ghana, and the definition of child labour is hotly debated. Though the minimum legal age of employment is 15 years, the 1998 Children’s Act stipulates that children aged 13 and older may engage in some forms of light work. And the recent National Plan of Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour, based on the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention No. 182, recognises the challenges to completely eradicating child labour; it is designed, instead, to protect children from work that might harm their physical or educational development.

One area of contention is household work, such as cooking, cleaning, running errands, and caring for younger siblings. Prince Ohene-Koranteng, the director of communications at Defense for Children International Ghana, explained that such chores are sometimes acceptable.

“Those things are possible, and they must not be stopped, as long as they don’t prevent the child from accessing quality education,” he said. “But it should end somewhere, because at a certain point the child should be able to take care of his or her school assignments,” he added.

UNICEF’s Allan said that some household tasks can contribute to a child’s socialisation or training, but she specified when even light work infringes on children’s rights.

“In Ghana, children help their families,” she explained. “Where that help is hazardous to the child’s health, or is harmful to the education of the child, then it is termed child labour,” she said, adding that every child has the right to be protected from engaging in work that constitutes a threat to his health, education, or development.

Many children also help their families by working part-time, and attending school on a shift system. They might go school in the mornings and work afternoons, or work certain days and study others. But this too can inhibit their development and be deemed child labour, according to Allan.

“If a child is . . . going to sell and then going on the shift system, the it goes to school tired and sleepy. That is affecting the child’s education, because it is not performing,” she said, adding that they do not have time to do their homework.

She also noted that when a child is given a load to carry on her head, though considered light labour, it could affect their physical growth and pose a threat to development.

Allan’s understanding of the national legislation mirrors that of Ohene-Koranteng. He said that any form of harmful work, whether “light” or “hazardous,” is child labour – and therefore illegal. But, he said, the legislation is rarely implemented.

“Even though the law is there in our books, the implementing agencies should do more to be able to protect the children,” he said.

“If we have to leave this to the parents alone to do, they will say that because their children are helping them to make ends meet, they will continue to put them on the street.”

According to Jacob Achulu, the Ashanti regional director with the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare, such implementation problems stem from financial insecurity.

“The legal framework is there,” he said. “The problem is the enforcement – and I think it’s because poverty is widespread in most parts of our country.”

Financial insecurity prevents Aku from going to school. She is 10 years old, and attends school when she can, but when her parents cannot afford her school feels she sells hot peppers, locally known as pepe, in Kejetia Market.

“She went to school today, but the teacher sacked them because they are not paying their school fees,” explained a woman in the market.

“They want to go tomorrow, but because of money—school fees—the mother said they will go into service instead,” she translated.

Achulu called for more concrete action on the ground.

“The ILO interventions and NGO interventions are welcome, but there is the need to have sustainable activities that will make sure the families are able to keep their children in school,” he explained.

The Ghana Children’s Rights Protection Foundation, or GCRPF, is an organisation that aims to do this by addressing child labour at its root. Its members provide school supplies and funding to low-income families, and help parents to earn additional income through hands-on projects. The secretary, Osborn Kwasi-Sarpong, noted the importance of supplementing family earnings.

“How must a child go to school tomorrow if he stops selling water today?” he asked. “The basic thing we have to do first is to see to the welfare of the mother, the parent, to be able to find something to do with her hands,” he explained.

And ultimately, said the GCRPF’s director, Reverend Christian Antwi-Boasiako, getting more children out of the streets and into schools will have a positive impact not only on the child, but also on the nation as a whole.

“A child is supposed to have good education, and good health care,” he said, “and then when he or she grows, he would also contribute to the development of the nation.”

Kathmandu's entertainment joints hire minor girls. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Jul 8 2012 (IPS)

Almost unnoticed, Nepal’s burgeoning adult entertainment industry has been drawing young girls away from being trafficked across the border to the fleshpots of India’s big cities.

Rights activists are worried that the issue of internal trafficking has not received the kind of legislative attention that resulted in laws, passed in 2007, to prevent and punish trafficking of young girls across Nepal’s borders by prostitution rings.

The result, they tell IPS, is that internal trafficking for the domestic entertainment industry is dismissed as an issue of exploitation rather than being treated as the more serious crime of trafficking for prostitution.

“Trafficking is happening right here in the country and not just to Mumbai or New Delhi of India,” says education specialist Helen Sherpa from World Education’s Asia division, which is working to combat child exploitation  through awareness programmes.

Although there are no government studies on cross-border  trafficking, a 2001 report by the International Labour Organisation estimated that around 12,000 Nepalese girls were being trafficked annually to India for prostitution.

Sherpa said that young girls from impoverished families are now being lured into working in the massage parlours and sleazy ‘cabin restaurants’ of Kathmandu and other cities with false offers of respectable jobs in the big hotels.

Cabin restaurants, massage parlours and dance bars make up the core of the entertainment industry, and a large number of them are known to be fronts for prostitution rackets.

There are also lodges, ‘bhatti pasals’ (small street eateries serving alcohol), and the ‘dohori’ (Nepali folk song and music) restaurants in the urban centres and along highways that are known to solicit clients.

An estimated 6,000-7,000 girls and women currently work in cabin restaurants, 3,000-4,000 in the dance bars, about 900 in the dohori restaurants and an equal number in the massage parlours, adding up to about 15,000 girls and women in a rapidly growing industry.

In Kathmandu alone there are an estimated 11,000 to 13,000 girls and women in the entertainment business, according to ‘Trafficking and Exploitation in the Entertainment and Sex Industries in Nepal,’ a handbook prepared for decision makers by the Terres des homes Foundation (TDH) in 2010.

Many activists consider the handbook an important source of information and guidance for government agencies and leaders dealing with trafficking. But the country has a long way to go in implementing its recommendations and steps.

“Internal trafficking has not been dealt with effectively in Nepal. It has been hinted at and peripherally addressed without researched information,” expert on trafficking Nandita Baruah tells IPS.

“But it is emerging as a critical concern today,” said Baruah who heads the ‘Combating Trafficking in Persons Programme’ of the Asia Foundation in Nepal.

Baruah explains that authorities and development agencies address internal trafficking as an issue of  child sexual exploitation in the entertainment industry  rather than one of  trafficking for  prostitution.

Nationwide there are approximately 32,000 sex workers with about half of them minors under 16 years of age, according to the government’s National Centre for STD/AIDS.

Activists believe that half of these sex workers were lured by traffickers while the other half chose to enter the trade to escape desperate poverty. Many of them were as young as 12 to 14 years old when they were internally trafficked to Kathmandu, as told to IPS by sex workers who wished to remain anonymous.

“I was 13 when I arrived in Kathmandu to join a job at a hotel but I was taken straight to a massage parlour. I had never seen such a place before,” said Sita Tamang (name changed). Tamang said that the massage parlour employers treated her well, initially.

After a week, she was told what the job really entailed. “I was shocked and I cried a lot in the beginning as I was very scared and then other girls consoled me saying that it wasn’t dangerous as they had been through the same thing and they got used to it,” said Tamang.

Tamang, now 18, says she never went back home and does not want to face her poor farmer parents. When she sees very young girls being brought in,  she is reminded of her own  past and feels bad , but  is powerless to do anything about it.

“Sometimes we fight with the owners when they bring in young girls. Once I had a physical fight with an owner over a very young girl and he let her go only after I threatened to have it reported in the newspapers,” said another masseur who started work when only 14.

She called the girl’s parents in Makwanpur district, 200 km from Kathmandu, and asked them to take their daughter home. “I screamed at them at the bus stop as I was reminded of my own past,” she said.

Cases of sex workers being sensitive and strong enough to prevent the recruitment of minors are rare. The general trend in the entertainment industry is for sex work victims to turn into traffickers themselves in a self-perpetuating system.

Studies by TDH show that entertainment workers are also primary procurers of girls for the industry and are paid for it.  Often, according to TDH studies, girls and women are not allowed to leave work until they find a replacement or repay debts by providing fresh recruits from their villages.

So far, the only action taken by the government has been in the shape of  occasional raids on entertainment establishments, though anti-trafficking laws are never invoked, activists say.

A major legal loophole is that Nepal has no law against prostitution and the girls, if arrested, are booked for disturbing the peace or obscenity. Usually, they are locked up for 24 hours and fined, but quickly return to work.

The girls earn about 100 dollars per month as salaries in the entertainment joints with the owners skimming off the bulk of the profits. Yet, many prefer that to the grinding poverty of Nepal’s rural villages.

According to TDH studies, a quarter of the establishments where the girls work bring in 10,000 dollars per month while at least half make about 4,000 dollars a month – considerable sums in impoverished Nepal.

“The severity of such crimes has not been measured and this is why the supply of girls has been easy,” said Asia Foundation’s Baruah.

She added that there is a need to conceptually clarify both the difference and the overlap between sexual exploitation and trafficking and then make a case for it within the criminal justice system.

“People have to first accept that internal trafficking is happening and the government has to acknowledge that this is a huge problem that needs more focused attention,” she explained.