By Joseph Chamie and Barry Mirkin
NEW YORK, Nov 17 2015 (IPS)

Concerned with the consequences of demographic decline and population ageing, especially with respect to economic growth, national defence and pensions and health care for the elderly, a growing number of governments are seeking to raise birth rates. Whereas nearly 40 years ago 13 countries had policies to raise fertility, today the number has increased four-fold to 56, representing more than one-third of the world’s population.

The most recent and largest addition to this pronatalist group of countries, which includes Australia, France, Germany, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Spain and Turkey, is China. The Chinese government announced that it will change its controversial one-child policy to a two-child policy per couple in order to balance population development and address the challenge of an ageing population.

Assuming a slight increase in its current fertility level, China’s population of 1.38 billion is projected – according to the UN medium variant – to peak by 2030 at 1.42 billion and then decline to 1 billion by the end of the century (Figure 1). However, if fertility were to remain constant at its current level, China’s population would soon begin declining, reaching around 0.8 billion by the year 2100. If fertility were to instantly reach the replacement level, an unlikely event, China’s population would grow to 1.51 billion by midcentury.

Source: United Nations Population Division.

China’s population age structure is also becoming older than any time in the past. Whereas in 1950 less than five per cent of the Chinese were aged 65 years or older, today the proportion has doubled to 10 per cent. By 2035 China’s proportion elderly is expected to double again and reach one-third by around midcentury.

Similar to China, 82 other countries – accounting for almost half of the world’s population – are experiencing fertility rates below the replacement level of about two births per woman. As a result, the populations of 48 of those countries, including Germany, Japan, Russia and South Korea, are projected to be smaller and older by midcentury, even assuming modest gains in birth rates. If fertility rates were to remain constant at their current levels, the declines and ageing would be even more pronounced than currently expected (Figure 2).

Source: United Nations Population Division.

In an attempt to counter those two major demographic trends, many governments have adopted a variety of policies to raise birth rates. At one extreme are draconian measures such as prohibiting contraception, sterilization, abortion and the education and employment of women. As those measures violate basic human rights, few governments are prepared to take such drastic steps to raise fertility. Moreover, such measures have undesirable demographic consequences, including higher levels of unintended pregnancy, illegal abortion and maternal mortality.

Some governments are promoting marriage, childbearing and parenting through public relations campaigns, incentives and preferences. Such programs highlight the vital role of motherhood and its valuable contribution to the welfare and growth of the country. Australia and South Korea, for example, are among those making appeals to women to have one more child. Also, Iran is considering legislation that would encourage businesses to prioritize the hiring of men with children.

Perhaps the most common pronatalist policies aim to reduce parent’s considerable financial costs for childbearing and child rearing. Those policies include cash bonuses at the time of a child’s birth and/or recurrent cash supplements for dependent children

In Turkey, for example, parents are entitled to 300 Turkish lira (108 dollars) for the birth of their first child, 400 Turkish lira (144 dollars) for the second and 600 Turkish lira (215 dollars) for the fourth and subsequent child. One consequence of this legislation, however, has been the need for the provision of government financial assistance to needy families with large families.

Additional policies, especially popular among many Western countries, focus on making employment and family responsibilities “compatible” for working couples, especially mothers. In addition to extended maternity leave as well as paternity leave, other measures include part-time work, flexible working hours, working at home and family-friendly workplaces, including nurseries, as well as pre-school and after-school care facilities.

However, the costs of family friendly policies are not insignificant. For example, with fertility at two children per woman, France’s extensive scheme of family benefits is estimated to cost four per cent of gross domestic product, one of the highest percentages in the European Union.

Some governments are also looking to selective immigration to maintain the size of their workforce and slow down the pace of population ageing. However, a recent United Nations study concluded that international migration at current levels would be unable to compensate fully for the expected population decline. Between 2015 and 2050, the excess of deaths over births in Europe is projected to be 63 million, whereas the net number of international migrants to Europe is projected at 31 million, implying an overall shrinking of Europe’s population by about 32 million.

In addition, the financial costs, social integration and cultural impact of immigration have come to the political forefront in recent months. A growing tide of refugees and economic migrants – mainly from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iraq, Nigeria and Pakistan, estimated at over 800,000 – have arrived on the shores of the European Union since the beginning of 2015 to escape war, repression, discrimination and unemployment.

As part of its response, the EU is considering a plan to offer aid money and visas to African countries that agree to take back thousands of their citizens who are unlawfully residing within its borders. Also aiming to stem the record inflows of refugees, various EU members have put up fences, imposed border controls and tightened asylum rules.

Other countries that are averse to encouraging immigration, such as Japan and South Korea, have instead opted to boost labour productivity as a means of compensating for a shrinking labour force. Those governments are also reviewing legislation to encourage more women to join and remain in the labour force by offering them family friendly work environments, improved career mobility and promotions to management and senior positions.

While family-oriented measures may encourage some women to have children, those policies are costly and their overall effect on fertility is weak or unclear. The many forces pushing fertility to low levels are simply too powerful for governments to overcome with dictates, financial incentives and public relations campaigns.

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Excerpt:

By Joseph Chamie
NEW YORK, Oct 29 2015 (IPS)

Women are having fewer than two children on average in 83 countries, representing nearly half of the world’s population. And in some countries, such as Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Singapore, South Korea and Spain, average fertility levels are now closer to one child per woman than the replacement level of about two children (Figure 1).


Largely as a result of women’s reproductive decisions, the populations of 48 countries are projected to be smaller and have older age structures by mid-century. Looking further ahead, the prospects for those countries are compounded over time resulting in even smaller and older populations by the close of the century.

For example, if Japan’s fertility rate of 1.4 births per woman were to remain unchanged, its current population of 127 million would be 64 million by 2100 with more than 40 percent of the Japanese aged 65 years and older. Similar demographic outcomes occur in many other countries when low fertility levels remain unchanged, such as Germany, Italy, Russia and South Korea (Figure 2).

Based on the demographic trends observed over the last five decades, once birth rates fall below the replacement level, especially when less than 1.6 births per woman, they tend to stay there. And even if birth rates were to increase somewhat, the pool of women of childbearing age in many of the low fertility countries is shrinking, resulting in fewer babies being born.

Although relatively little supporting empirical research exists, countries tend to view demographic decline and population ageing as critical concerns. They believe those demographic trends will have serious repercussions on national interests affecting economic growth, military defence, cultural integrity, pensions and health care, especially for the elderly.

Some governments, including Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Singapore and South Korea, have concluded that intervention efforts are needed to raise their country’s birth rates in order to stem the projected decreases and rapid aging of their populations. Most recently, those twin demographic concerns have led China to announce that it is abolishing its one-child policy in favour of a two-child policy per couple.

However, despite government policies, considerable financial expenditures and various pronatalist initiatives, including national conception day, family night, “love cruises,” match-making, economic incentives, promotion of motherhood and appeals to patriotism and civic duty, efforts to raise fertility back near the replacement level have generally failed to convince women to have more children. In many low fertility countries birthrates have remained well below replacement for decades.

There are many factors or reasons why fertility levels have fallen below replacement and continue to persist at low levels. Marriage as a valued social institution has declined with divorce and separation becoming more common and acceptable. Also, marriage is no longer being viewed as just for reproductive purposes.

Opportunities for education, employment, mobility and financial independence, together with effective contraception, permit women to delay or forgo motherhood altogether. In many developed countries, especially in Europe, 10 per cent of women in their forties are childless and even in some, such as Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, the number is close to 20 per cent.

Also instead of marriage many women and men are choosing to cohabitate, thereby avoiding legal issues, social responsibilities and long-term commitments. Even if they subsequently decide to marry, many are content to continue with their partner just as a couple.

Growing numbers of young women as well as men are choosing personal self-fulfillment and career development rather than centring their lives on family and children. After years of being without children, many have become accustomed to an urban life style, higher social and economic status and unrestricted freedoms.

Women also report that they have no children because they are not able to find a suitable partner who would be willing to share equally in parenting and household chores. For example, when asked if she wanted to have a child, one young Japanese woman replied, “No, because in order to have a baby I’d have to marry a baby.”

Also, many young couples find that they cannot live on one person’s income alone and therefore both are obliged to work. The additional costs of children plus the need to save for longer years of old age place increased financial demands on household income as well as exerting powerful brakes on childbearing.

Another compelling factor accounting for low fertility in many countries is the lack of sufficient support and social services for those with children, especially single-parent families. That issue has become particularly salient given the fact that the majority of women are no longer simply mothers but are working mothers.

The demands of employment, career development and parenting combined with the costs of childrearing have also created “the hurdle of the second child.” Given those pressing circumstances, especially as childcare still falls largely on women, many mothers are reluctant to have a second child. Even if some women decide to cross the second-child hurdle, comparatively few are willing to consider having three or more children.

Some women as well as men have limited their fertility due to concerns about global overpopulation and its damaging consequences on the natural environment. They are convinced that the world would be a better and more sustainable place to live with low birthrates, which would in turn lead to a smaller future global population.

Government policies and schemes to encourage women to have more births in order to stem population decline and ageing have also encountered resistance and objections about unwarranted government interference and meddling in women’s lives. In Germany, for example, the recent introduction of a childcare allowance for stay-at-home mothers was harshly criticized for discouraging women to pursue careers as is widely promoted and expected of men and fathers.

Will governments be successful in persuading women to call off their reproductive strike and have significantly more children, thereby perhaps raising fertility rates to near the replacement level? It seems highly doubtful.

Based on their current behaviour and what they’re reporting, women in low fertility countries are not likely to increase their reproduction for the sake of the nation, limited financial incentives or other governmental pronatalist schemes. Most young women have decided not to return to the traditional, restrictive reproductive roles that their mothers and grandmothers followed. Consequently, for the foreseeable future, birthrates in low fertility countries are likely to remain below the replacement level.

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Sixty-five years after a major international summit here on malaria, the mosquito-borne disease remains a scourge and its incidence may even be rising in parts of sub-Saharan Africa due to the combined effects of climate change, agricultural practices and population displacement.

Almost half the world’s population is deemed at risk of malaria, and an estimated 214 million people will contract it in 2015, with nearly half a million dying.

Credit: FAO

“Malaria is the number one public health problem in our country,” says Babria Babiler El-Sayed, director of Sudan’s Tropical Medicine Research Institute. Sudan has begun, with the assistance of FAO and the IAEA, to release sterilized male mosquitoes into the air in hopes that they crowd out their virile brethren and lead to reduced mosquito populations.

The Unite d Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) have used this “nuclear” technique with success against the lethal tsetse fly and the produce-destroying fruit fly. Malaria is a new area, and the two agencies are experimenting across East Africa with this so-called Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) of pest control.

And yet malaria is demonstrably preventable – and that is why it is explicitly named in Sustainable Development Goal No. 3 as something to be ended by 2030.

The key is not to rely on one method or tool but to develop integrated efforts to subdue the disease, notes El-Sayed.

That fits FAO’s broader approach. While working with the IAEA on the logistics and technology of SIT, field officers emphasize the need to integrate agricultural practices ranging from crop selection, tilling technique, water use and even rural home locations.

It’s a shift from 1950, when a World Health Organization conference held in Kampala resolved to support the intensive use of Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) to eradicate the disease. As was learned the hard way, even such a potent chemical cannot on its own sustainably solve the problem. Indeed, in the emblematic case of the Tennessee Valley in the United States, it was a mass anti-poverty campaign coupled with a huge hydroelectric public-works program that led to the rapid demise of malaria without the use of chemicals in the 1930s.

Warmer climate helps bugs fly higher

Particularly alarming is malaria’s literal ascent into the densely-populated highlands of east Africa. Inhabitants of southwest Uganda and parts of Zambia and Rwanda typically lack the genetic resistance to malaria developed by farmers in mosquito-prone areas.

Climate change wreaks all sorts of changes in the risk profile of the human environment. For example, more and more Zambians are killed by crocodiles, lions and buffalos as they travel further for water in times of drought. Less headline-grabbing, but more pervasive, is the way one poor harvest can wipe out livelihoods, driving people to sell their livestock, tools and even land in a bid to survive and ending up mired in poverty. Similarly, pressure on the land – sometimes linked to civil conflict – is driving record flows of migrants, the majority of whom don’t leave their countries, but move into new ecosystems, as scores of Ugandans are doing by moving to the hilly southwest regions of this country and ultimately taking up a form of farming that enhances the risk of malaria.

Add to this the steady climb in average temperatures, which increase the potential habitat for the main malarial vectors and are “related to altitude rather than latitude,” according to recent research done by the International Food Policy Research Institute into why the incidence of malaria has risen so dramatically in Uganda’s upcountry. That spells special risks for elevations above 2,000 meters in Kenya, Ethiopia and Burundi, too.

Strategies must be integrated and local

Despite popular images today, malaria is not particularly a tropical disease. Indeed, it was the successful use of DDT in postwar Italy that galvanized the Kampala conference, even though it now appears the rising incomes linked to Marshall Plan-funded economic growth was the determining factor.

Integrated methods – farming techniques, crops themselves, and human practices such as the use of nets – are all part of any success story in malaria. Zambia’s Malaria Institute at Macha has, with international support, practically eliminated malaria in its southern district, and the credit should go primarily to an engaged community effort, according to Dr. Phil Thuma, one of the institute’s mainstays and an advocate of what he calls “full court press” tactics in battling the epidemic.

FAO has long been involved in distributing mosquito nets, one of the simple but critical tools in any effort. Indeed, one current FAO project promotes the use of insecticide-treated nets around livestock barns in Kenya and has led to a sharp uptick in dairy production as both humans and animals are healthier.

The media has long indulged in donor-depressing tales about Zambian fishermen using anti-mosquito nets to boost their catch or – in one quirky story from Uganda but published in Botswana – p eople using the nets to make bridal dresses. But in fact most people in eastern Africa have and use their government-provided nets today, and many buy another one in a sign of conviction about their utility, according to a detailed survey of actual behaviour in Tanzania.

The real problem is that many farmers have to get up before dawn, or stay out in their fields late, and as a result their work forces them to forgo protection during the biting hours.

Almost everybody knows the basics about malaria, but few had heard about climate change. Intriguingly, those with secondary or higher education tended to worry about unpredictable rain patterns while those with only primary education are focused on rising temperatures.

Empirical surveys clearly show that where cultivation practices reduce vegetation cover, temperatures rise in mosquito breeding sites. That means land use and reforestation efforts need to be part of the community-driven policy mix. Farmer field schools, a longtime FAO priority focus, are key to spreading knowledge that is locally useful, such as casting shade on breeding places or fostering fish in ponds.

Developing “malaria-smart” programs need to be drawn up with that in mind, especially given efforts to increase irrigation infrastructures to boost agricultural yields in sub-Saharan Africa. One survey in Ethiopia found that the rate of childhood malaria was seven times higher in villages within three kilometres of a microdam for irrigation than children living more than eight kilometres away.

Maize cultivation, a huge force in the region, may also be lifting the incidence of malaria because the higher-yield hybrid varieties used pollinate later in the year, helping fatten up mosquito larvae – meaning more, bigger and longer-living adult ones.

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By Joseph Chamie
NEW YORK, Oct 20 2015 (IPS)

The demographic revolutions the world is experiencing are profound and far-reaching, affecting virtually every aspect of human society. Whether in politics, business, international relations, environmental affairs or even personal matters, understanding the fundamental demographic changes underway and anticipating their juggernaut consequences can contribute considerably to the setting of meaningful goals, designing effective strategies and achieving genuine progress.

Most observers would probably not go as far as some who claim “demography is destiny.” Many, however, would likely concede that demography is way ahead of anything else in second place regarding the destiny of human populations.

Among the key demographic revolutions underway perhaps first and foremost is the unprecedented growth of world population. The 20th century saw the beginning of rapid growth with the world’s population increasing nearly four-fold during the past century, from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6.1 billion in 2000.

The world’s annual rate of growth peaked at 2.1 per cent in the late 1960s and is now 1.2 per cent. The global annual increase also hit a record high of 93 million in the late 1980s and is currently 83 million additional people annually.

World population, now at 7.3 billion, is projected to reach 9.7 billion by mid-century and 11.2 billion by the century’s close, according to the UN medium variant projection which assumes declines in high fertility and slight increases in low fertility. It is possible, however, that world population in the future could be larger or smaller than that projection (Table 1).

Source: United Nations Population Division.

If current fertility rates were to remain constant, world population would be 10.9 billion by 2050 and 26.0 billion in 2100. In contrast, if fertility rates for all countries were instantly at the replacement level of about two children per woman, world population would reach 9.3 billion by mid-century and 10.3 billion by the end of the century. Also, if the fertility rates of countries were to fall and remain well below the replacement level, world population would peak at 8.7 billion in 2050 and decline to 7.3 billion by 2100.

Nearly all of world population growth takes place in less developed regions. India and China alone account for close to one-third of the world’s annual births, 19 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively. The increase in India’s population is so rapid that it achieves in 10 days the same demographic growth as Europe over an entire year.

Differential rates of demographic growth are contributing to a New International Population Order. Whereas six of the world’s 10 largest populations in 1950 were more developed countries, today the number is two – the United States and the Russian Federation – and by 2035 the Russian Federation is projected to be displaced by Ethiopia (Figure 1).

Source: United Nations Population Division.

Europe’s population, which was double Africa’s in 1965, is expected to be half the size of Africa’s population by 2025. Other noteworthy population changes include India surpassing China in 2022, the population of the Philippines outnumbering Japan in 2029, the United Kingdom exceeding Germany in 2049 and Nigeria overtaking the United States as the third most populous country in 2049.

In 2007, for the first time in human history, the majority of the world became urban dwellers. By mid-century the growing urban population is expected to account for two-thirds of the world’s population, which is the reverse of the world urban-rural distribution in mid-20th century. Most of the world’s projected population growth over the coming decades will be taking place in urban areas.

Another demographic revolution during the 20th century – perhaps humanity’s greatest achievement – is the decline in mortality. Mortality rates across all age groups, especially infants and children, fell remarkably resulting in dramatic increases in life expectancies.

Whereas global life expectancy at birth in 1950 was 47 years, it is projected to be 78 years by mid-century. Increased human longevity is also expected to continue or even accelerate with the current number of centenarians projected to increase 60-fold by 2100.

A further decisive demographic development during the 20th century is the remarkable decline in fertility levels in most regions of the world. Over the past 50 years the average global fertility rate declined from 5 to 2.5 births per woman.

Africa remains the only major region with relatively limited fertility declines. Consequently, the populations of 28 African countries are expected to more than double by 2050 and 10 of them are projected to increase by at least by five-fold by 2100.

In contrast, 83 countries – accounting for nearly half of the world’s current population – have fertility rates below the replacement level. As a result of those low fertility rates, the populations of 48 countries, many in Europe, are projected to be smaller by 2050.

Declining fertility and increasing longevity have resulted in older population age structures. While the 20th century was one of rapid demographic growth, the 21st century is characterized by the unprecedented ageing of population age structures.

Average ages of population, for example, have increased in most countries, with the highest now at 46 years in Italy, Germany and Japan. Among the developed countries the proportion of elderly aged 65 years and older surpassed for the first time the number of children aged 0 to 14 in 2015 and that noteworthy transition is expected among the developing countries in 2075.

The age-structure revolution is resulting in major economic and social challenges for nations. Areas of special concern for governments, households and individuals include labour force, retirement, pensions, social security, care giving and health services.

International migration will continue to impact population growth, age structure and ethnic composition, especially among the major receiving countries where it has become the dominant force of demographic growth. This in turn will result in significant social, economic, political and cultural consequences not only for receiving societies but also the sending and transit countries.

Those migratory flows are expected to include mounting numbers of refugees, asylum seekers and others displaced by conflict, political upheaval and environmental degradation in many less developed countries.

The more developed regions are expected to continue being net receivers of international migrants, with an average gain of at least two million people per year over the coming decades. The outflow of the highly skilled and educated from the less developed countries, particularly in Africa and Asia, is likely to further challenge and undercut developmental efforts in many of those countries.

The revolutionary demographic changes that the world is experiencing are impacting virtually every aspect of human life. Ignoring those weighty consequences and avoiding the needed adjustments to the changing demographic landscapes will significantly impact societal wellbeing. On the other hand, fully acknowledging the revolutionary demographic changes underway and seriously preparing for the anticipated challenges will contribute significantly to improving human existence on the planet.

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Excerpt:

Shanty town near Cape Town, South Africa. Credit: Chell Hill(CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Busani Bafana
LUANDA, Sep 3 2015 (IPS)

Slums are a curse and blessing in fast urbanising Africa. They have challenged Africa’s progress towards better living and working spaces but they also provide shelter for the swelling populations seeking a life in cities.

Rural Africans are pouring into towns and cities in search of jobs and other opportunities, but African cities – 25 of which are among the 100 fastest growing cities in the world – are not delivering the much needed support services, including housing, at the same rate as people are demanding them.

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) projects that nearly 1.3 billion people – more than the current population of China – will be living in cities in Africa in the next 15 years."We must encourage, identify ‎and celebrate the continent. Our schools need to train architects and city planners in no other way than to appreciate and promote African architectural culture" – Tokunbo Omisore, past president of the African Architects Association

Africa’s urbanisation rate of four percent a year is already over-stretching the capacity of its cities to provide adequate shelter, water, sanitation, energy and even food for its growing population.

Safe and resilient cities and human settlements is one of the aims of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be agreed on in New York next month. As the SDGs replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) launched in September 2000, UN-Habitat has largely succeeded in meeting the target of taking 100 million people out of slums by the time the MDGs expired in Asia, China and part of India … but not in Africa.

However, Tokunbo Omisore, past president of the African Architects Association, believes that Africa can solve its slums situation by planning and developing towns and cities that strike a balance in the provision of housing, water sanitation, energy and transport while luring investments to create jobs.

According to Omisore, the problem lies in the fact that so far settlements have been developed for people but not with people, and he asks if Africa wants the humane aspects of its cultural values and heritage reflected in its cities or has to replicate the cities of developed nations to become classified as developed.

“Slums and sprawls demand understanding the reasons and problems resulting in their existence and identifying the class of people living there,” says Omisore.

“African governments focus on the infrastructural development of developed nations without consideration for the human development of our different communities and ensuring creation of employment opportunities which is key to the sustainability of our cities. People make the cities, not the other way around.”

By redefining slums, policy-makers in Africa can work more on understanding the rural-urban links to arrive at African solutions for African problems, he argues, calling for a “campaign of marketing Africa and appreciating what is African.”

Aisa Kirabo Kacyira, Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“We must encourage, identify ‎and celebrate the continent. Our schools need to train architects and city planners in no other way than to appreciate and promote African architectural culture.”

At a time Africa is grappling with the issue of land tenure, particularly in agriculture, limited and often expensive land in urban settlements is posing the question of whether Africa should build up or build across, and there are those who argue that densification is the answer to Africa’s housing woes.

At the 2nd Africa Urban Infrastructure Investment Forum hosted by United Cities and Local Government-Africa (UCLG-A) and the government of Angola in Luanda in April,  Aisa Kirabo Kacyira, Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat argued that densification is an avenue for the transformation of Africa and its cities.

“If urbanisation should be possible and if we are going to build landed housing without going up, it simply means it will be expensive, but if we have to densify then we need to go up,” said Kacyira.

“Yes, let us stick to our identity and culture, but let us stick to principles that make economic sense. We are not going to have vibrant cities by running away from the problem and spreading and sprawling.”

Kacyira also argued that by planning, reducing desertification and recycling waste, African cities can help reduce their carbon footprint, a key issue on the post-MDG agenda.

Meanwhile, a Kenya housing project could represent a model for the future of

Housing in Africa. Muungano Wa Wanavijiji, a federation of slum dwellers, has partnered with Shack/Slum Dwellers International to provide decent shelter for people living in slums by creating a low cost three-level house called  ‘The Footprint’, which costs 1,000 dollars.

The project has built 300 houses in two settlements this year. Dwellers pay 20 percent towards the structure and are given support to access a microloan covering 80 percent of the cost.

The UCLG-A network which represents over 1,000 cities in Africa, estimates that Africa needs to mobilise investments of 80 billion dollars a year for upgrading urban infrastructure to meet the needs of urban residents.

Edited by Phil Harris   

With little fanfare, the German IFO Institute for Economic Research recently published a report on population projections for Germany which states simply that the country’s population is shrinking fast.

The country has lost 1.5 million inhabitants since the last census in 2011 and it is estimated that it will have fallen from the 82.5 million in 2003 to 66 million in 2060, when Great Britain (if it still exists as such), will be the most populated country in Europe.

Roberto Savio

Meanwhile, a European Commission Population Policy Acceptance study found that 23 percent of German males thought that “zero” was the ideal family size, and this despite the 243 billion euros that the government spends each year in family subsidies.

The IFO report also states that, without immigrant families, the number of newly-born children would only reach 400,000 in a country of 82 million, and that even if German couples were to start having children again, it would take two decades to have citizens contributing to the social system.

It concludes that a decline in income and productivity because of the aging population is a serious concern for everybody for the near future.

This is happening in the European country which has most immigrants – close to 10 million.  Last year, Germany accepted almost 700,000 immigrants, placing itself after United States in terms of numbers. Nevertheless, even with that “open” policy, its population is destined to a massive decline.

“Instead of opposing populist parties with a campaign of facts, European governments try to neutralise them by incorporating their requests”
At European level, we see the same chilling trend. According to population projections from Eurostat, the official statistical agency of the European Union, the projected values for Europe’s population “are unprecedented in any human population.”

It says that “whereas in 1960 there were on average about three youngsters (aged 0-14 years) for every elderly person (aged 65 or over), by 2060 there may be more than two elderly people for each youngster: in other words, more grandparents for fewer grandchildren than in the past.”

Let us add to all this a Migration Policy Debate paper issued in 2014 by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which states that ”contrary to widespread public belief, low-educated immigrants have a better fiscal position – the difference between their contributions and the benefits they receive – than their native born peers.”

“Where immigrants have a less favourable fiscal position, this is not driven by a greater dependence on social benefits, but rather by the fact they often have lower wages and thus tend to contribute less … Efforts to better integrate immigrants should be seen as an investment rather than a cost.”

Finally, the U.K. government has declared that, although migrants make up only eight percent of the population, they contribute 10 percent to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), and that the economic growth rate of the United Kingdom would be some 0.5 percent lower for the next two years if net immigration were to cease.

Now, what is impressive is that those data remain for the specialists even though they have vital political implications. No newspaper has been publishing them and no parliamentarian – let alone government – has used them.

This simply because we now have anti-immigration (and usually right-wing and anti-euro) political parties which have sprung up in every European country, especially since the financial crisis of 2008, and this argument is now taboo.

The fact that the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) considers that Europe will no longer be competitive in just a few decades, because its aging population will not be competitive and a major burden on the social system, unless it opens the door to at least 10 million people, is totally ignored.

Instead of opposing populist parties with a campaign of facts, European governments try to neutralise them by incorporating their requests. After the anti-immigrant and anti-euro U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) took four million votes in May’s general elections, Prime Minister David Cameron has embarked on a campaign among European colleagues to demand that he be allowed to expel European immigrants if they do not find a job within six months and, among others, cancel their rights to social benefits.

This is a brilliant example of the difference between a statesman and a politician. A statesman does what is good for his country, even if that costs him dear.

When German Chancellor Helmut Khol was in favour of European integration and the euro, he had to face very hostile public opinion. For the Germans, the Deutsche mark was a symbol of stability and trust, and the idea of a new currency shared with other less responsible people revived memories of the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic. At the same time, Europeans were suspicious of German intentions.

Kohl decided to accept a non-German, Wim Duisenberg of the Netherlands, as the first governor of the European Central Bank to make the Euro possible.

Today, the existence of Pegida, a German far right anti-Islam political organisation which boasts a few thousand members at most, is enough to paralyse Chancellor Angela Merkel, a politician. She has voiced her opposition to the quota proposed by the European Union for sharing the load of immigrants entering Europe via the Mediterranean.

Her position has immediately been shared by France, with the United Kingdom and Denmark asking to be left out, and several Eastern and Central Europe countries agitating against immigrants … even though they are the countries which provide the bulk of internal immigrants in Europe!

So, we have the data, the projections, and the hard fact that Europe is heading for decline unless it changes policy and acts to increase its population. And, speaking of projections, in the meantime the population of Africa is expected to double.

When will the European political class wake up and realise that time is passing? (END/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. 

Fathi Said and Mustafa Jarboua, Gazan fishermen who have seen their livelihoods destroyed by Israel’s blockade. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
GAZA CITY, Feb 27 2015 (IPS)

The beautiful Mediterranean Sea laps gently onto the white sandy beach near Gaza City’s port. Fishing boats dot the beach as fishermen tend to their boats and fix their nets.

However, this scenic and peaceful setting belies a depressing reality. Gaza’s once thriving fishing industry has been decimated by Israel’s blockade of the coastal territory since 2007.

Approximately 3,600 Gazan fishermen, and their dependents, estimated at over 30,000 people, used to rely on fishing for a living.

Fish also provided a basic source of food for Gaza’s poverty-stricken population of over 1.5 million people.“Access restrictions imposed by Israel at land and sea continue to undermine the security of Palestinians and the agricultural sector in Gaza, which is the primary source of income for thousands of farmers and fishermen and their families” – U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)

Following the blockade of the Gaza Strip, more than 90 percent of Gaza’s fishermen have had to depend on aid to survive.

Mustafa Jarboua, 55, the father of 10 children from Shati refugee camp, sits on the beach near his boat mending his nets. He has been a fisherman for 17 years and has witnessed the fishing industry’s decline since Israel first started placing restrictions on the fishermen in the early 2000s, culminating in the 2007 blockade.

“Before the blockade I used to earn about NIS 2000-3000 per month (500-750 dollars),” he told IPS.

“Now I’m lucky if I can earn NIS 500-600 (126 -152 dollars) a month because we can only fish a few days each week depending on when there are sufficient fish.

“The shoals closer to shore have been depleted with most of the better quality fish at least nine miles out to sea. I have to rely on money from the Ministry of Social Affairs to survive.

“I can’t afford meat and have to buy second-hand clothes for my children. Buying treats on holidays is no longer possible,” said Jarboua.

According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “in the late 1990s, annual catches from the Gaza Strip’s four fishing wharves located in Rafah, Khan Younis, Deir Al Balah and Gaza City averaged more than 3,500 tonnes and generated an annual income of over 10 million dollars.”

The already dire situation was exacerbated during last year’s July-August war with Israel, reducing the area in which the fishermen can fish to six nautical miles. After the Oslo agreement in 1993, the distance had been 20 nautical miles.

However, fishermen are still being shot at and killed and injured even within that 6-mile nautical zone.

Jarboua pointed to his boat and showed IPS the bullet holes where the Israeli navy had fired on him while out to sea.

Others fishermen have had their boats destroyed and been arrested, Jarboua’s friend Fathi Said, also from Shati camp, told IPS that his brother had been arrested by the Israelis several weeks ago while only five nautical miles out to sea.

Sami Al Quka, 35, from Shati had his hand blown off when the Israeli navy shot at him while he was within the approved fishing zone.

Brother Ibrahim Al Quka, 55, said he used to earn about 50-100 dollars a day before Israel’s blockade.

“Now on a good day I only earn about 30 dollars and then I can buy food for my family for a few days. After that I have to rely on the United Nations to survive,” Al Quka told IPS.

Oxfam GB confirms the fishermen’s claims: “Even when fishing within the six mile restriction, fishermen face being shot or arrested by the Israeli navy. In the first half of 2014, there were at least 177 incidents of naval fire against fishermen – nearly as many as in all of 2013.”

OCHA reported in its weekly Humanitarian Report in mid-February that “incidents involving Israeli forces opening fire into the Access Restricted Areas (ARAs) on land and at sea continued on a daily basis, with at least 17 such incidents reported during the week.”

“In at least two incidents,” said the report, “Israeli naval forces opened fire at Palestinian fishing boats reportedly sailing within the Israeli-declared six nautical mile fishing limit, forcing them ashore.

“Access restrictions imposed by Israel at land and sea continue to undermine the security of Palestinians and the agricultural sector in Gaza, which is the primary source of income for thousands of farmers and fishermen and their families.”

Gaza’s farmers are also unable to access their land near the borders with Israel which is imposing “security zones” of up to 1.5 km in some of Gaza’s most fertile land. Dozens of farmers have been shot and killed or injured after trying to reach their farms.

The Gaza Strip’s dense population is crammed into an area 6-12 km wide by 41 km in length.

Gaza’s struggling economy has been further battered by Israel’s almost complete ban on exports, including manufactured goods and agricultural products which formed a major part of its economy, and imports.

“Severe trade restrictions on both imports and exports have stifled the private sector, forcing several thousands of businesses to close in the past few years,” according to the ‘GAZA Detailed Needs Assessment (DNA) and Recovery Framework: Social Protection Sub-Sector‘ report produced by the Palestinian Government, European Union, World Bank and the United Nations.

“Since the economic blockade (which Egypt has now joined) was put in place in 2007, exports from Gaza have dropped by 97 per cent,” added the report. “Even companies that are still operating can only produce at high risk and with limited profit, due to elevated production costs, widespread power cuts and the almost complete ban on exports.”

“The basic needs of Gazans are not being met,” Arwa Mhanna from Oxfam told IPS. “Poverty is deepening, vital services have been affected and livelihoods crippled. The situation is moving towards more violence and further humanitarian tragedy.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

A video ad is being screened before every match at the Africa Cup of Nations currently under way in Equatorial Guinea. Part of African Football Against Hunger, a joint initiative by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Confederation of African Football (CAF), it shows a player dribbling a football, taking a shot and scoring – the winning kick is a metaphor for ending hunger in Africa by 2025.

“Football, like no other game, brings people together, within nations and across country lines. It’s exactly this type of coming together we need to reach the goal of zero hunger in Africa,” FAO Director of Communications Mario Lubetkin told IPS in an online interview.

As part of the African Football Against Hunger campaign, a video ad is being featured at matches throughout the 2015 African Cup of Nations tournament in Equatorial Guinea. Credit: FAO

“Our aim is to harness the popularity of football to raise awareness of the ongoing fight against hunger on the continent, and to rally support for home-grown initiatives that harness Africa’s economic successes to fund projects that help communities in areas struggling with food insecurity and build resilient livelihoods,” he explained.

Last year, African governments came together and undertook to wipe out chronic hunger among their peoples by 2025, in line with the United Nations’ Zero Hunger campaign.

Hunger in Africa is pervasive.  In 2014, some 227 million people across the continent suffered from hunger. According to FAO’s 2014 ‘State of Food Insecurity in the World’ report, one in four people across sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished.“Football, like no other game, brings people together, within nations and across country lines. It’s exactly this type of coming together we need to reach the goal of zero hunger in Africa” – Mario Lubetkin, FAO Director of Communications

And despite its vast fertile lands and a youth bulge, Africa continuous to spend over 40 billion dollars every year on food imports, according to Tumusiime Rhoda Peace, Commissioner for Rural Economy and Agriculture for the African Union Commission (AUC).

“The fact that the continent’s population is growing means that while Africa has made progress in hunger eradication over the last decade, the total number of hungry people on the continent has risen. This brings additional urgency to fund home-grown solutions that allow families and communities to strengthen food security and build resilient livelihoods,” Lubetkin told IPS.

Placing a more direct link between football and the fight against hunger, he said adequate nutrition is essential to both cognitive and physical development and to achieving one’s goals – none of the players in the cup would be able to perform at the level they do without adequate nutrition.

“The human potential that is lost by persistent hunger is still immense. It is in the interest of everybody to join forces to make hunger history. Fighting hunger is a team sport – we need everybody to get involved,” he explained.

It is estimated that over 650 million people worldwide will be watching the African Cup of Nations, which this year sees teams from Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, D.R. Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia and Zambia competing for the trophy from Jan. 17 to Feb. 8.

The initiators of the African Football Against Hunger campaign hope that with the enormous number of people exposed to the campaign, more citizens will become engaged in the struggle against hunger.

“History shows that when citizens are engaged governments are encouraged to allocate funding to hunger eradication,” Lubetkin said. “Citizen engagement also often leads communities to come together to find innovative solutions for shared problems.”

He went on to explain that football events are also being used to spread the message about the work of the Africa Solidarity Trust Fund for Food Security, which was set up by African leaders in 2013, and to encourage countries to become involved in the Fund as donors, project partners and sources of local knowledge.

“The on-the-ground work is done through the Fund, through projects that increase youth employment, improve resource management, make livelihoods more resilient and eradicate hunger by building sustainable food production.”

So far the Fund has leveraged 40 million dollars from African countries to empower communities in 30 countries by building job opportunities for young people, help them use their available resources better and bounce back quicker in situations of crisis.

FAO and the Fund are complementing the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAAADP), a continent-wide initiative to boost agricultural productivity in Africa. Launched by governments 10 years ago, CAADP has been instrumental in bringing agriculture back to the discussion table as a priority sector, according to Komla Bissi, Senior CAADP Advisor at the AUC.

“Our governments are recommitting resources, and it’s time to bring the private sector on board,” he told IPS. He said 43 of Africa’s 54 countries have so far committed to the process; 40 have signed the CAADP compact and 30 of them have developed agriculture sector investment plans.

“The job of eradicating hunger and making food production sustainable is a long-haul game and these ongoing projects – along with future ones – are the seeds of progress in the fight against hunger,” Lubetkin concluded.

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, Sep 19 2014 (IPS)

At the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), heads of government and the international community committed themselves to reducing the number of hungry people in the world by half. Five years later, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) lowered this level of ambition by only seeking to halve the proportion of the hungry.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The latest State of World Food Insecurity (SOFI) report for 2014 by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme and International Fund for Agricultural Development estimates that 805 million people – one in nine people worldwide – remain chronically hungry: 789 million are in developing countries where this share has declined from 23.4 to 13.5 percent.

By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015.

Some 25 countries have made more impressive progress, achieving the more ambitious WFS target of halving the number of hungry. However, the number of hungry people in the world has only declined by one-fifth from the billion estimated for 1990-92.

Major effort needed

The proportion of undernourished people – those regularly not able to consume enough food for an active and healthy life – has decreased from 23.4 percent in 1990–1992 to 13.5 percent in 2012–2014. This is significant because a large and growing number of countries show that achieving and sustaining rapid progress in reducing hunger is feasible.

However, the MDG target of halving the chronically undernourished people’s share of the world’s population by the end of 2015 cannot be met at the current rate of progress. Meeting the target is still possible, however, with a sufficient, immediate additional effort to accelerate progress, especially in countries which have showed little progress so far.

Progress uneven

“By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015”
Overall progress has been highly uneven. All but 14 million of the world’s hungry live in developing countries. Some countries and regions have seen only slow progress in reducing hunger, while the absolute number of hungry has even increased in several cases. While sub-Saharan Africa has the highest share of the chronically hungry, almost one in four, South Asia has the highest number, with over half a billion undernourished.

Marked differences in reducing undernourishment have persisted across regions. There have been significant reductions in both the estimated share and number of undernourished in most countries in Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean – where the MDG target of halving the hunger rate has been reached, or nearly reached.

West Asia has seen a rise in the share of the hungry compared with 1990–1992, while progress in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Oceania has not been sufficient to meet the MDG hunger target by 2015.

In several countries, underweight and stunting persist in children, even when undernourishment is low and most people have access to sufficient food. Such nutrition failures are due not only to insufficient food access, but also to poor health conditions and the high incidence of diseases such as diarrhoea, malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

Food security and nutrition

Hunger is conventionally measured in terms of the prevalence of undernourishment, the FAO estimate of chronic inadequacy of dietary energy. While such a measure is useful for estimating hunger, it needs to be complemented by more measures to capture other dimensions of food security.

SOFI’s suite of indicators measures different dimensions of food security. Information thus generated can guide priority policy actions. For example, in countries where low undernourishment coexists with high malnutrition, specially-designed nutrition-enhancing interventions may be crucial to address early childhood stunting.

With the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals likely to seek to overcome hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, FAO has recently developed and tested a new Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) in over 150 countries to measure the severity of reported food insecurity.

Lessons

Improvements in nutrition generally require complementary policies, including improving health conditions, hygiene, water supply and education. More sophisticated and creative approaches to coordination and governance are needed, with more, and more effective, resources to end hunger and malnutrition in our lifetimes.

With high levels of deprivation, unemployment and underemployment continuing and likely to prevail in the world in the foreseeable future, poverty and hunger are unlikely to be overcome without universalising social protection to all in need, but also to provide the means for future livelihoods and resilience.

The forthcoming Second International Conference of Nutrition in Rome on November 19-21 is expected to articulate coherent bases for accelerated progress to overcome undernutrition as well as for greater international cooperation and support for enhanced and more integrated national nutrition efforts.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

Smog over Cairo. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria reaffirmed their commitment Sep. 17 “to support international cities’ efforts to lead in the global fight against climate change”. Credit: Wikipedia

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Sep 17 2014 (IPS)

If former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg had used the Vélib’ – Paris’ public bicycle sharing system – to arrive at the headquarters of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development here Wednesday, he might have sent a stronger message about the need for cities to be “empowered to take the lead in combating climate change”.

Yet, despite arriving by car, Bloomberg, the United Nations Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, spoke persuasively about how efficient environmental policies at local level can lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

A key step is to make populations more aware of the issues by sending the right message, so that voters can make informed decisions, Bloomberg said during an open “discussion” with OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría.

For example, if people saw an image of a baby on television with “two or three cigarettes dangling out of his or her mouth” and understood that as a symbol of the polluted air that they were breathing in their city, or the air that their children would breathe, the message would hit home, said Bloomberg, the founder and principal owner of the international media company that bears his name.If people saw an image of a baby on television with ‘two or three cigarettes dangling out of his or her mouth’ and understood that as a symbol of the polluted air that they were breathing in their city, or the air that their children would breathe, the message would hit home – Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York

“People will understand the issue, they will understand how it affects them … and what they can do about it,” he said, adding that such understanding will affect their political choices.

At the meeting, Bloomberg and Gurría “reaffirmed their commitment to support international cities’ efforts to lead in the global fight against climate change” and urged governments to adopt policies to achieve this.

Their pledge ties in with the former mayor’s current role: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed Bloomberg as a special envoy in January to assist him in “consultations with mayors and related key stakeholders in order to raise political will and mobilise action among cities as part of his long-term strategy to advance efforts on climate change”.

This assistance includes “bringing concrete solutions” to the 2014 Climate Summit that the UN Secretary-General will host in New York on Sep. 23.

However, many non-governmental organisations regard this Summit as a gathering where world leaders will once again be “fiddling with flimsy pledges instead of committing to binding carbon reductions”, according to environmental group Friends of the Earth.

“A parade of leaders trying to make themselves look good does not bring us any closer to the real action we need to address the climate crisis. This one-day Summit will not deliver any substantial action in the fight against climate change,” said Dipti Bhatnagar, climate justice and energy coordinator for Friends of the Earth International (FoEI).

“World leaders are falling far short of delivering what we need to truly tackle climate change in a just way. Their flimsy non-binding pledges in New York will do little to improve their track record. What we urgently need are equitable and binding carbon reductions, not flimsy voluntary ones,” she said in a statement.

Friends of the Earth will join with thousands of protesters on Sep. 21 to march in New York, Paris, London and several other cities around the world to “demand climate justice, standing with climate and dirty energy-affected communities worldwide”, the group said.

Some of the cities where the demonstrations will occur have already taken steps to reduce emissions and improve the quality of life for residents, as Bloomberg pointed out in Paris. But political awareness needs to be heightened so that special interest groups are not the ones imposing directions, the former mayor said.

Over three consecutive terms as mayor of New York, where he reportedly spent 268 million dollars of his own money on election campaigns, Bloomberg set up schemes to make New York “greener”, including recycling food waste and aiming at converting organic waste to biogas.

For Bloomberg and Gurría, cities are a” crucial part of efforts to slow climate change” because urban areas produce more than two-thirds of the world’s carbon emissions. The share of the global population living in cities is also set to increase to 70 percent, or 6.4 billion people, by 2050 from the current roughly 50 percent, says the OECD.

“Cities have the potential to make a great difference in the global effort to confront climate change: they account for more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and two-thirds of the world’s energy use today,” according to Bloomberg and Gurría.

“Mayors have, within their authorities, many ways to reduce emissions, change the way energy is consumed, and prepare for the impacts of climate change,” they added.

Both men called on world leaders gathering at the UN Climate Summit to “look for ways to help their cities accelerate their progress and empower them to do even more.”

“We are all aware of the immense scale of the global challenge presented by climate change,” Gurría said. “It is no longer simply an environmental issue. It is an economic and a social issue. It is vital to our quality of life and to the life of our fragile earth. Action is becoming ever-more urgent.”

The OECD and Bloomberg Philanthropies also issued a “Policy Perspectives” document Wednesday that recommends measures for enabling cities to fight global warming. The recommendations include actively involving the private sector because “green” policies cannot be separated from economic growth, according to Gurría.

He said that various sectors needed to work together to “enable real progress in reaching international climate goals and a meaningful, global agreement next year in Paris,” where the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference will take place.

Friends of the Earth and many other NGOs remain unconvinced, however, of the commitment by wealthy nations such as those that are members of the OECD. The group said that the positions of developed countries’ leaders “are increasingly driven by the narrow economic and financial interests of wealthy elites, the fossil fuel industry and multinational corporations.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Palestinian families take shelter at an UNRWA school in Gaza City, after evacuating their homes in the northern Gaza Strip, July 2014. UNRWA has now launched a humanitarian reconstruction programme. Credit: Shareef Sarhan/UNRWA Archives

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Sep 17 2014 (IPS)

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has launched an ambitious recovery plan for Gaza following the 50-day devastating war between Hamas and Israel which has left the coastal territory decimated.

However, the successful implementation of this plan requires enormous international funding as well as a long-term ceasefire to enable the lifting of the joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the territory.

“We are working on a 24-month plan aimed at 70 percent of Gaza’s population who are refugees but this will only be possible if the blockade is lifted and construction materials and other goods are allowed into Gaza,” Chris Gunness, spokesman for the UN Relief and Welfare Agency (UNRWA), told IPS.

“Taxpayers are being asked once again to fund the reconstruction of Gaza and at this point there are no security guarantees, so a permanent ceasefire is essential if we are not to return to the repetitive cycle of destruction and then reconstruction,” Gunness said.“If Gaza is to recover and Gazans are to have any hope for the future, it is vital that the international community intervenes to help those Gazan civilians who have and continue to pay the highest price” – Chris Gunness, UNRWA spokesman

The attack on Gaza, euphemistically code-named “Operation Protective Edge” by the Israelis, now stands as the most severe military campaign against Gaza since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967.

“The devastation caused this time is unprecedented in recent memory. Parts of Gaza resemble an earthquake zone with 29 km of damaged infrastructure,” said Gunness.

Following the ceasefire, the Palestinian death toll stood at 2,130 and more than 11,000 injured.

Over 18,000 housing units were destroyed, four hospitals and five clinics were closed due to severe damage, while 17 of Gaza’s 32 hospitals and 45 of 97 its primary health clinics were substantially damaged. Reconstruction is estimated to cost over 7 billion dollars.

According to UNRWA, 22 schools were completely destroyed and 118 damaged during Israeli bombardments, while many higher education facilities were damaged.

Some 110,000 displaced Gazans remain in UN emergency shelters or with host families, according to UNRWA.

The reconstruction of shelters alone will cost over 380 million dollars, 270 million of which relates to Palestinian refugees.

According to the Palestinian Federation of Industries, 419 businesses and workshops were damaged, with 129 completely destroyed.

“We have a two-year plan in place which addresses the spectrum of Palestinian needs. Currently we have 300 engineers on the ground in Gaza assessing reconstruction needs,” Gunness told IPS.

Palestinian boy inspecting the remains of a house which was destroyed during an air strike in Central Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, July 2014. Credit: Shareef Sarhan/UNRWA Archives

UNRWA’s strategic approach has been divided into the relief period, the early recovery period and the recovery period of up to four months following the cessation of hostilities.

“The relief period, which will continue for the next four months, involves urgent humanitarian intervention including providing shelter, food and medical needs for displaced Gazans,” said the UNTWA spokesman.

“The early recovery period will continue for the next year and will address the critical needs of the population such as repairing damage to environmental infrastructure, restoring UNRWA facilities and supplementary assistance for livelihood provisioning.

“The recovery period will last for two years and will focus on the impact of the conflict through a sustainable livelihoods programme promoting self-sufficiency and completing the transition of UNRWA emergency and extended-stay shelters back to intended use and full operational capacity.”

One thrust of UNRWA’s programme will focus on protection, gender and disability. The increased numbers of female-headed households and households with disabled men is having an impact on unemployment patterns.

“Women are the primary caregivers and are closely linked to homes and the psychological trauma being exhibited by children. Furthermore, there have already been signs of increased gender-based violence,” explained Gunness.

“We want to focus on raising awareness of domestic violence, how to deal with violence in the home and building healthy and equal relationships through our gender empowerment programme.”

The UN agency will also address food distribution by providing minimum caloric requirements through basic food commodities, including bread, corned beef or tuna, dairy products and fresh vegetables. Non-food items provided include hygiene kits and water tanks for 42,000 families.

Emergency repairs to shelters are also being undertaken with 70 percent more homes destroyed or damaged than during the 2008-2009 hostilities. Emergency cash assistance for refugee families to meet a range of basic needs is also being distributed.

“Due to the enormous damage done to hospitals and health facilities, UNRWA has so far established 22 health points to provide basic health services to the sick and wounded, and health teams have been deployed to monitor key health issues,” noted Gunness.

The psychological impact of the war is another area that concerns UNRWA.  “There isn’t a person in Gaza who hasn’t been affected by the war. In consultation with UNRWA’s Community Health Programme, we have hired additional counsellors and youth coordinators who will provide a range of services to groups and individuals.”

“If Gaza is to recover and Gazans are to have any hope for the future,” said Gunness, “it is vital that the international community intervenes to help those Gazan civilians who have and continue to pay the highest price.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Members of Abu Sheira's family in front of the tent they set up in the grounds of Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

By Khaled Alashqar
GAZA CITY, Sep 8 2014 (IPS)

“When the [Israeli] shelling started, I gathered up my family and headed for what I though was a safe place, like a school, but then that became overcrowded and lacked sanitation, so we ended up in the grounds of the hospital.”

Islam Abu Sheira from Beit Hanoun, a city on the north-eastern edge of the Gaza Strip, was speaking to IPS in front of what has been his family’s makeshift ‘home’ at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City for the last two months. His eyes misted over as he recalled his devastated home and his efforts to find a safe refuge for his family."I found no other safe place to shelter in but Al-Shifa Hospital. Together with our seven children we fled into the hospital grounds and slept our first night under trees to escape the Israeli missiles that were destroying whole areas, killing entire families" – Islam Abu Sheira, a refugee from Beit Hanoun, Gaza Strip

In his forties, Islam described his family’s ordeal after Israeli shelling left them homeless and they first sought refuge in a school run by UNRWA, the U.N. relief and development agency for Palestinian refugees, and were then forced by overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions to move out and seek shelter elsewhere.

“I found no other safe place to shelter in but Al-Shifa Hospital. Together with our seven children we fled into the hospital grounds and slept our first night under trees to escape the Israeli missiles that were destroying whole areas, killing entire families, ” said Islam,  adding that “during the war, the only thing we were looking for was a place that could protect us from the shelling.”

Like the majority of Palestinian families whose homes were destroyed, they have lost their belongings and, for the time being, their chances of living a life of dignity. Most families in the Gaza Strip were forced to leave their homes so quickly that they had no time to take anything with them.

“We simply have no livelihood and my children sleep every night on the ground without even a blanket to cover them,” lamented Islam. “We have been living a primitive life since we fled our home without even taking the clothes we need.”

As the numbers of people escaping the shelling mounted, so did the difficulty of sheltering them. Schools did their best, but there were insufficient basic necessities and medical supplies, and they were housing four or five persons, if not more, in each classroom.

Palestinian families whose homes were destroyed by Israeli shelling of Gaza sheltering in a UNRWA school. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

Jamila Saad, a housewife who is taking care of her 12-member family and also fled to one of the UNRWA schools, told IPS: “The school was receiving more and more refugees, and we and the other refugee families were sharing one toilet. We need a better life for our children and we hope that our home will soon be rebuilt so that we can begin a new life there in our new home.”

The complex and harsh conditions that the Palestinian refugees are suffering in schools and other shelter centres has pushed most international organisations to provide the refugees with as much aid as possible, but this is far from finding a final solution for the refugees’ suffering.

The conditions of the thousands of refugees who have lost their homes has placed the new Palestinian government before an enormous challenge and a huge responsibility to provide these refugee families with care and a secure environment, as well take on the responsibility of implementing the reconstruction programmes financially aided by the European Union and donor states in accordance with ceasefire agreement brokered in Cairo between Israel and Hamas, especially in terms of the reconstruction of Gaza.

Mufid al-Hasayna, Minister of Public Works and Housing in the new Palestinian unity government, told IPS that “the amount of destruction of houses and economic facilities is massive, and the population of Gaza is living under hard conditions, so we are working hard to improve the living conditions of people. We are working on programmes to start reconstruction of the Gaza Strip and rebuild destroyed houses and

Al-Hasayna believes that the blurred vision Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have of their future after 50 days of war and their constant fear of being retargeted by the Israeli occupation forces have only added to a worsening of their situation.

Amjad Shawa, Director of the Palestinian NGO Network, told IPS: “The harsh circumstances that the Gaza Strip underwent over the 50 days of the Israeli occupation’s war reduced the population’s access to water and food and threatened people’s security, while the bombing of residential high ‘towers’ housing dozens of families has left serious impacts on civilians.

According to Shawa, the housing situation is now all the more dramatic because, even before Israel’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’, the Gaza Strip was already suffering from the deficit of 70,000 housing units that had been destroyed in the 2009 and 2012 wars.

“Following the two wars, scheduled housing projects to rebuild the infrastructure were not implemented, and the deficit of housing units has reached a state that has put the population in a situation of real disaster,” Shawa told IPS.

He called on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to form an independent body of Palestinian civil society organisations to create a plan for reconstruction of the Gaza Strip.

According to a report prepared by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), in June 2014 the Gaza Strip was home to an estimated population of 1.76 million living in a coastal area that extends along the Mediterranean Sea and covers approximately 365 square kilometres with a maximum width of 12 kilometres.

The PCBS believes that Gaza Strip’s narrow surface area and high population has contributed to some extent to the distribution of people in large blocks and increased its population density, turning the Strip into one the most densely populated areas in the world.

Population density in the Gaza Strip has reached 2,744 per square kilometre, and experts say this means that food, health and education should be the top priorities for the future development agenda of decision-makers.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Fish cages on the Nile River. Experts are calling for a more holistic approach to aquaculture. Credit: Cam Mcgrath/IPS

By Cam McGrath
CAIRO, Jul 26 2014 (IPS)

Less than four percent of Egypt’s land mass is suitable for agriculture, and most of it confined to the densely populated Nile River Valley and Delta. With the nation’s population of 85 million expected to double by 2050, government officials are grappling with ways of ensuring food security and raising nutritional standards.

“With the drive toward increasing food production and efficiency, Egypt is going to have to become smarter in how it uses water and land for food production,” says aquaculture expert Malcolm Beveridge. “It would make sense to bring aquaculture together with agriculture in order to increase food production per unit of land and water.”“Why are we using water first for agriculture then taking the drainage for aquaculture? Surely it should be the opposite – use water first for aquaculture and after that to irrigate fields” – Sherif Sadek, general manager of the Cairo-based Aquaculture Consultant Office

One possibility under study is to adopt integrated aquaculture, a holistic approach to food production in which the wastes of one commercially cultured species are recycled as food or fertiliser for another. Projects typically co-culture several aquatic species, but the synergistic approach also encourages the broader integration of fish production, livestock rearing and agriculture.

“An integrated approach would seem the logical next step for Egypt’s aquaculture industry in that it can significantly reduce water requirements while increasing fish farmers’ revenues,” Beveridge told IPS.

Egypt’s aquaculture sector has witnessed explosive growth in recent decades. Annual production of farmed fish climbed from 50,000 tonnes in the late 1990s to over one million tonnes last year – exceeding the combined output of all other Middle East and African nations.

But fish farming as it is predominantly practised in Egypt – by simply digging a pit and filling it with water and fish – has a major drawback. A decades-old government decree requires that drinking water and crop irrigation be given first call on Nile water, leaving aquaculture projects to operate in downstream filth, contaminating fish and limiting productivity.

“Over 90 percent of the aquaculture in Egypt is based on agricultural drainage water, with plenty of pesticides, sewage and industrial effluents,” says Sherif Sadek, general manager of the Cairo-based Aquaculture Consultant Office.

“Why are we using water first for agriculture then taking the drainage for aquaculture? Surely it should be the opposite – use water first for aquaculture and after that to irrigate fields.”

Integrated aquaculture reverses the water-use paradigm, with tangible benefits to both fish farms and farmers’ crops. While the practice is still in its infancy in Egypt, several projects have demonstrated its commercial viability.

At the El Keram farm in the desert northwest of Cairo, farmers use pumped water for tilapia culture, recycling the water into ponds where catfish are raised. The drainage from the catfish ponds, rich in organic nutrients, is then used to irrigate and fertilise clover fields. Sheep and goats that graze on these fields generate manure that is used to produce biogas to heat the tanks where fish fry are raised, or to warm the fish ponds in the winter.

“The project has demonstrated how farmers who switched to aquaculture after salinity rendered their fields infertile can increase their productivity and profits using the same volume of water,” says Sadek.

Other integrated projects on reclaimed desert land culture marine aquatic species such as sea bass and sea bream, directing the downstream wastewater to pools of red tilapia, a table fish able to tolerate high salinity. According to Sadek, the brine from these ponds can be used to grow salicornia, a halophyte in demand as a biofuel input, livestock fodder and as a gourmet salad ingredient.

“Salicornia can be irrigated with extremely salty water and produces seeds and oil, as well as fodder for camels and sheep,” says Sadek.

According to development experts, integrated aquaculture delivers greater efficiencies, requiring up to 70 percent less water than comparable non-integrated production systems. It is also a cost-effective method of disposing of wastes and saves resource-poor farmers from having to purchase fertilisers.

Beveridge says small-scale Egyptian aquaculture ventures unable to afford the complex closed-loop system employed at El Keram could still benefit from integrated practices that would allow them to harvest commercial food products year-round.

“Egypt’s aquaculture industry has a problem in that the growing season is relatively short,” he notes. “During the months of December to February temperatures are too low to sustain much (fish) growth. And during that period, farmers who try to overwinter their fish often lose substantial numbers to stress and disease.”

Pilot studies have shown that fish farmers are able to capitalise on the nutrients locked up in the mud at the bottom of their earthen fish ponds.

“The idea is that you drain down your ponds in November, harvest your fish, then plant a crop of wheat in your pond bottom that you would harvest in March before flooding the stubble area with water and reintroducing young fish,” Beveridge explains.

Fidelis Molao was 33 when he ran in elections to become a member of parliament in Botswana for the first time in 2010. He was one of the youngest MPs in the country at the time, and still is. He has long championed youth rights.

Across the Atlantic, in Trinidad and Tobago, medical doctor and MP Amery Browne is 41 and the youngest member of the opposition party, the People’s National Movement, in the lower house of parliament. He previously served in the government as minister of social development and has made rights to health care a central part of his work.“There are some people in my parliament who were elected before I was born, and you can see that they’ve lost steam and energy."

The two parliamentarians reflect the changing face of politics in developing or middle-income countries. With the world now having the biggest percentage of young people in history, youth – long under-represented in politics – is making its presence felt.

“When I was head of the Youth Council in my country, we used to have a statement: anything for us, without us, is against us,” Molao told IPS. “I may be young, but I’m equally a member of parliament.”

Molao and Browne were among the 260 parliamentarians from 134 countries attending the sixth International Parliamentarians’ Conference on the implementation of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Programme of Action that took place in Stockholm Apr. 23-25.

Among other goals, the participants all reaffirmed their commitment to “adopt laws to promote and protect human rights and eliminate discrimination without distinction of any kind” as they work to implement the programme of action adopted 20 years ago at the landmark International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo, Egypt.

In their wide-ranging Stockholm Statement of Commitment, the parliamentarians also pledged to “design policies and programmes that harness the demographic dividend through enhancing the capabilities of young people to contribute to social and economic development and innovation.”

Put simply, policy makers realise that including youth in political decisions, especially regarding sexual health and reproductive rights, can reap benefits for a country. With their technological proficiency with social media, young people can also help to reach their peers. But one of the problems is to get older parliamentarians to make room for them.

“There are some people in my parliament who were elected before I was born, and you can see that they’ve lost steam and energy,” Molao said. “You need new ideas and fresh ambition.”

Getting young people to become active in politics is also an issue, but once they are there, they can push for legislation that will help to improve human rights, particularly regarding women and marginalised groups, he told IPS.

Dianne Stewart, director of the information and external relations division at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which co-organised the conference, said that national policies to encourage youth involvement are crucial. She said there had been “clear gaps” in global development goals, as young people as a group had been “left behind”.

Young women especially have been affected as they are “still the largest group dying from complications related to childbirth and pregnancy” and are also the biggest victims of gender-based violence and sexual assault, she told IPS.

“We have the largest generation of young people on the planet that we’ve ever had, so what are we going to do in terms of making sure that their needs are addressed,” Stewart said. “It’s a huge prospect potentially for new economies if we make sure we take care of their needs and give them opportunities.

“Young women particularly need access to contraception, they need services, they need protection, and they need to be able to stay in school to complete their education,” she added.

In the Caribbean, where some countries have a high level of discrimination against the LGBT community, and alarming incidents of violence against women, Browne of Trinidad and Tobago said that revision of laws were necessary to protect individuals.

“Slowly people are becoming aware of the reality that we’re all human, and that we can’t talk about human rights while excluding human beings, and that’s just a fundamental principle,” Browne said.

“I have hope for a more equitable future for everyone because if we look back over the last hundred years, and we look at where we are today, there are many groups and sub-populations across the world that were heavily attacked, discriminated against, and vilified that have now achieved equal status,” he added.

Browne and several other parliamentarians under the age of 50 stood out at the Stockholm conference with their apparent sincerity and dynamism, against the backdrop of moves in some countries (notably Uganda and Spain) to roll back sexual and reproductive rights.

A number of older officials reiterated legitimate concerns about the effects of colonialism, global inequities, the exporting of talent and the “taking” of natural resources from developing countries.

The young parliamentarians, while sharing these worries, expressed more interest in tangible rights for women, girls and young people.

Jamaican opposition senator Kamina Johnson Smith, 41, has been instrumental for instance in getting legislation revised to allow teenage mothers to return to school after giving birth, and also in urging political action against the incidents of violence against women on the island.

Ulrika Karlsson, also 41, is a Swedish MP who chairs the Swedish Parliamentary Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Intergroup. She said that parliamentarians “must fight for laws, for funding and for real support for those who need it the most.”

“As parliamentarians, as lawmakers, we have the power to bring change. And now is the time for action,” Karlsson said.

But it’s not only parliamentarians who can affect policy. Young activists at the Stockholm conference also made their voices heard in discussions on youth and rights.

Asel Kubanychbekova, 18, has been acting as an “agent of change” since she was 15 in Kyrgyzstan, while 29-year-old South Africa-based activist Remmy Shawa is the Africa regional coordinator for MenEngage, a global network of NGOs and UN partners working to engage men and boys in gender equality.

“I’m so glad that a number of MPs (at the conference) are actually young,” Shawa told IPS. “It shows that we’re finally at the table. But at the country level, the challenge now is to have a very clear, well-defined way in which young people can get to be at the centre of the development agenda.”

Children in a PNG village. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
BRISBANE, Nov 7 2012 (IPS)

The Pacific Islands are making steady progress on reducing child mortality, but most are struggling to eradicate poverty and generate employment for young and rapidly growing populations.

With three years to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), progress fluctuates across the region, according to a recent report by the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), a regional inter-governmental group.

The good news, according to the PIF report, is that 10 of 14 Pacific Island states surveyed, including Vanuatu, Marshall Islands, Cook Islands and Tonga, are on track to reduce MDG4 that deals with child mortality.

Worldwide there has been varied progress on the MDGs, which were agreed in conjunction with the U.N. Millennium Declaration in 2000 that resolved to make globalisation ‘fully inclusive and equitable.’

The 2012 Regional MDG Tracking Report comes three years after PIF countries signed a compact to strengthen the co-ordination of resources to boost development progress.

Successes and long-term challenges are evident at the sub-regional level.  Melanesia, with a large population average of over two million, dominated by Papua New Guinea (PNG), is off track on the goals. In contrast, Polynesia, comprising Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa, Tonga and Tuvalu, with an average population of 62,000, is on target with four goals.

The Cook Islands and Niue are the only states likely to achieve all eight MDGs.

Halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, as mandated by MDG 1, is a considerable challenge across the Pacific.

In PNG, approximately 28 percent of the population of seven million lives below the poverty line, a five  to 10 percent improvement since 1990. Critical factors include a large remote rural population, corruption, high incidence of violence and an HIV epidemic.

Some 23 percent of Tongans live below the poverty line with increased hardships for families due to impacts of the global financial crisis, low economic growth and inflation.

There are also variations at the sub-national level with rural communities experiencing higher levels of poverty in Fiji, Palau, Samoa and Tonga, while there are greater numbers of urban poor in the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

Poverty is not easily defined in the Pacific Islands where the benchmark of earning less than a dollar a day can be inaccurate. Pacific societies have a long history of subsistence agriculture, self-sufficiency and retain a strong belief in social obligations within the extended family and community that can capture the needs of the most vulnerable.

But even in rural villages, centuries of traditions are changing in varying degrees with the influence of cash economy, rapid urbanisation and cultural pressures of modernisation.

Albert Cerelala, programme officer at the Foundation of the Peoples of the South Pacific, a local non-government organisation based in Fiji, describes poverty as “the inability for individuals and families to meet the basic necessities of a meaningful and healthy life. It may mean that they are unable for whatever reasons to put food on the table or are denied social and economic opportunities.” 

“It may also mean not having a sense of belonging to a ‘vanua’ (land or village) or place, or that one is disconnected from one’s tradition or community,” Cerelala told IPS.

The PIF makes a case for the term ‘poverty of opportunity’ in the Pacific Islands.

All island states in a region of 10 million people and growing by 188,000 a year are challenged to provide full productive employment with youth unemployment a growing concern. Only the Cook Islands and Niue, with employment rates of 70 percent and 80 percent respectively, are on course, with Kiribati recording 44 percent and Samoa 30 percent.

While MDG7 – that calls for improving the lives of slum dwellers – did not feature prominently in the report, urbanisation has reached a high rate of 4.2 percent in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

Squatter settlements, beset with insecure land tenure and sub-standard housing, are growing in Melanesia as greater numbers of people seek jobs and access to services unavailable in provincial areas.  Approximately half of the residents in PNG’s capital, Port Moresby, and 30 percent of the urban population in Vanuatu reside in informal settlements.

But in a positive trend most Pacific Island states are expected to reduce child mortality by two-thirds in line with MDG4.

“This could be attributed to the successes of awareness programmes carried out by national and regional public health authorities to encourage immunisation and proper healthcare for babies, more trained human manpower for the implementation and monitoring of child health programmes,” Gordon Nanau, lecturer in international affairs, University of the South Pacific, Fiji, said.

Nanau, who is also a member of the Oceania Development Network, said bilateral and multilateral support were also important factors in achieving MDG4.

Fiji with a population of 868,406 has reduced the under-five mortality rate from 28 to 18 per 1,000 births since 1990, which is attributed to implementation of  holistic integrated management of childhood illness strategy and good obstetric services.

In Tuvalu, with high measles immunisation coverage, the under-five mortality rate decreased during the last decade from 35 to 25 per 1,000 births.

The PIF believes that accelerated regional progress on the goals before 2015 is dependent on political will.

Nanau agreed, but added “that even with determined political leadership and improved governance, financial and human resources and capacity” are also imperative.

By Jinty Jackson
Sep 20 2012 (IPS)

Carolina Poalo strikes the dry earth over and over with her hoe, her frail body bent almost double. She is determined to begin planting. During the long, dry season in Mozambique, she and her two young grandchildren have eaten little but cassava leaves.

In a country where the average life expectancy is 50, the 65-year-old is considered very old, but her golden years are far from restful.

Instead, life is a constant battle for the many elderly living in the semi-rural outskirts of the capital, Maputo.

Violence and abuse against the elderly – ranging from rape to psychological abuse and neglect – are on the rise, say authorities. Often this is linked to witchcraft accusations, although no official statistics exist about the phenomenon. Perpetrators are often family members.

Carolina Paolo’s sister, Amelia Paolo, fled her home when her sons accused her of witchcraft. “They threw me out, calling me a witch,” she tells IPS. “I only survived thanks to my plot of land.”

It was a bit unclear how she got access to land where she lives now, but she has a plot of land next door to her sister’s in Bilalwane, on the outskirts of Maputo.

“I don’t get any help from my children. Sometimes they dump their kids here when they get pregnant,” Carolina Paolo tells IPS of her two daughters.

The women survive by earning extra cash when they can, working in nearby fields. The five dollars a month state elderly grant, the lowest in Southern Africa, is enough to buy them a one-kilogramme bag of salt. With no access to running water, the money also comes in handy when filling up at a nearby tap – one barrel of water costs them three cents.

Mozambique’s social welfare office is notoriously corrupt and inefficient. Only one in three people interviewed by IPS said they received the grant despite all three having applied for it.

Her body shrunken and her eyes grown over with cataracts, Maria Chambale (70) admits she is frightened of what might happen when she can no longer work, “I must go on fighting,” she says and shrugs. “What else can I do?”

She, like the other elderly in Mozambique, works on her own small plot of land to grow vegetables to feed herself. She also accepts “piece jobs” or day jobs in nearby fields owned by richer neighbours who have land but do not have the time to farm it.

Despite the heady pace of Mozambique’s economic growth – the World Bank expects the economy to expand by 7.5 percent in 2012 – little benefit is trickling down to the poor, many of whom are elderly people.

“Sixty-eight percent of the elderly live below the poverty line in Mozambique,” says Janet Duffield, the director of the aid agency HelpAge International in this country.

For the elderly in the city who cannot grow food to feed themselves, conditions are even worse.

Sixty-year-old Armando Mattheus is amongst the many elderly people who now find themselves begging on the streets of the capital, unable to cope with the high cost of living. “Before I could buy something with the little I have but today I can’t buy anything,” says Mattheus, who spends his days outside a popular Maputo restaurant, begging tourists for handouts.

It is a situation experts say Mozambique’s government needs to address urgently. Eighty percent of people work well into old age in Mozambique – one of the highest rates in the world.

“The population in Mozambique works until they die because there aren’t alternatives,” says the director of Mozambique’s Institute of Social and Economic Studies, António Francisco.

With half its population of 23 million under 18 years old, Mozambique is often referred to as a country of young people. Those who can remember the devastating civil war that ended two decades ago are now in the minority.

Newly discovered natural gas and coal deposits promise untold riches for a lucky few and will soon fuel what is already one of the world’s fastest growing economies.

The aged make up a tiny fraction of the population – just five percent.  However, by the time a child born today reaches 60, that number will be nearly three times as high, according to Francisco’s research. This represents, he says, “an unprecedented demographic transformation in the history of Mozambique.”

Nearby countries – South Africa, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia and Lesotho – all spend between 0.3 and two percent of GDP on grants for the elderly. Like Mozambique, they have a young population structure but such an approach can pay dividends.

Japan, which in 2010 registered 38 percent of its population over the age of 65 – the world’s largest proportion – spends over 10 percent of GDP on pensions, according to the International Monetary Fund. And the United Kingdom spends five percent of GDP on pensions, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Studies show that providing state pensions can reduce hunger and poverty because elderly people share resources with the family.

A 2003 study by HelpAge International found that “social pensions increase the income of the poorest five percent of the population by 100 percent in Brazil and 50 percent in South Africa.” And a 2005 study by the University of Manchester in the U.K. found that people living in households receiving a pension were 18 percent less likely to be poor in Brazil and 12.5 percent less likely in South Africa.

One fifth of all families in Mozambique include an elderly person. This is one reason why aid agencies are pushing the government to fall into step with other countries in the region. Another is that 43 percent of orphans are cared for by grandparents in Mozambique. The country has an HIV prevalence rate of 16.2 percent, one of the highest rates in the world.

“Of the 10 African countries with the highest HIV prevalence, eight have introduced some form of social pension or cash transfer directed at older people,” says Duffield.

The government would need to provide citizens over 60 with a minimum of 26 dollars a month to have an impact, estimates Francisco. The figure represents three percent of the country’s 12.8-billion-dollar GDP.

But universal social pensions would be too costly, argues Felix Matusse, who heads the government’s Department for the Elderly. “We still depend on external aid,” he explains, pointing out that foreign donors contribute over 30 percent of the entire state budget.

But the government cannot go on pleading poverty for long. By some estimates, Mozambique stands to collect over five billion dollars a year in the long term from its natural gas alone.

Bolivia, South America’s poorest country, financed its universal pension scheme or “Dignity Pension” in 2007 through a direct hydrocarbon tax. Could Mozambique do the same?

“Improved revenue collection from new-found mineral resources could free up fiscal space more than adequate to provide a cash transfer for all older people,” suggests Duffield.

Others argue that caring for the elderly should not have to depend on hydrocarbon windfalls. “What kind of state do we have that cannot look after five percent of its population?” asks Francisco, adding that nearby Lesotho finances a pension scheme but has no natural resources to speak of.

Few expect a major shift in government policy on pensions before the next national elections in 2014. But in the run-up, the government is showing greater willingness to tackle its elderly problem.

A draft bill, due to go to parliament before the end of the year, aims to protect the aged from abuse, meting out specific tough penalties for violence related to witchcraft accusations. However, there is no mention of universal old age pensions.

Matusse points out that Mozambique will not begin to reap the benefits of hydrocarbons for at least another five years. “Then we will see what is going to happen in terms of social security,” he says.

A health worker weighs malnourished children at the Chikhwawa District Hospital in Malawi. The country reduced its under-five child mortality rate by 64 percent in the last 10 years. Courtesy: UNICEF/ Eldson Chagara

By Charity Chimungu Phiri
CHIKHWAWA, Malawi, Sep 15 2012 (IPS)

Three-month-old Simplicious Gift lives in Mafunga village in Malawi’s southern rural district of Chikhwawa, 48 kilometres from the commercial capital, Blantyre. His is a poor farming village of about 1,200 people who live off their harvests and the produce from their livestock of goats, pigs and cows.

While a large portion of the population in this region may be facing food insecurity this year because of poor harvests, whatever the situation, Simplicious will not go wanting for health care.

Whenever her young son is in need of medical treatment, Margaret Gift has only to walk 300 metres to her nearest medical clinic.

“I come here whenever my child has a fever, diarrhoea or a cough. I also come for family planning methods,” she told IPS as she waited at the local village clinic.

In this southern African nation, where 90 percent of the population are impoverished rural subsistence farmers with limited access to transport, the average distance to a district hospital is 21 kilometres, according to a December 2011 report on the country’s medical facilities in the East and Central African Journal of Surgery. In Tanzania the average distance is 31 kms, while the average in sub-Saharan Africa is eight, according to Every Mother Counts, a platform that links grassroots mobilisation campaigns with the steps of “engagement, education, and advocacy.”

But the growing presence of rural health centres and the introduction of community health workers in Malawi over the last 30 years has resulted in a 64 percent reduction of under-five mortality rates in the country over the last 10 years, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). In 1990 the country recorded 227 deaths per 1,000 live births. The number was reduced to 83 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2011.

A UNICEF report released on Sep. 13 “Committing to Child Survival: A Promise Renewed”, says the number of children under the age of five dying in sub-Saharan Africa has been reduced by 39 percent, while globally it has been reduced from nearly 12 million in 1992 to 6.9 million in 2011.

The report noted that Malawi is only one of nine low-income countries worldwide to have reduced their under-five mortality rate by more than 60 percent.

In the Chikwawa district there are 12 health centres that serve the region’s approximate 350,000 people. Makhwira Health Centre provides health services to about 58,755 people.

Kennedy Thala, a senior Health Surveillance Assistant (HSA) or community health worker at the centre, told IPS that the introduction of Early Infant Diagnosis in 2010 has reduced the number of child deaths here.

“When it was first launched we had 229 infants, of which only three died between the months of July and September 2010 while waiting for their HIV and malnutrition results from the Central Lab in Blantyre. Before that, children were dying at a much higher rate. But unfortunately we don’t have the data because there were no records,” she said.

She added that the introduction of the UNICEF Rapid SMS programme in 2010 also reduced the under-five mortality rate.

“We get text messages with the results of children who were tested for HIV, usually after three to four weeks,” she said. Previously it would take months for the health centre to receive the results.

Babies here are also enrolled in the Growth Monitoring Programme, a project that runs together with the Out-Patient Therapeutic Programme, where babies with moderate malnutrition are given ready-to-use therapeutic food such as plumpy’nut (fortified peanut butter) and corn-blend soy flour mixed with cooking oil, medication and vitamins.

In this region, as across the rest of the country, HSAs conduct clinics in local villages daily. In addition, the community health care workers visit health centres twice a week to assist with child immunisations, antenatal care, and HIV counselling and testing services.

“We believe that through these programmes mothers are receiving first-hand information on what is expected of them in as far as the reduction of malnutrition amongst under fives is concerned,” said UNICEF Malawi Chief of Communications, Victor Chinyama.

UNICEF officials say it has been very important to take health care services closer to where people live, thereby significantly reducing the distance that people have to travel to access medical treatment in Malawi.

“In Malawi, many district hospitals are very far from most villages, which previously forced many mothers to walk very long distances. But now people can get medical care right where they are, and mothers seeking child healthcare can access it right away,” said Chinyama.

Spokesperson for the Ministry of Health, Henry Chimbali, told IPS that the reduction in under-five mortality rates was “a remarkable achievement for us because it shows that what we are doing is working.”

“We are mainly attributing this success to the Safe Motherhood project, the village clinics and also to the HSAs who are directly working with mothers right in their communities to help prevent deaths that could be avoided amongst children,” he said.

Dr. Queen Dube, a paediatrician at the Queen Elizabeth Central hospital in Blantyre – a 950-bed facility with patients mostly from rural areas or townships, told IPS that the reduction of deaths in children under five due to malnourishment could also be attributed to the improved access to food supply in the country since 2005.

“I was here when there were over one hundred children in the Nutrition Rehabilitation Unit. But now you go there it’s not even full – there are only 16 children there – to us that’s amazing!

“Things have to improved after the introduction of the Out-Patient Therapeutic care (which started in community clinics almost 30 years ago) and community clinics, because health workers are no longer waiting for mothers to bring in very sick children.” Instead, health workers are going to mothers and educating them on how to prevent their children from falling ill.

Dube also said that the introduction of the Extended Programme of Immunization for children under five, which started in the early 1960s countrywide, helped reduce mortality rates.

“At the moment our coverage nationwide is at 90 percent. Though there is still more to be done in the area of pneumonia, but since last year babies are now being vaccinated against the disease. In addition, many pregnant women are now attending antenatal care at least once – at the moment countrywide attendance is at 91 percent,” she said.

Dube, however, told IPS that neonatal mortality remains a big challenge for Malawi as it contributes to nearly a third of all under-five deaths. Current statistics indicate that 79 infants under 12 months of age die each year out of every 1, 000 live births. The current global neonatal rate, according to the UNICEF report, is 22 deaths per 1,000 live births.

“Basically, neonates get sick within the first 72 hours of life and they mostly die due to low-birth weight. Such deaths remain unchanged in Malawi, the numbers are still high,” she said.

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Aug 8 2012 (IPS)

Humanity is living beyond its means with the growing demand for food, medicines and other nature-based products, making sustainable consumption and conservation a matter of life and death. This is according to the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network, the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

International Union for Conservation of Nature director general Julia Marton-Lefèvre says that a sustainable future cannot be achieved without conserving biological diversity. Courtesy: Laurent Villerent

The IUCN says that despite prioritising attempts to halt the global extinction of plant and animal species, the battle is far from being won.

“We need to do more conservation – which works – and scale it up, and at the same time we need to change our production and consumption habits to make them more sustainable,” IUCN director general Julia Marton-Lefèvre told IPS from Switzerland.

On the eve of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil, in June, the IUCN released its latest update of the Red List of Threatened Species.

The Red List – a global barometer of the health of global biodiversity – indicated that of 63,837 species assessed, 19,817 are threatened with extinction. Freshwater ecosystems are particularly under pressure from the growing human population and exploitation of water resources. In addition, unsustainable fishing practices and the destruction of their habitat through pollution and the building of dams threaten freshwater fish.

According to the IUCN, a quarter of the world’s inland fisheries are on the African continent and 27 percent of freshwater fish in Africa are threatened, including the tilapia (Oreochromis karongae), an important food source in Lake Malawi that has been overfished.

Twenty seven percent of freshwater fish in Africa are threatened, including the tilapia (Oreochromis karongae), an important food source in Lake Malawi that has been overfished. Credit: Claire Ngozo/IPS

Marton-Lefèvre told IPS reporter Busani Bafana, ahead of the IUCN’s World Congress to be held in Jeju, South Korea Sept. 6 to 15, that a sustainable future cannot be achieved without conserving biological diversity.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: In its 2020 Strategic Plan for biodiversity, the IUCN has drawn up a number of targets, and target 12 aims that by 2020 the extinction of known threatened species would have been prevented and their conservation status, particularly of those most in decline, improved and sustained. Are you on target with this strategic plan to halt extinction?

A:  Unfortunately, at the moment the answer is “no”. That is why we have made this target our top priority at IUCN. That is not to say that we haven’t got inspiring examples of conservation success. For example, through our SOS or Save Our Species initiative, IUCN and partners have already helped conserve close to 100 threatened species in over 30 countries. We know that conservation works, but we need significantly greater resources if we are to reverse the current extinction crisis.

Q: In the light of the latest Red List report in June 2012, which shows that a large number of species are threatened with extinction, would you say we have reached a tipping point?

A: Indeed, the latest update of the IUCN Red List paints a bleak picture: one in three corals, one in four mammals and two out of five amphibians are at risk of extinction.

Moreover, a recent ground-breaking study found that we have overshot three out of nine of the so-called “planetary boundaries” that define a “safe operating space” for humanity, including biodiversity loss.

Today we are dangerously close to reaching such “points of no return”, but it is very difficult to predict precisely when a tipping point is reached until it actually happens. For instance, the collapse of the north Atlantic cod fishery happened back in the 1970s but its impacts are felt even today.

Q: What needs to change? Our consumption habits or our conservation efforts?

A: We certainly need both. We need to do more conservation – which works – and scale it up, and at the same time we need to change our production and consumption habits to make them more sustainable.

Consumer demand for nature-based products – for food, medicine, clothing – has emerged as a major threat for many species that had not been affected by habitat loss or climate change thus far. Nature simply cannot keep up with our insatiable appetite for everything from raw materials to live animals – and we need to change that.

Q: Do you think there is now greater political will to halt the extinction of species than, say, 20 years ago?

A: Twenty years ago, at the Rio Earth Summit (United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development), world leaders signed the Convention on Biological Diversity into existence. Today it is one of the most widely ratified global treaties. It is difficult to compare the level of commitment then and now, but one thing is for sure: the political will that is required today is much greater because of the magnitude of the problem.

Q: How has the work of the IUCN and its partners made an impact?

A: For many years, the answer to the central question of the impact of global conservation action has been both anecdotal and elusive. Thanks to the efforts of IUCN, its Species Survival Commission, and our more than 1,200 members around the world, we now have solid evidence that without targeted conservation efforts, the loss of biodiversity as measured by the Red List Index would be almost 20 percent worse.

Q: What challenges remain?

A: The biggest challenge now is getting everyone to understand what is at stake: that nature is not a luxury but the very foundation of our own wellbeing on this planet. We also need to strengthen political will to take the necessary action. As I’ve said before, the situation is quite critical, and our Congress will look at several of these challenges.

Excerpt:

The road between Zimbabwe’s Victoria Falls and Livingstone, in Zambia, is a well-traversed one, criss-crossed by bicycle riders towing trailers of bread and other supplies, with their bicycle spokes reinforced to bear the extra weight.

“If you have a bicycle, you can be rich,” said one cargo cyclist on the road just beyond the falls, as he abandoned pedalling and pushed his wheeled load. “This is how we trade.”

Although they are low-tech, the trailers are skilfully designed and often neighbourhood- manufactured, have two wheels and are attached to the bicycle via a hitch behind the saddle. They can carry up to around 200 kilogrammes of goods, water or, less often, people. These are significantly greater weights than what can be transported by head load, handcart or backpack.

Zambulances – bicycle trailers with a mattress, privacy curtain and basic medical equipment – have replaced walking or being pushed in a wheelbarrow for many ailing rural people who live some distance from healthcare centres. Credit: Gail Jennings/IPS

In Zambia, Namibia and more recently Congo-Brazzaville, bicycle trailers save not only livelihoods, but also lives. Zambulances – bicycle trailers with a mattress, privacy curtain and basic medical equipment – have replaced walking or being pushed in a wheelbarrow for many ailing or pregnant rural people who live some distance from healthcare centres.

Designed and produced by Zambikes, the 2012 winner of the international MobiPrize for mobility-related social entrepreneurship, these trailers have been found to save one life for every nine days they are used.

South Africa has been slower than its neighbours to embrace the bicycle as an obvious example of low-cost, low-carbon mobility. But slowly micro-entrepreneurs and bicycle tourists are discovering the ease and economic opportunity a bicycle trailer can offer as a way of transporting goods and passengers.

Malibongwe* lives in Khayelitsha, a low-income neighbourhood on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. He makes a living buying ice cream and selling it from his make-shift bicycle trailer – and manages to support his whole family. Recently he tested positive for HIV and now uses his bicycle to make the monthly trip to collect his anti-retroviral medication as well.

So it was with dismay that Malibongwe learned that his enterprise is in danger, from a surprising source. Despite the country’s draft non-motorised transport (NMT) policy that aims to increase the role of NMT as a key transport mode and allocate adequate and sustainable funding for its development and promotion, the South African National Department of Transport (NDoT) is considering prohibiting the use of bicycle trailers on public roads.

However, the department recognises that although there is growth in motorised transport in developing countries such as South Africa, a large portion of the population depends on non-motorised forms of transport. This is likely to not only continue, but increase following global trends of rising fuel prices and the need for low-carbon transportation.

“Local transport solutions such as trailers, handcarts or bicycles could assist poor and rural communities in making them more efficient with small business and domestic duties,” stated the draft NMT Policy.

It also noted that the “effects of inefficient transport systems in rural parts of Africa, which rely on non-motorised transport in its most basic form, are manifested in a lack of market integration, poor provision of education and health services, low productivity and low rates of regional and local economic activity.”

Yet in June, the NDoT published an intention to amend the National Road Traffic Regulations, proposing that “no person shall ride a pedal cycle on a public road drawing or towing a trailer or anything.”

Malibongwe told IPS that he is “very worried about the new law, as if it is passed I’ll have no way of supporting my family.” He is one of a number of bicycle riders who petitioned the NDoT in July, asking that the proposal be reconsidered.

Kyle Mason-Jones, a chemical engineer whose work focuses on carbon emissions reduction, and who also bicycle commutes 15 kilometres most days in Cape Town, is another.

“By limiting the ability of bicycles to carry goods and passengers, this regulation will undermine their potential as a primary mode of transport for individuals and for most entrepreneurial small businesses,” he told IPS.

“For the poor, this will destroy a very promising possibility for affordable transport and wipe out many small business opportunities. For wealthier citizens, it will make the ownership of a motorcar a necessity of life, eliminating many of the benefits of bicycle-centred transport.”

Concerns about road safety were among the reasons behind the proposed amendments, said one of the policy-makers working with the NDoT. “We know that we have a poor safety record – almost half of the deaths on our roads are pedestrians and cyclists,” he told IPS, asking for anonymity.

South Africa has one of the highest road death tolls in the world. During the holiday period from Dec. 1, 2011 to Jan. 10, 2012, 1,475 people were killed in road accidents according to the NDoT. This contrasts sharply with the United Kingdom, for example, where the death toll for all of 2010 was 1,857.

“Road safety activists brought to our attention that in mostly rural areas, people were being carried by these trailers, and we had a concern about the speed of downhill transportation,” the source said.

Safety-conscious countries such as Germany and the UK – where bicycle trailers are popular modes for parents transporting young children, and for long-distance bicycle tourists – strictly regulate bicycle trailers as merely one facet of comprehensive attention to safer road behaviour.

In Germany, bicycle trailer loads (goods and people) may not exceed 250 kg, or 100 kg in a rigid coupling with no independent brakes, and 60 kg if the trailer itself has no brakes and has a flexible coupling.

Trailers must be less than 80 centimetres wide. In the UK, all wheeled vehicles designed for transport must comply with British or European safety standards – the equivalent of the rules and regulations issued by South Africa’s Bureau of Standards. Certain visibility precautions must be taken, such as reflectors, lights and pennants.

In South Africa, current legislation forbids bicycles from towing other vehicles, but does not define bicycle trailers as vehicles. Instead, trailers were broadly defined as a vehicle towed by a car. The country’s Vehicle Technical Committee, in reviewing these regulations in 2011 and 2012, determined to prohibit bicycle trailers rather than regulate or define them.

The new, prohibitive measures seem counter-productive in a middle-income country with high levels of poverty, where the overwhelming majority of people rely on non-motorised transport.

Improving the goods and passenger carrying of non-motorised transport vehicles will not only facilitate the fulfilment of any government’s transportation goals, but also its goals for job creation, micro-enterprise and community sustainability, suggested NMT engineer and safe cycling educator Louis de Waal.

There is no doubt that road danger is a major fear for people who walk and cycle in South Africa, De Waal told IPS. In addition to the ill-disciplined behaviour of road users, the road environment itself is often not conducive to keeping pedestrians and cyclists safe.

“But to ban one form of bicycle transport, ahead of implementing other safety regulations such as mandatory 1.5 metre passing distances, slower road speeds and compulsory bicycle reflectors, just does not make enough sense,” he said.

Citizen action and the resulting correspondence to the NDoT might have made an impact, though.

“Now that we have seen people’s objections, and read their reasoning, we agree that we will have a significant impact on entrepreneurs and small businesses, and livelihoods of people, with this possible regulation. So we will be back at the drawing board,” said the source at the NDoT.

This is good news, of course, said Malibongwe. But he raised a new concern. Unaccustomed to reading South Africa’s government gazette, blogs or social media, he was not on the “public engagement” radar; he found out about the proposed amendments only because a vigilant activist was looking for interviewees. How will he know of the outcome, he asked?

*Name withheld on request.

Emmanuel Biandjui Diffi, 40, stands outside Abidjan's main prison, where he was held for six months earlier this year. Credit: Robbie Corey-Boulet/IPS

By Robbie Corey-Boulet
ABIDJAN, Jul 26 2012 (IPS)

Eliane Negui knew just what to do when she got word that a group of inmates had escaped from Abidjan’s main prison, MACA, earlier this month. After all, the 24-year-old, who has lived across a dirt road from the facility for nine years, had witnessed the same scenario just two months before. 

“Whenever there is an escape we are always running into our rooms and closing the doors,” she said in a recent interview with IPS from her stand outside the prison’s main entrance where she sells fried bananas. “Whenever there is an escape the guards are shooting, so we enter our rooms so as not to be hurt or killed.

Twelve inmates escaped from the prison that day, eight of whom were soon caught. The total paled in comparison to the earlier escape, on May 4, when about 50 inmates broke free from the facility, prompting a statement of concern from Côte d’Ivoire’s United Nations mission.

This West African nation is still rebuilding after six months of post-election violence sparked by the November 2010 election, when former President Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down after losing to current President Alassane Ouattara. During the violence, the country’s 33 prisons were emptied, and infrastructure and equipment was largely destroyed.

Prisons began re-opening in August 2011, and 31 are now operational. But the recovery has been marred by a rash of prison breaks. Since August, there have been 17 separate escapes involving about 250 prisoners, according to Francoise Simard, chief of the U.N.’s rule of law section.

The problems dogging the country’s prisons mirror larger problems with the security sector — especially when it comes to personnel. Complaints about prison conditions also highlight room for improvement in the country’s post-conflict recovery.

Prior to the violence, which claimed some 3,000 lives, prison guards alone provided security at the country’s penitentiaries. These guards were armed, but there was a shortage of weapons and not all were functional, Simard told IPS.

When prisons began reopening in August, the Republican Forces of Côte d’Ivoire (FRCI), the national army, was the only security force allowed to have weapons. Soldiers began to work alongside prison guards.

More than one year after the conflict ended, prison guards are still unarmed. “The current government is very reluctant to give weapons to prison guards,” Simard said.

This reluctance underscores the lack of trust among the different security forces. Because the number of prison guards nationwide nearly doubled during Gbagbo’s 10-year tenure, there is a perception — whether accurate or not — that most guards are loyal to the old regime.

“There is a suspicious atmosphere in the prison,” said Stephane Boko, a supervisor at MACA Prision in Abidjan, told IPS. “The power no longer rests with the prison guards because they are considered to be pro-Gbagbo.”

A similar division has been evident in the broader security sector. The FRCI is largely composed of forces loyal to Ouattara, including leaders of the Forces Nouvelles rebel group, which controlled northern Côte d’Ivoire when the country was partitioned from 2002 to 2010. The government has long been wary of police and gendarmes, and in some parts of the country — notably the volatile western region — the FRCI remains the only security force with access to weapons, meaning it has taken the lead on general policing.

Recently, though, police and gendarmes have been re-armed in some places, and they now have a permanent presence in the prisons. Under a policy established after the May escape, five police officers and five gendarmes are supposed to be posted in each facility, Simard told IPS.

The presence of multiple security forces in each facility can sometimes lead to a lack of coordination. Earlier this year, for instance, some 93 prisoners were able to escape from a facility in Agboville, a town located roughly 80 kilometres north of Abidjan. In the three days leading up to the escape, Simard said, no security forces showed up to guard the prison.

Boko and other staff at MACA said they believe responsibility for protecting Côte d’Ivoire’s prisons should be returned to the guards. But Serges Kouame, head of communications for the Justice Ministry, said after the prison break earlier this month that a central command center was being established to respond to prison escapes, and that it would involve the FRCI, guards, gendarmes and the police.

Conditions

Meanwhile, concerns persist about conditions facing Côte d’Ivoire’s inmates. The national prison system was dramatically overcrowded prior to the post-election violence, with more than 12,000 prisoners crammed into facilities that have a total capacity of about 5,500, according to the U.N.

The current prison population is much lower – 5,945 as of Jul. 20 — but it recently surpassed the total capacity and is rising by the week. Though Simard noted that “the situation is not as dramatic as it was before with overcrowding,” she said that certain aspects of detention conditions — among them access to food — remain problematic.

The U.S. State Department addressed poor prison conditions in its most recent Human Rights Report for Côte d’Ivoire. Though the report took note of some improvements under Ouattara, it said food provision remained “inadequate.”

This was the main complaint of Emmanuel Biandjui Diffi, a 40-year-old who was held in MACA for six months since January after he sold a plot of land to two different people.

“The conditions were OK, but the quality of the food was very poor,” he told IPS. “There was nothing in the soup – no meat and no fish.”

Diffi also complained about the prison’s policy of feeding inmates just once a day at around 2pm, something Simard said that the U.N. was pushing the government to remedy.

Diffi said the general atmosphere inside the prison was tolerable. “We were living normally,” he said. “We could play football. Some of us were working as tailors. Most of us were spending a lot of our time praying.”

But he singled out one problem that highlights just how far Côte d’Ivoire has yet to go in getting its institutions back on track: prolonged pretrial detention, something the Ouattara government has previously blamed on “a lack of judicial capacity,” according to the U.S. State Department.

More than anything, Diffi said, this issue, and the impression it left of a system that was broken, was fueling desperation within MACA’s walls.

“Most of the people in there have not been prosecuted,” he told IPS. “Some are charged, but many are not. They want to go out. They want to be released. And so they are asking for judgment.”

Salou Bandé is proud to stand at the front of the only classroom in the village of Bénnogo, 90 kilometres north of the Burkina Faso capital, Ouagadougou, sharing his knowledge with his students. He is part of an initiative to improve education for nomadic children in the West African country.

Bandé’s slender build marks him out as a member of the nomadic Peul people, and he was one of the first teachers at the “School of the Shepherds”. This innovative educational institution takes in between 20 and 25 students each year, specifically targeting 12-year-olds who have never attended formal school.

“We start with a unit in Fulfulde (the local language) on malaria, then we continue with classes in history, geography, French language, and earth and life sciences – which covers livestock rearing, health, the environment and hygiene,” Bandé told IPS.

Bandé said he has 18 students in his class, including 11 girls. “They study as far as the Cours élémentaire 2ième année (the third year of primary school), then an exam administered by the Provincial Department of Basic Education allows the students to join formal school system. Our first cohort is now in its fifth year of high school.”

There are 300 students attending the unusual school in this region of the country.

According to Boubacar Barry, head of the education programme at the Association for the Promotion of Livestock Herding in the Sahel and the Savannah (APESS), putting children in formal school has a severe impact on a pastoral family’s livelihood.

Working alongside the Ministry of Education and Literacy in the north of the country where pastoralists make up 17 percent of the population, Andal et Pindal – a local association that has been instrumental in setting up the school for shepherds – conducted a study in 2003 which found that less than one percent of livestock herders’ children were enrolled in school.

The special school conducted its first classes that same year, welcoming students between nine and 15 years old in six counties of the northern province Sanmantenga. Of the 197 students in that first intake, 144 completed the four-year cycle and sat for a final exam.

This year, according to Mamadou Boly, a retired primary school inspector and president of “Andal et Pindal” (whose name means “knowledge and enlightenment” in Fulfulde), the shepherds’ school achieved an 85 percent success rate, and nearly two-thirds of students went directly into CM2, the final year of primary school. Several have gone on to secondary school and vocational training centres.

“We thought we were just training children from the cattle pens, but these children have left their settlements and are conquering the world,” said Boly.

Burkina Faso is attempting improve education for the nomadic Peul children by forming a “School of the Shepherds”. Credit: Julius Cruickshank/CC BY 2.0

He told IPS the school was born out of concern by individuals in pastoralist communities: “People who had been to school, and who realised that their community was not progressing.”

Moussa Diallo, president of the parent’s group at the school, registered both his son and daughter at Bénnogo. “We’ve realised that there is no longer enough space for livestock and agriculture. So to succeed in these sectors, knowledge is needed,” he said. “We can see the difference with those who have not gone to school.”

Boly agreed. “The kids say they don’t want to go to formal school, but it’s essential. So we have framed the standard curriculum with an accent on pastoralism, on earth and life sciences, health and hygiene,” he told IPS.

“It’s the management of time and space that’s different. It’s always the community itself that decides at what time each school opens and closes. When the students get out early, they can go water the animals and help their parents.”

In addition, the school is not in session at all from May to December, leaving students free to take part in the annual migration with the herds in search of pasture.

With the school in Bénnogo well established, further classrooms have been opened in six other villages in the region. With support from the Education Ministry and foreign partners, 15 more schools are expected to open in the 2012-2013 school year in the eastern and south-central regions (where rates of literacy and school attendance are lowest).

“The relevance of Andal et Pindal’s work lies in its focus on a very specific group which must be educated in its real context if we want to provide an adequate education which responds to the specific needs of its intended beneficiaries,” explained Rémy Abou, director general for basic education and non-formal education at the ministry for education. His department has helped the association design programmes and provided it with learning materials.

“We appreciate what this association is doing, because the government can’t do everything – especially when it comes to non-formal education where there is such a wide range of different needs,” said Abou.

“What the shepherd school has achieved is a precious safeguarding of the pursuit of education amongst people for whom education was not a priority,” said Barry from APESS.

Almost 400,000 famine victims who fled to the Mogadishu for aid at the height of famine, are still living in one of the many refugee camps outside Mogadishu. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

By Abdurrahman Warsameh
MOGADISHU, Jul 20 2012 (IPS)

One-year-old Miriam Jama is a symbol of life in Somalia after the famine. Born just as the United Nations World Food Programme declared famine in this Horn of Africa nation a year ago on Jul. 20, Miriam has known no other life than the one in the Badbaado refugee camp, situated 10 kilometres outside the country’s capital, Mogadishu.

Weak and visibly malnourished, Miriam, like the rest of her family, hardly have enough food to eat.

And like the almost 400,000 famine victims who fled to the city for aid at the height of the crisis, Miriam, her parents and four siblings are still living in one of the many refugee camps outside Mogadishu.

Here they live in squalor in a tiny shelter of only two square metres, in a camp that is run by self-appointed administrators who are often accused by the community of stealing aid.

“We get barely enough to keep alive. Famine may have ended, but for us hunger has not,” Hawa Jama, Miriam’s mother, tells IPS.

Jama says that her family receives only 25 kilogrammes of grain, 25 kgs of flour, and 10 litres of cooking oil for a month. It is hardly sufficient to feed this family of seven. But they are not the only ones hungry here.

As the WFP marks one year after famine was declared in Somalia on Friday, Jul. 20, hundreds of thousands of famine refugees living in camps outside of the capital say they still face hunger and desperation. The famine has claimed tens of thousands of Somalis, was declared in the war-torn nation as a result of a severe drought. The drought had been prevalent in entire Horn of Africa and was described as the worst in 60 years. It was compounded by high food prices and instability in the region.

The WFP said on Jul. 18 that although there is currently no famine in Somalia and malnutrition rates have improved considerably over the last year, the situation remains fragile and progress could be reversed if aid is not sustained.

The U.N. Refugee Agency reported on Jul. 18 that the Somali refugee population has exceeded one million. Kenya’s Dadaab refugee complex alone houses 570,000 people. And 3.8 million people in Somalia remain in crises and are in urgent need of assistance, while an estimated 325,000 children are acutely malnourished.

Dense shelters spanning as far as the eye can see have remained on the outskirts of Mogadishu a year after the crisis began.

But life in the camps is a difficult existence as refugees complain that camp administrators and local officials steal food aid and practice nepotism and favoritism in aid distribution.

“I don’t like to complain, but this is a matter of life and death for us. Those responsible for running our camp are not giving us all the aid and favour others. We tell every foreign official who comes to visit, but nothing is done about our predicament,” Mumino Ali, a mother of seven, tells IPS at Sayidka camp in Mogadishu.

Water and sanitation are also poor at the camps as the number of toilets remains inadequate, and the water trucked in does not meet the international requirement both in quality and quantity, says Mohamed Ali, a local human rights activist.

“I think what we have achieved since the famine was declared back in July last year is that people are not now dying because of hunger. But hunger is still there and there are no systematic programmes to help refugees stand on their feet by creating income schemes and repatriating them back to their communities,” Ali says.

The food situation has worsened as international aid agencies scaled down their humanitarian operations after the U.N. declared the end of the famine in February. In addition, the Somali government’s national Disaster Management Agency, which was formed to deal with the famine, has been called ineffective and corrupt.

“The agency has not been effective in its work and is one of the agencies that failed the people in need. Corruption is widespread among the organs of government and this agency has its share,” a local aid worker, who asked for anonymity, tells IPS.

The official says “layers of corruption” from international agencies, their local partners, government officials, as well as those running the camps continues the cycle of hunger for the displaced refugees.

In order to survive, many of the famine refugees seek out odd jobs. But unemployment is already rife among the general population of Mogadishu where 20 years of war has left the economic infrastructure in tatters. Even children can be seen at the city’s local markets offering their services as shoe shiners, housemaids and even car washers, as they attempt to earn a living to support their families.

Jama’s husband is one of the many who spend their days trying to find odd jobs in the capital city where he knows no-one and where work is hard to come by.

She says that she and her husband, former subsistence farmers from Somalia’s Middle Shabelle region, just north of Mogadishu, would rather that aid agencies helped them find a sustainable way of earning an income than merely giving them aid.

“I don’t want to be dependent on handouts from aid agencies, which are never enough here. But I would be happy if I got help in working to support my family and go back to my village,” Jama says as she carries Miriam on her hip.

The little girl was born a month before her family fled their hometown in August 2011, and Jama is anxious for her to know another, less-harsh way of life.

As the Latino population in the United States rises, the demographic shift will affect future as well as current voting habits, and therefore election outcomes, in the United States, according to several experts.

In the highly competitive upcoming presidential elections, “a couple hundred of Latino voters can make a difference,” Roberto Suro, director of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at University of Southern California, said Monday. The impact is especially significant in battleground states like Florida, which holds 29 electoral votes, and where 22.9 percent of the populace is Latino.

The Hispanic and Latino population in the United States is projected to more than double by 2050 and will account for 24 percent of the future population – more than 102 million people – according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

American denizens have long been predominantly white and of European descent. However, 2012 marked the first time that minorities – such as Latinos and blacks – have outnumbered the majority – non-Hispanic whites – in the U.S.

According to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, the rising Latino voting populace “solidifies this emerging electorate as an important voting bloc among U.S. voters”. Every month, an estimated 50,000 Latinos in the United States turn 18 and thus are legally allowed to vote in the country.

A record number of Latinos voted in the 2008 presidential election, where 9.7 million Latino voters cast ballots in a marked increase from the 7.6 million who voted in 2004.

Yet the voting bloc represents only a small percentage of potential voters in the Latino demographic. According to a U.S. Census Bureau finding on voting patterns, 40 percent of Latinos did not register to vote and 50 percent did not vote in 2008.

Nevertheless, the Latino population might be the deciding factor in this year’s elections. Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, an organisation focused on immigration reform, called the Latino influence in the election “the whisker that wags the dog”.

In 2010, three Latino candidates, all Republican, ran for and won political offices. In Nevada, Brian Sandoval became the state’s first Hispanic governor. In New Mexico, Susana Martinez became the first Latina governor in U.S. history, and in Florida, Marco Rubio won a U.S. Senate seat.

One of the most intriguing candidates in this elections cycle has been Rubio, who has been named as a potential – though unlikely – candidate for vice president on the Republican ticket with Mitt Romney, the party’s presumptive nominee.

“It brought light to his biggest plus, which is that he could bring some (Latinos) under his tent,” Manuel Roig-Franzia, author of “The Rise of Marco Rubio”, said of Republicans’ vetting of Rubio, at a panel discussion at the New America Foundation.

Despite the fact that all three of the winning Latino candidates for office were Republicans, Latino voters generally tend to vote for Democratic candidates. According to exit polls conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center in 2010, 60 percent of Latino voters supported Democratic candidates in House races, while 38 percent supported Republican candidates.

In the last presidential election in 2008, Latinos supported President Barack Obama by a margin of more than two to one – 67 percent to 31 percent – over his Republican challenger John McCain, according to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut.

The elections cycle, however, has brought about a different set of circumstances that do not guarantee Latinos will vote according to past practices. With the economy and unemployment paramount in this year’s election, naturally the Latino population is far from exempt from political plays.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among Hispanics and Latinos is 11 percent, according to June statistics, which is noticeably higher than the national average of 8.2 percent.

Another prickly issue regarding the Latino population is the issue of deportation. President Obama addressed a less contentious part of the deportation issue earlier in 2012, a move that earned him a mixture of both praise for his efforts to push for along immigration reform as well as criticism for what some considered a political maneuver.

However, the Obama administration has deported more people than the Bush administration. According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, the United States deported nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants in 2011 fiscal year – the highest total ever.

Population pressure in Pakistan. Credit: M. Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Pakistan, Jul 11 2012 (IPS)

“No scalpel, no stitch and no rest needed,” guarantees Dr. Ghulam Shabbir Sudhayao, referring to the surgical procedure called vasectomy – the least popular method of birth control around the world, including Pakistan.

“People confuse vasectomy with castration (surgical removal of the testicles) and that scares them away,” Sudhayao, who works for the government’s population welfare department, tells IPS.

Vasectomy involves a minor procedure to snip the sperm ducts.  Sudhayao himself resorted to the method when he decided that his family was complete. “We had two daughters and wished for a son, and the third  time, my wife delivered twin boys.”

“Compared to vasectomy, tubaligation (tying a woman’s fallopian tubes) is a complex surgical operation and is done under general anaesthesia,” says Sudhayo, explaining why he did not ask his wife to get herself sterilised.

Sudhayao says he has carried out over 6,000 of these minimally invasive, “ten minute” surgeries performed under local anaesthesia in the last 20 years.

But, Sudhayao is frustrated that the 2,000 social mobilisers working for the department are unable to meet their quotas. “We get no more that 80 to 90 clients in a month though the operation is  free and the patient gets Pakistani rupees 500 (five dollars) for nutrition, and the introducer can collect 1.59 dollars as incentive money.”

Over the last two decades, Sudhayao has trained 18 other doctors to perform this simple operation, but few of them are interested in promoting it.

“Despite being trained to spread the message, they say they are scared of being ridiculed in the community. To popularise this method, we need to use the electronic media, the quickest way to get the message across,” says Sudhayao.

Interestingly, men from the low economic strata appear to be quicker to realise the benefits of this procedure.

Syed Jeal Shah, 42, a biology teacher in a government school in Khairpur, underwent vasectomy after he had 10 children. “Things were getting out of hand. We could not afford to feed so many mouths on my meagre salary.”

While his operation was carried out eight years ago, he is still the butt of friends’ jokes that centre around impotency. “My colleagues say family planning (FP) is a woman’s problem,” says Shah.

“Men don’t think FP is their problem,” says Sherhshah Syed, former president of the Society of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists of Pakistan and currently president of the Pakistan National Forum on Women’s Health.

Syed says vasectomy is associated with impotency. Men find the subject embarrassing and often seek advice from clerics, most of whom are opposed to birth control.

But with Pakistan’s population expanding rapidly and family planning  methods focused on women alone failing, population experts are taking a second look at vasectomy as a means of birth control.

Pakistan’s population stands at 180 million, and with each woman bearing four children on average the projections are that the population could cross  450 million by 2050.

Studies by the Islamabad-based Research and Development Solutions (RADS), in collaboration with United States Agency for International Development, show six million Pakistani couples needing contraception annually while the public sector covers just 33 percent of them.

Dr. Ayesha Khan who heads RADS tells IPS that “some 53 percent of these couples buy FP services, while 15 percent access them through non-governmental organisations.”

According to the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), a Washington D.C.-  based research organisation that monitors population trends around the world, Pakistani women ususally think about FP only after they have had five or more children.

“Women are often required to have large families to improve their social standing and ensure their economic survival,” says Tewodros Melesse, director general of International Planned Parenthood Foundation.

“In many countries girls marry at a very young age, become pregnant too early and out of necessity  drop education to take care of their young family,” Melesse said in an interview with IPS.  In Pakistan, he added, only 22 percent of married women of reproductive age use a modern contraceptive method.

Farid Midhet, a demographer and founder of the Safe Motherhood Alliance cites “illiteracy, in particular female illiteracy”, and bad governance as the two main reasons why family planning programmes have never worked in Pakistan.

“Contraceptive use works as part of an enlightened and educated culture where women have some autonomy,” he told IPS.

Over the years the emphasis and pressure to bring down the number of babies has fallen on women, a majority of whom are illiterate and not empowered to take decisions concerning family size.

“The numbers for both male sterilisation (0.33 percent of all contraception) and condom use reflect the gender power imbalance – women bear a disproportionate burden when it comes to pregnancy prevention,” says Melesse.

“We need to proactively engage men as clients, as partners and as change agents in the sexual and reproductive health programme in Pakistan,” emphasizes Melesse.

“Religious prohibition and husband opposition are the main reasons identified for non-use of contraception in Pakistan so we need to engage with religious leaders to increase access to sexual and reproductive health services among most conservative communities in Pakistan,” Melisse said.

The case of Abdul Ghaffar Khosa, 55, who teaches in a madrassah (religious seminary) in Nawabshah, Sindh province, typifies the difficulties as well as the potential of roping in the clerics.

Khosa says there are different schools of thought in Islam regarding family planning and that while it remains a controversial issue he has set an example by undergoing the procedure himself about eight years ago.

But Khosa accepted vasectomy only after begetting 22 children from two wives. “In between pregnancies, my wives were miscarrying and they were getting weaker – I was scared of losing them.”

Khosa waited three years, to make sure that the procedure had not impaired his sexual functioning, before recommending it to friends and relatives. He has even referred several of his fellow clerics to Sudhayao.

The Summit on Family Planning that is taking place in London on Wednesday is a bid to get governments around the world to commit more resources to safeguarding women’s reproductive rights, according to the executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin told IPS that the meeting aims to provide greater visibility for family planning and to mobilise the political will and extra resources needed to give 120 million more women voluntary access to family planning by 2020.

“We think that the global momentum it will create will be good for women and girls around the world to exercise their right to plan their lives,” he said in a telephone interview. “We believe it’s long overdue.”

The UNFPA has joined with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Kingdom government and other partners to co-host the summit and to work towards this goal, Osotimehin said.

The summit comes in the wake of the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development where women’s groups expressed disappointment with the final document. Many such groups will be keen to hear a different message in London.

According to UN figures, there are some 222 million women in mainly developing countries who would like greater access to family planning tools, but are not being served for a variety of reasons including cultural norms and lack of human and financial assets.

The UNFPA estimates that 4.1 billion dollars are still needed every year to fully meet the need for modern contraceptive methods in the developing world. Osotimehin said the organisation is urging donors and United Nations member countries to help produce this amount.

“The summit is planning to put some very high-level policy issues on the table,” Osotimehin told IPS. “We’ve identified 69 countries in the world where the greatest needs exist, and the summit would hope to raise the necessary funds to help these countries.”

The UNFPA says it already spends about 25 percent of its entire programme resources to “help governments buy family planning supplies and improve services.” By “reshaping its priorities and programmes”, the organisation plans to increase this spending to 40 percent, it says.

To gain the maximum attention, the London meeting has been timed to coincide with World Population Day, which raises awareness about the concerns related to managing a world of 7 billion people – a figure expected to grow to 9 billion by 2050 if current trends continue.

“The summit draws attention to the fact that the projected population growth rates are not an inevitability, and this is extremely important,” says Neil Datta, secretary of the Brussels-based European Parliamentary Forum (EPF), a political network that will be participating in the event.

“What happens in terms of population growth is in large part influenced or determined by our own actions. And these actions, also regarding consumption, have an impact on the future of our planet,” Datta told IPS.

“Our job as a parliamentary network will be to make sure that there is a political will for supporting family planning funding in the coming years,” he added.

One of the Gates Foundation’s stated aims is to aid people to “get off aid”; and greater access to birth control resources is one way to do this, according to co-chair Melinda Gates, wife of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

“If women have access to contraceptive tools, they can save their own lives, because we know it will decrease the number of women dying in childbirth and also save children,” she said at a conference on development in Paris earlier this year.

She said then that the objective of aid was to build countries that provide the right products and services to their people. “That’s what leads to sustainability, and that’s when a society can lift (itself) up,” she said.

Osotimehin emphasised this approach as well. He also pointed out that certain countries have shown that cultural and religious practices are no excuses for denying women access to family planning.

“I want to say that some of the most successful family planning strategies I know have taken place in what would appear to be very religious countries,” he said, citing Brazil, a largely Catholic country, and Iran (mostly Muslim) as having “very successful and progressive” family planning programmes.

“It’s about context and it’s about working with stakeholders on the ground and communities to understand that family planning is a liberating force that empowers women to make choices in their lives and also ensures that we can reduce the number of women dying,” Osotimehin said.

“I don’t think there’s any community in the world that can be against that,” he added.

But along with community mobilisation, legal reforms and economic incentives are crucial to “rectifying social discrimination and economic injustice” against women and girls, according to the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

In its latest Social Institutions and Gender Index report, the organisation said that women’s “reproductive autonomy is limited”, with one in five women on average in emerging and developing countries having no access to family planning.

At the Rio+20 conference, the Women’s Major Group (WMG) representing 200 civil society women’s organisations from all around the world, said it was greatly disappointed in the outcome.

“Women worldwide are outraged that governments failed to recognize women’s reproductive rights as a central aspect of gender equality and sustainable development in the Rio+20 Outcome Document,” the group stated.

The London summit is thus seen an opportunity to get back to the planning board.

Market gardening in the peri-urban areas of Conakry, the Guinean capital, is growing quickly, bringing in income for groups of women and giving them some autonomy.

IPS visited one group of 14 women who are working a low-lying parcel of land at Kobaya, just outside Conakry. The women have leased the fertile three-hectare plot for the equivalent of 130 dollars a month.

“We’re growing tomatoes, potatoes, onions, lettuce, peppers and cucumbers,” said Fanta Camara, president of the association.

Most of the group’s members have their own gardens to grow vegetables for home consumption, but they got together in 2007 with a view to getting into commercial gardening.

The group has put up a makeshift shed in which to store farm implements – hoes, rakes and watering cans – as well as sacks and boxes for transporting their produce to market. Two wells were dug, in 2007 and 2010, to provide water for irrigation.

“Market gardening has both a social and an economic role. It provides jobs and it constitutes a source of income,” said Moïse Koundouno, an agriculture extension worker in Conakry’s Ratoma commune. He added that this activity makes up more than 50 percent of the income for half of peri-urban gardeners.

But the Kobaya association has not adopted any modern techniques to increase its production in the off-season, instead relying on manure to produce vegetables year round.

“Our vegetables are grown and harvested naturally, without any artificial techniques,” said Ramata Touré, who is in charge of sales for the group.

“With the help of an extension worker, we have divided our plot into different crops according to the seasons,” she said.

“We’re seeing good harvests from each 10 by 10 metre block dedicated to a particular crop: a tonne and a half of onions, two tonnes of tomatoes, two and a half tonnes of cabbage, as well as large quantities of aubergine, carrots and okra,” said Dramane Fofana, the agricultural extension worker who has volunteered his time to help the women.

For the market gardeners in areas around Conakry, bringing vegetables to market during the dry season from November to April is crucial, particularly in January and February. At Kobaya, the women are making vegetable growing their principal off-season activity.

Their greens reach the market in the simplest way possible, via direct sales from their farm, or through a community wholesaler called “Bana-bana”.

Abdoul Karim Bangoura, who manages an extensive fruit and vegetable market in the Conakry neighbourhood of Madina, told IPS some 370 groups bring fresh produce to this market, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.

The prices paid for vegetables in the city varies greatly, with fresh produce bringing in up to three times as much during times of relative scarcity. Ramatoulaye Touré, the group’s treasurer, estimates their annual profits at around 10,000 dollars.

“The income is shared among the group’s members after the deduction of costs, mostly to cover the rent of the land and the purchase of inputs,” she told IPS.

Many of the group members IPS spoke to are happy with the results. “I got around 500 dollars at the end of 2011. That money’s allowed me to look after my children and support my husband who’s unemployed,” said Hawa Dabo, a mother of five.

One challenge the women have faced has been post-harvest losses, with unsold produce rotting and going to waste. Since 2010, the group has addressed this by processing some of their harvest on site, turning a problem into added profit.

“Now we make a purée out of peppers and carrots. They’re preserved in a jar and then sold during the dry season when the price is higher. We get twice the usual price for it,” Dabo said.

According to a 2009 report from Crédit Rural de Guinée, a micro-credit institution, “The Guinean population is essentially rural, with around 30 percent in the urban areas against 70 percent in rural areas, but 64 percent of agricultural operations cover less than two hectares.”

In the outlying areas of the capital, customary title to land is still in force. Under customary law, land is generally acquired through inheritance or as a loan, with outright sale forbidden, restricting access for market gardeners.

“Urbanisation is a threat to vegetable growers, because land is in short supply,” said restaurant manager Taliby Sako. “They are increasingly forced to move further from the capital. The added distance to the fields leads to an increase in the price of fresh produce. A kilo of tomatoes today costs eight times what it cost five years ago.”

The Kobaya group also faces other challenges. “Despite putting up living fences (such as thorny, inedible rows of cactus) we’re not happy with animals allowed to graze unsupervised. We also lack equipment and phytosanitary products, which affects the quality of our produce,” said Camara.

The agriculture ministry leads Guinean government support for market gardening in Guinea. With assistance from international partners, it is financing several projects which support poverty reduction.

One of these is the seven million dollar Social Development Project, which attracted five million dollars in backing from the African Development Fund.

This two-year project, which will end in December 2012, aims to develop the productive capacity of the poor, particularly women, by supporting income-generating projects including market gardening.

“Our group has not yet benefited from this programme. But we plan to register ourselves with the Ministry of Agriculture to see what we can gain from this project – or any other programme which is interested in promoting market gardening,” Camara told IPS.

A nurse attends to an expectant mother at Walgak Primary Health Care Centre in South Sudan's Jonglei State. Credit: Charlton Doki/IPS

By Charlton Doki
JUBA, Jul 9 2012 (IPS)

One year after the formation of South Sudan, the country’s women say that independence has not resulted in the positive political, economic and social changes that they had hoped for.

Women activists worry that even after separation from Sudan on Jul. 9, 2011, when South Sudan became the world’s newest country and Africa’s 54th nation, the government has not done enough to improve the lives of its women.

But as people across the country celebrate the first anniversary of independence from Sudan, after a 21-year civil war, the year has been fraught with crises.

The country is in the midst of an economic crisis after South Sudan’s decision in January to shut down oil production, which accounts for 98 percent of the its revenue, following a dispute with Sudan over fees charged to use its pipelines.

There is also dire food insecurity here. In June, the United Nations World Food Programme said that more than half of the country’s 8.2 million people would need food aid by the end of the year.

In the country’s Upper Nile state, the Jamam refugee camp is on the verge of a humanitarian crisis. The camp is home to some of the 200,000 refugees who, according to the U.N., have fled the conflict in Sudan’s Blue state.

However, Médecins Sans Frontières has warned that the mortality rate among children at the camp was 2.8 per 10,000 per day. This figure is above the emergency threshold of two per 10,000.

Amidst all of this both women leaders and activists admit that they had high expectations of the country’s first year. Some feel that the reality of independence has failed to live up to the hype and euphoria.

“We had high expectations, but I think they are not unrealistic and should not be pushed aside. Women are doing badly politically, economically, socially and education wise. The government needs to take measures to address the challenges facing women so that they can truly enjoy life in their new independent country,” Lorna Merekaje, of the South Sudan Domestic Election Monitoring and Observation Programme, told IPS.

Others disagree.

The Central Equatoria state Governor’s advisor on conflict resolution, Helen Murshali Boro, said that women’s concerns would be addressed.

“There is freedom of speech to allow women to express themselves and this means women’s concerns will not go off the radar until they are addressed in the coming years of our country’s independence,” she said.

Though the reality still remains far different.

“Like in the past when South Sudan was still part of Sudan, today women live in poverty,” said Lona James Elia, executive director of a local women’s rights agency, Voice For Change.

The National Baseline Household Survey (NBHS), conducted in 2009 and released in June 2012, indicates that over half of South Sudan’s 8.2 million people live below the poverty line on less than a dollar a day. The majority of the poor are women.

Elia added that South Sudan is still unable to provide maternal health services to the country’s women, especially in rural areas.

According to the U.N. Children’s Fund only 19 percent of births are attended by a skilled health worker. According to the NBHS, 30 percent of the population has no access to basic health services.

The few available health facilities lack supplies and qualified personnel to provide the required services. And in some rural areas women cannot receive maternal and antenatal care because they live too far from the nearest maternity clinic. Thirty-seven percent of poor households have to travel for more than an hour to reach their nearest most-used health facility, according to the NBHS.

“Women are still dying while giving birth. They are still not accessing maternal health services. A woman is not supposed to die because she is giving birth to a new life, a new baby. This is not acceptable,” Elia told IPS.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2011 the country recorded that 2,054 out of every 100,000 women died during childbirth. The high mortality rate has not changed much a year later, according to the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA).

In June, Kate Gilmore, assistant secretary-general and deputy executive director (Programme) of the UNFPA, told reporters in Juba that maternal mortality rates in South Sudan remained the worst in the world.

“The latest evidence that we have is that using standard figures in every 100,000 births there are over two thousand women who die from preventable causes in South Sudan. In Afghanistan, which surely is one of the most troubled countries in the world, it is half that. Across Africa it is five hundred,” she had said.

Elia said the government needed to invest in maternal health services to ensure that women could participate in developing the country.

“A mother should not have to travel all the way from Gondokoro to Juba to deliver a baby because there is no hospital in her home city,” Elia said. Gondokoro is about 20 km from Juba and also within Central Equatoria state. She added that because the nearest health care centre was too far, some women died along the way.

However, government spokesman Barnaba Marial Benjamin said that the government had worked hard to improve living standards.
“We have initiated projects, including building schools and health centres, which will benefit all South Sudanese citizens, including women,” he told IPS.

In addition, the government has implement an affirmative action policy that ensures 25 percent women’s representation in all government jobs at national, state and county levels.

“You see after independence the president appointed six women to the cabinet and about nine to 10 assistant ministers. I think with about 16 women in the national government, the government has responded positively,” said Boro.

Currently there are four female ministers out of a total of 29, and eight female assistant ministers from a total of 27.

However, activists say that this has not directly affected the lives of the country’s women.

“When you look at the middle-class women and those at the grassroots they are still not in positions where they can make decisions that benefit women,” Merekaje told IPS.

Boro admitted that women still occupy low entry positions in the work field.

“Although these days you see more women coming to work in the morning, at the end of the day they go home with peanuts because they work in the less-paid, low positions,” Boro said.

Elia said that women were unable to find employment because the majority are illiterate and do not have the vocational skills required by employers. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, 88 percent of South Sudanese women are illiterate. In addition, the U.N. says that only one percent of girls complete primary school.

“Women are the most illiterate and because, despite the independence of our country, women at the grassroots level still remain the most underprivileged segment of society as they have to depend on men for survival,” Elia told IPS.

Jerisa Yide is one such example. The 65-year-old grandmother earns a living breaking stones and rocks into gravel, which she sells to builders.

“I used to crash stones before independence to enable me to pay my grandchildren’s school fees. We are now independent, but we are even paying more fees for our children to go to school,” said Yide.

Primary and secondary school education are not free in South Sudan. And as a result of the shut down on oil production, the government introduced an austerity budget in January where it scrapped free university education.

Yide said that when she voted for independence she expected the government to provide better services, including education and health.

Selina Modong agreed that not much had changed. She said that the cost of living in Juba had increased since independence. As a result of the economic crisis, inflation has soared to a staggering 80 percent in May.

“I was eating one meal per day before independence. Today I still eat one meal per day and sometimes we hardly eat good food these days,” Modong said.

“I think independence has not changed anything for us poor people,” Modong concluded.

Elia said that everyone should participate in ensuring that the women’s agenda is addressed.

“If you want this independence to benefit everyone, the issue of women should not be for women alone. It should be for everybody. Let us ensure that our daughters have a bright future. That they will get the education they want, that they will get the employment they want and that they will get the health services they deserve to build healthy families for themselves,” said Elia.

A grieving Michael Kusolo and his wife Mary lost all their four children in the recent landslides. They are sitting on a spot where they suspect their children were buried by the mudslide. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
BUDUDA, Uganda, Jul 4 2012 (IPS)

The Ugandan government says it will forcibly remove people settling on the steep slopes of Mount Elgon in eastern Uganda’s Bududa District, as the growing population has resulted in increased landslides in recent years.

In the latest one on Jun. 25, an estimated 100 people are feared dead and up to 250 have been unaccounted for when three villages were washed away after heavy rainfall in the area.

Over the last three years, landslides have buried alive several hundred people living on the slopes of Mount Elgon.

In March 2010, 365 people were killed in Bududa District during a landslide. However, prior to that there were fewer fatalities in the area. In 1997, 48 people were killed in a landslide.

But the increasing number of fatalities resulting from the landslides has not stopped people from settling here. Mount Elgon, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, has the country’s highest population density of 1,000 people per square kilometre with a population growth rate of 3.4 percent per annum.

Many locals have been hesitant to move to low-lying areas as some say that the soil is very fertile for farming, while others claim cultural and historical attachments to the mountain.

However, Dr. Steven Malinga, Uganda’s Disaster Preparedness Minister, told IPS that the government is now determined to enact a law to allow it to evict all those living on dangerous parts of the mountain slope in order to resettle them elsewhere.

“This place has been one of the most risky areas as far as landslides are concerned. And they are getting more frequent and severe. So a special committee of cabinet has been formed. The committee will go round the mountain sensitising people on voluntary relocation,” Malinga told IPS.

The recent landslide has left a huge hollow in the mountain the size of 10 football pitches. A mound of soil mixed with eucalyptus trees, banana suckers and wrinkled iron sheets that once were part of people’s houses stands at the bottom of the mountain. Buried underneath it are human bodies and cattle carcasses.

Malinga said if people did not want to move voluntarily for their own safety, the government would use force.

“If they do not move we shall have no option but to forcefully evacuate them. We shall use our security forces, if necessary, to have those people moved,” he said.

He added that the country’s current constitution did not allow the government to forcefully evict communities, even if they were in danger.

“That is why we need another law to allow for the forceful evacuation of people living in danger. Otherwise they will claim their rights are being violated,” he said.

Over 600 people were relocated to government-owned land in Uganda’s Midwestern district of Kiryandongo after the March 2010 landslides. However, Malinga said many had returned.

“That kind of thing should not be happening. We have got to teach our people that these are risky areas,” he said.

He added that the government would aid those who could not afford to buy land elsewhere.

The Mount Elgon area conservation manager Adonia Bintora told IPS that although landslides have occurred in Bududa District since the early 1900s, they are likely to become more frequent and deadly as the population increases.

Bintora told IPS that the population growth has exerted more pressure on the land and natural vegetation leaving the soil denuded and therefore vulnerable to landslides.

“So if the hills are stripped of vegetation, the soil gets saturated with rain water and therefore it easily caves in,” said Bintora.

Dr. Mary Goretti Kitutu, an environment information systems specialist with Uganda’s National Environment Management Authority, has extensively researched landslide occurrences in Bududa District and their causes.

She explained that overpopulation in the area has exerted pressure on the clay-rich soils as residents clear hillside forests for firewood and farming.

“And when there are no trees with complex roots to hold the soil in place after constant rain, then you end up with landslides. The moment trees are cleared, water becomes the only downward driving force, and you will end up with land slides,” she said.

Apart from felling trees and extensively tilling the land, Kitutu told IPS that the practice by cutting into slopes for the construction of houses and roads has triggered slope failure.

When IPS visited the affected areas, it was easy to observe houses constructed on excavated slopes. The backs of the houses are situated next to high walls of mud that could easily cave in.

“The cutting of slopes removes the lateral support of the slope leading to slope failure,” said Kitutu.

Scientists have also said that Mount Elgon has developed a 40-kilometre crack with a width of between 30 to 35 centimetres. Bintora told IPS that the crack could affect up to three million people living on Kenyan and Ugandan sides of Mount Elgon.

Moving may be the only option to save the community here from further devastation. But some locals are resistant to the idea.

Gabriel Buyela, who lives just across the hill from the area where latest landslides occurred, told IPS that he would only move to a low lying area in the district if government provided him with land. But he added that he could not abandon his ancestral home.

Zaina Namono lost a relative in the landslide but said she and her family were hesitant to move.

“The government relocated our people to Kiyrandongo after the March 2010 landslides but we have heard that they are suffering and going without food. We cannot accept to be subjected to the same,” she said.

Though some who have lost everything say they will relocate.

A grieving Michael Kusolo and his wife Mary lost all their four children in the recent landslides. Kusolo told IPS that he had no alternative but to move because everything he had was now destroyed.

“Even all the land is gone; the graves of my father, my mother and brothers were swept away. So I will move,” he said.

A number of people line up at the Kanungu Health Center IV, Uganda to access family planning facilities. Courtesy: Tadej Znidarcic/UNFPA

By Mantoe Phakathi
Kanungu, UGANDA , Jun 29 2012 (IPS)

It is midmorning at the Kanungu Health Centre IV and the queue of patients grows as more people start to arrive for treatment at this rural facility more than 400 kilometres outside the Ugandan capital of Kampala.

Most are here to access family planning services, while some are waiting for cancer screening.

Generally about 100 patients a day visit the health centre. But today there will be four times as many.

“We see an average of 400 people a day when the doctor from Kampala visits once a month,” says nursing sister Kwesiga Muteisa.

There are mostly women in the queue here, although some are accompanied by their partners.

“Those who come with their husbands are served first to encourage male involvement in family planning,” says acting district health officer sister Rwabahima Florence.

She explains that it also serves as an opportunity for men to undergo HIV counselling and testing, and to learn about other methods of family planning not commonly practiced among Ugandans, like having a vasectomy.

The increased number of patients who visit the health centre are a testament to the success of the voluntary health team (VHT). Three years ago, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in collaboration with the Ugandan Ministry of Health and the Kanungu District Local Government, created the teams. UNFPA funds 95 percent of family planning services in this East African nation, while the government provides the remainder.

VHTs consist of volunteer members from the community who are trained in family planning in order to encourage the practice in their areas.

They conduct home visits and educate people about family planning, distribute condoms and refer patients to health facilities for more information and services. Each VHT is assigned to 25 households.

Voluntary health team member and pensioner Babwicwa Mark beams from ear to ear, satisfied with the number of couples who have now embraced family planning in the Kanungu district.

While the country’s 2011 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) states that the contraceptive prevalence rate at national level is 26 percent, it is 41 percent in Kanungu.

“I motivated some of the people to come to the facility for family planning services,” says Mark. “Most people in my area did not believe in contraceptives, but after a lot of education they realised they’ve got nothing to fear.”

Making Ugandans aware of the need for family planning is vital in a country with the world’s third-highest population growth rate: 3.2 percent.

“People in the communities listen better to the VHTs than the health workers, because at least they know them better than us,” explains Saturday Nason, a nursing officer and VHT trainer at the Kihihi Health Centre in the Kanungu District.

Ugandan women give birth to an average of six children, according to the DHS, a 0.5 decrease from the 2006 average of seven. Nason attributes this decrease to family planning awareness.

Although 26 percent of the Ugandan productive population of 15 to 49-year-olds use modern family planning methods according to the DHS, myths and cultural beliefs still stand in the way.

Women are often subjected to pressure from men to produce more children. “The biggest challenge is that while many women want to adopt family planning and have fewer children, their spouses insist on more,” says VHT member Nyakato Peace, a mother of three.

While the majority of women IPS interviewed at Kanungu Health Centre IV want an average of four children, the majority of men want seven or more. Twesigye Chrisente and her husband, Niwagaba Savio, are an example.

The mother of four is satisfied with the number children she now has, but Savio wants seven and is threatening to marry a second wife if she insists on refusing to have more.
“I only have a brother and sister and we’re not respected in the community because our family is small,” says Savio.

“I don’t want this to happen to my children.”

Chrisente, on the other hand, argues that their income is barely enough to provide for the needs of the children they already have. Both husband and wife are subsistence farmers with no steady income.

The couple had to undergo counselling at the Kinaaba Health Centre II in Kanungu District before Savio agreed that his wife could get a contraceptive implant. It will prevent her from falling pregnant for three years while Savio ponders whether or not to have more children.

While Chrisente is assured of not having any more children within the next three years, the situation is not so easy for other women on different types of contraceptives. Peace says that once women experience the slightest side effects from contraceptives they tend to discontinue them, and this inevitably leads to unplanned pregnancies.

“When it comes to side effects people prefer to discuss their problems with fellow women instead of returning to the health centre to seek advice,” says Florence. “That’s why we need people in the community who can give advice.”

The DHS reported that the use of modern contraceptives increased from eight percent in 1995 to 26 percent in 2011, showing increased demand for family planning services. However, there is a serious shortage of services in the area.

The VHTs complain that pills and female condoms are not available in Kanungu.

UNFPA assistant representative Dr. Wilfred Ochan says that there is a 41 percent unmet need for family planning in Uganda. He attributes this to inadequate funds and poorly skilled health workers.

“However, we’ve made progress because it’s the first time we’re seeing a decrease in the fertility rate in this country,” says Ochan.

Graphic online photographs of seven month-pregnant Feng Jianmei lying prostrate on a hospital bed next to a bloody foetus have created outrage in China over the brutal enforcement of the controversial one-child-policy. The husband of the woman whose forced late-term abortion caused uproar worldwide has gone missing, according to his family.

Feng’s husband Deng Jicai’s whereabouts are unknown, but his disappearance follows continued harassment by thugs and officials. Banners erected in the couple’s hometown in northern Zengjia county, Shaanxi, call them “traitors” and declare that they must be driven out for publicising the forced abortion online and accepting interviews from foreign media.

“The authorities concerned even threatened to send our relative who works in the government to talk to me and tell me not to make a big public scene (over the forced abortion),” Deng said, talking to IPS last week before he disappeared. “I am speechless.”

Earlier this month Feng was given a stark choice by local officials: pay a 40,000RMB (6,200 dollars) fine or have an abortion on her second pregnancy, then in its seventh term.

When unable to meet the fine, officials dragged Feng to a hospital while her husband was away. There they beat her, blindfolded her, and forced her to sign a “consent” form before administrating a lethal injection into her stomach. On Jun. 4 Feng gave birth to a still-born baby girl.

Feng and Deng originally believed their second child was legal since couples whose first child is a girl in rural areas are routinely allowed to have a second one. But Feng’s hukou (household registration document) was registered in Inner Mongolia, not Shaanxi, rendering the privilege void.

“The family planning department gave us three days to go back to Inner Mongolia to transfer my wife’s hukou,” Deng, 29, told IPS. “As soon as her hukou gets transferred to Zengjia county, we will qualify to have a second child and my baby would have been legal. But everyone knows by train it takes more than a week to go to Inner Mongolia and get back. It was an impossible mission.”

Three family planning officials in Shaanxi have since been suspended.

The couple’s case has caused furore online – and Deng’s disappearance has only fanned the flames. “Shaanxi stop embarrassing yourself!” wrote one user calling named rzsc5151 on the micro-blog site Sina Weibo. “(The) seven month pregnant woman forced abortion incident is escalating. Deng Jiyuan ran away. The local government is looking for him like crazy… Now each member of the family is under watch, is being followed, and cannot return home. In such a small place, such behaviour will drive the family mad.”

Since implementing the one-child policy in the late 1970s, China claims to have prevented over 400 million births. Abortions have become a commonplace way to prevent couples from having more children. In 1983, 14.37 million women had abortions according to the Ministry of Health. In 2008, there were 9.17 million. With over-zealous officials keen to meet government birth quotas, many are involuntary.

Li Pin, project manager of the Beijing-based NGO Gender Watch Women’s Voice, believes Feng’s case has opened unprecedented debate in a country where forced abortions are rarely discussed.

“In the past, forced abortion victims could not find ways to channel (complaints) and come to the public’s attention,” Li tells IPS. “The Internet and discussion on forums provides an opportunity for sensitive issues to be made public. This case is not the only one, it is just one of the many.”

“Deng’s case is not the first one, but it’s the first one that has been discussed openly online,” agrees lawyer Zhang Kai, who offered Deng assistance (which he refused) to sue the county government. “Maybe it’s because the brutal pictures caught people’s eyes.”

Crucially, the incident has raised questions in China over the legitimacy of the one-child policy as a whole. Loopholes and variations within the system are myriad. Ethnic minorities can have more than one child, while the wealthy have an option to pay large fines for the privilege of having a second or third child. “Does China’s new social situation call for a loosened population policy?” the nationalistic newspaper Global Times asked in an editorial.

However, activists who speak out against forced family planning risk severe persecution. The blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng was detained in 2005 after exposing thousands of forced abortions and sterilisations. While Chen now studies in New York University after dramatically fleeing to the U.S. embassy, he and his family suffered years of abuse and stifling house arrest at the hands of local authorities.

For now, Feng remains in hospital as her husband’s whereabouts are unknown. The pain continues. “My five-and-a-half year old daughter asked her mother: ‘Where did the baby in your tummy go?’” Deng said last week. “My wife said: ‘God took it away’.”