Two Mexican teenage girls at their school. Investing in education for teenage girls in Latin America is regarded as the way forward for them to become future drivers of sustainable develpment in their societies. Credit: UNFPA LAC

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Jul 11 2016 (IPS)

Latin America’s teenage girls are a crucial force for change and for promoting sustainable development, if the region invests in their rights and the correction of unequal opportunities, according to Luiza Carvalho, the regional head of UN Women.

“An empowered adolescent will know her rights and will stand up for them; she has tools for success and is a driving froce for positive change in her community,” Carvalho told IPS in an interview from the regional headquarters of UN Women in Panama City.

Adolescent girls and boys will have a leading role in their societies when the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development has been completed, she said. One of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is gender equality. Investing in today’s girls will have “a great transformative impact in future,” she said. “Investing in education and protection against violence are important tools for fulfilling the potential of teenage girls and young women,as wellas for promoting gender equality” -- Luiza Carvalho.

The world today has a higher proportion of its population aged between 10 and 24 years old than ever before, with 1.8 billion young people out of a  total population of 7.3 billion. Roughly 20 percent of this age group live in LatinAmerica and the Caribbean, Carvalho said.

According to data given to IPS by the regional office of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), 57million of the region’s 634 million people are girls aged between 10 and 19, living mainly in cities.

The theme for this year’s World Population Day, celebrated July 11, is “Investing in Teenage Girls”, on the premise that transforming their present situation to guarantee their right to equality will not only eliminate barriers to their individual potential but will also be decisive for the sustainable development of their countries.

Women Deliver, an international organisation, has calculated the benefits of this investment in financial terms. For every additional 10 percent of girls in school, national GDP rises by an average of three percent; for every extra year of primary schooling a girl has completed, her expected salary as an adult grows by between 10 and 20 percent.

This is fundamental because, as Carvalho pointed out, “lack of economic empowerment, together with generalised gender discrimination and the reinforcemet of traditional stereotypes, negatively affects the capability of women in Latin America and the Caribbean to participate on an equal footing in all aspects of public and private life.”

Luiza Carvalho, regional director of UN Women for Latin America and the Caribbean. Credit: UN Women LAC

That is why “investing in education and protection against violence are important tools for fulfilling the potential of teenage girls and young women,as well as for promoting gender equality,” she said.

Teenage women, she said, “are an especially vulnerable group who face special social, economic and political barriers.” Their empowerment in the region may come up against difficulties such as unwanted pregnancy, forced early marriage or union, gender violence and limited access to education and reproductive health services.”

As an example of these obstacles, the regional director of UN Women said that a Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) study of women aged 15-49 years in 12 countries of the region “reported that for a substantial proportion of these women, their first sexual encounter had been unwanted or coerced.”

Carvalho stressed that “early marriage or union imposed on girls is a major concern in the region, and it significantly affects the exercise of adolescent girls’ rights developing their full potential.”

“It is a form of violence that denies them their childhood, interrupts their education, limits their social development, curtails their opportunities, exposes them to the risk of premature pregnancy at too young an age, or unwanted pregnancy and its possible complications, and increases their risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections, including HIV (human immuno-deficiency virus),” she said.

It also increases the girls’ exposure to “becoming victims of violence and abuse,” Carvalho said.

In Carvalho’s view it is very positive that all the countries inthe region have established minimum ages for marriage in their laws, but on the other hand, the laws fix different minimum ages for boys and for girls, and in certain cases such as pregnancy or motherhood, girls may legally marry before they reach the minimum age.

In Latin America, far from diminishing, teenage pregnancies have increased in recent years, due to cultural acceptance of early sexual initiation. As a result, the region ranks second in the world for adolescent birth rates, with an average of 76 live births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 years, second only to sub-Saharan Africa.

Furthermore, 30 percent of Latin American teenage girls do not have access to the contraceptive care services they need, according to UNFPA. Sexual and reproductive health face especially high barriers in this region because of patriarchal,culture, the weight of conservative sectors and the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church.

In Latin America, indigenous teenage girls, together with their rural counterparts, are the group most discriminated against in terms of opportunities and access to education. Credit: Rajesh Krishnan/UN Women

In contrast, the region has a good record on education. Over 90 percent of its countries have policies to promote equal access by teenagers to education. Ninety percent of teenage girls have finished their primary school education, although only 78 percent go on to secondary school, according to UNFPA.

The greatest educational access barriers are faced by rural and indigenous teenage girls, who have difficulties for physical access to some education centres. In the case of indigenous and Afro-descendant girls, this is added to inappropriate curricula or the absence of educational materials in their native languages (mother tongues). 

Carvalho highlighted as a positive element that education laws, especially those that have been reformed recently, “have begun to recognise the importance of establishing legal provisions that promote and disseminate human rights, peaceful coexistence and sex education.”

However, she regretted that “direct connections with prevention of violence against women and girls are still incipient.”

In her view, the school curriculum plays an essential role. Including contents and materials “related to human rights and the rights of women and girls, non-violent conflict resolution, co-responsibility and basic education about sexual and reproductive health,” will potentiate more non-violent societies, inside and outside of the classroom, she said.

Carvalho quoted a 2015 study carried out in 13 Latin American countries by UN Women and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which concluded that education systems are failing to prevent violence against girls.

“This is something that must be improved, because it is in the first few years of early childhood that egalitarian role modelling between girls and boys can occur and lay the foundations of the prevention of violence, discrimination, and inequality in all its forms,” she emphasised.

Carvalho said changes should start with something as simple as it is frequently forgotten: “Girls, teenagers and women are rights-holders and entitled to their rights.”

If girls are given “equal access to education, health care, sexual and reproductive education, decent jobs, and representation in political and economic decision-making processes, sustainable economies would be promoted and societies, and humanity as a whole, would benefit,” she concluded. 

Edited by Verónica Firme. Translated by Valerie Dee.

Participants at a UN event on Interfaith harmony and the Sustainable Development Goals. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias.

By Lyndal Rowlands
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 21 2016 (IPS)

The traditional definition of aid is being eroded at the same time that governments have committed to achieving the UN’s ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Jeffrey Sachs special adviser to the UN Secretary-General on development told IPS Thursday.

“A lot of governments have a kind of magical thinking which is, we’re all for the Sustainable Development Goals but don’t come to us if you want to achieve them, go borrow from the private markets,” said Sachs.

Aldo Caliari who represents civil society in UN Financing for Development (FfD) negotiations told journalists here Monday that there has been a “significant shift in the language” in these negotiations towards “a larger presence of the private sector”.

“We are concerned about states withdrawing their responsibility and saying the private sector should do it,” said Caliari who is also director of the Rethinking Bretton Woods Project at the Washington DC-based Center of Concern.

“Loans usually go for commercial projects rather than public service delivery so this is an entirely different way of utilising the financing,” he said.

While private sector financing will provide part of the funds needed to achieve the sustainable development goals, there are definitely some areas where public funds remain essential.

“If you want to achieve universal health coverage in poor countries, which is SDG 3, that is a public sector function and the poor countries do not have enough domestic revenues to achieve that on their own,” said Sachs.

“For the poorest countries the Official Development Assistance should be overwhelmingly in the form of grants because putting absolutely impoverished countries into debt makes no sense,” he said.

Sachs said that there are examples right now where donor governments are reducing funding to development programs in favour of domestic refugee costs, peacekeeping budgets and climate financing.

“I know cases where contributions to The Global Fund (to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria) and GAVI (The Vaccine Alliance) were cancelled in favour of climate financing because the government wanted to check the box on climate financing,” said Sachs.

He said that even Scandinavian countries, which he described as “some of the world’s best donors”, were reallocating their development funds to refugee programs.

Jeroen Kwakkenbos, Policy and Advocacy Manager at the European Network on Debt and Development (EURODAD) expressed concerns that some of the biggest increases in the recently published 2015 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Official Development Assistance (ODA) figures were for areas not traditionally defined as aid.

“One of the largest increases aside from refugee costs was for non-grant financing which is basically loans which increased by 26 percent,” said Kwakkenbos.

Kwakkenbos said that there is a trend towards loans replacing grants in country’s overseas development assistance budgets.

These changes are reflected in donor government aid policies. For example, the Australian government states on its website, that aid represents “an increasingly small proportion of development finance” and that Australia’s aid program will achieve it’s purpose by “supporting private sector development and strengthening human development.”

Kwakkenbos said that the inclusion of refugees in ODA accounting started in the 1990s, “but at the time it was a very small proportion of ODA so everyone just kind of ignored it.”

Overall, the OECD figures showed a small increase in ODA in 2015, without including the refugee costs, although some OECD countries did individually reduce the development assistance in favour of refugee programs.

The OECD told IPS by email that there has “not been any change of rules to allow more refugee costs to be counted as ODA” and that the OECD Development Assistance Committee told donor countries in February they were concerned that refugee costs should not “eat into ODA”.

Despite the small overall increase, most donor countries remain a long way from meeting their commitments to increase aid to 0.7 of one percent of their Gross National Income (GNI).

Kwakkenbos said that the target to reach 0.7 has now been revised to 2030, the same year governments have agreed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

“You have to remember that the original 0.7 target was 1980 and no later than 1985,” he said.

By Roberto Azevêdo
GENEVA, Jan 22 2016 (IPS)

In 2015 the international community took some huge strides forward on a number of vital issues.

There was the agreement on the United Nations new Sustainable Development Goals.

There was the remarkable breakthrough in Paris in the fight against climate change.

Roberto Azevêdo

And, late in December, at the World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial conference in Nairobi, members agreed a set of very significant results. In fact, they delivered some of the biggest reforms in global trade policy for 20 years.

We must seek to capitalise on this progress in 2016.

Let me explain in a bit more detail what was delivered in Nairobi.

The Nairobi Package contained a number of important decisions ­ including a decision on export competition. This is truly historic. It is the most important reform in international trade rules on agriculture since the creation of the WTO.

The elimination of agricultural export subsidies is particularly significant in improving the global trading environment.

WTO members ­ especially developing countries ­ have consistently demanded action on this issue due to the enormous trade-distorting potential of these subsidies. In fact, this task has been outstanding since export subsidies were banned for industrial goods more than 50 years ago. So this decision corrected an historic imbalance.

Countries have often resorted to export subsidies during economic crises ­ and recent history shows that once one country did so, others quickly followed suit. Because of the Nairobi Package, no-one will be tempted to resort to such action in the future.

This decision will help to level the playing field in agriculture markets, to the benefit of farmers and exporters in developing and least-developed countries.

This decision will also help to limit similar distorting effects associated with export credits and state trading enterprises.

And it will provide a better framework for international food aid ­ maintaining this essential lifeline, while ensuring that it doesn’t displace domestic producers.

Members also took action on other developing-country issues, committing to find a permanent solution on public stockholding for food security purposes, and to develop a Special Safeguard Mechanism.

And members agreed a package of specific decisions for least developed countries, to support their integration into the global economy. This contained measures to enhance preferential rules of origin for these countries and preferential treatment for their services providers.

And it contained a number of steps on cotton ­ helping low-income cotton producers to access new markets.

Finally, a large group of members agreed on the expansion of the Information Technology Agreement. Again, this was an historic breakthrough. It will eliminate tariffs on 10 per cent of global trade ­ that’s 1.3 trillion dollars worth of trade, making it the WTO’s first major tariff cutting deal since 1996.

Altogether, these decisions will provide a real boost to growth and development around the world.

This success is all the more significant because it comes so soon after our successful conference in Bali that delivered a number of important outcomes, including the Trade Facilitation Agreement. (TFA)

The TFA will bring a higher level of predictability and transparency to customs processes around the world, making it easier for businesses ­ especially smaller enterprises ­ to join global value chains.

It could reduce trade costs by an average of 14.5 per cent – with the greatest savings being felt in developing countries.

The Agreement has the potential to increase global merchandise exports by up to 1 trillion dollars per annum, and to create 20 million jobs around the world.

That’s potentially a bigger impact than the elimination of all remaining tariffs.

So the challenge before us is very significant.

For instance, during or the last two years, we have been trying to reinvigorate the Doha agenda on development, exploring various ways of overcoming the existing difficulties. We tested different alternatives over several months of good engagement, but the conversations revealed significant differences, which are unlikely to be solved in the short term.

But the challenge is not limited only to the question of what happens to the Doha issues, it is about the negotiating function of the WTO. It is about what members want for the future of the WTO as a standard and rule-setting body. And the challenge is urgent.

The world won’t wait for the WTO. Other trade deals will keep advancing.

The wider the gap between regional and multilateral disciplines, the worse the trade environment becomes for everyone, particularly businesses, small countries and all those not involved in major regional negotiations.

But the outlook is not bleak. I said at the outset that 2016 was full of promise. I truly believe that ­ because, while we face real challenges, there are also real opportunities before us.

(End)

Excerpt:

A small boy plays with his toys. Poor nutrition in Zimbabwe is exposing vulnerable children nutrition to mental health challenges according to humanitarian agencies. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

By Ignatius Banda
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Jan 12 2016 (IPS)

Mildren Ndlovu* knows the mental toll of Zimbabwe’s long-drawn economic hardships in a country where a long rehashed statistic by labour unions puts unemployment at 90 per cent.

Ndlovu, a 27-year-old single mother is raising two children, both under 5-years old, and survives on menial jobs such as doing laundry and dishes in neighbouring homes, says she has watched their health deteriorate and not just physically.

“I know they are not growing up the way other children are,” Ndlovu said, as she changed the underwear of her four-year who had just soiled himself.

“At his age, he should be able to visit the toilet by himself, yet I still have to change him,” she said from her one roomed shack in one of Bulawayo’s poor townships that litter the city’s north.

Ndlovu’s concerns about the slow development of her children point to the broader effects of Zimbabwe’s economic decline on vulnerable groups, with the UNICEF early this month releasing the Zimbabwe Poverty Atlas 2015 (http://unicef.org/zimbabwe/resources_17478.html) showing high poverty levels across the country that are affecting children’s mental health.

At the launch of the report, UNICEF, the World Bank and government officials said the poverty atlas is an attempt recognise that “Children are rarely recognised in poverty alleviation efforts and their needs are not properly addressed.”

According to the report, no child from the poorest health quintile reaches higher education, with eight of the country’s ten provinces registering poverty levels between 65 and 75 per cent.

“Child poverty has reduced (their) mental health and is reponsible for poverty when they are adults,” said Dr. Jane Muita, UNICEF’s deputy resident representative in Zimbabwe.

“It (child poverty) results in lower skills and productivity, lower levels of health and educational achievement,” Dr. Muita said.

According Zimbabwe’s health and child welfare, the country has witnessed an increase in mental health diagnoses, and has put in place a Mental Health Strategy 2014-18 to deal with the crisis.

The ministry blames the tough economic conditions that have thrown millions into the streets of unemployment.

There are no available figures of how mental health has affected children, but concerns by parents such as Ndlovu are giving a human face to a crisis that has been highlighted by the UNICEF report on child poverty and their mental health.

In some parts of Zimbabwe in the south-west districts such as Nkayi were found to have up to 95.6 per cent of poverty, while Lupane poverty levels stood at 93 per cent according to the UNICEF’s Zimbabwe Poverty Atlas.

There are concerns that this will slow the country’s march towards realising its Sustainable Development Goals to reduce child poverty by 2030.

Last year, the Zimbabwe Vulnerable Assessment Committee found that up to 36 per cent of children in Zimbabwe have stunted growth which experts say has not only affected them physically, but has also slowed their mental growth because of poor diets.

“The problem with children’s health and their mental development is that the attitude of both parents and some health workers is that these children will soon grow out of these challenges,” said Obias Nsamala, a Bulawayo pediatrician.

“But what I have seen with many children under 5 years is that these mental deficits can be detected when they come for treatment but only become an issue by the time they have began school. I think that is why for a long time this country had something like special classes for children not intellectually gifted,” Nsamala told IPS.

“I believe its been a wrong approach because some of these children may be slow learners or intellectually challenged not because of some genetic deficit but because all the signs were ignored earlier on based on their backgrounds and access to adequate meals,” he said.

As the country seeks to improve the lives of vulnerable groups such as children with government officials saying the country needs to grow the economy in order to reduce poverty, there is no consensus on how exactly this will be achieved to attract investment, with the country continuing to rely on international development partners to create safety nets for the poor.

From 2014 to June last year, UNICEF says it spent 363 million dollars on social services, this at time the country’s critical social services ministries are facing budget cuts which officials have admitted made it impossible to provide adequate assistance such as health care.

Under the 2016 national budget, the health and child welfare ministry received 330 million dollars which will largely be funded by donor countries, leaving a huge deficit which Minister David Parirenyatwa said is not enough to meet such such sectors as the poorly funded psychiatric clinics.

Perhaps to highlight these funding challenges, officials at the country’s largest psychiatric institution which caters for adults, Ingutsheni Hospital in Bulawayo early this year told Minister Parirenyatwa that the mental health hospital requires 23 doctors but only had six.

The social welfare ministry, also previously offering financial support for vulnerable group’s such Ndlovu’s children, has complained of poor funding from government.

Aid agencies say millions will require food assistance in 2016, further pushing Ndlovu and many others on the edge of what UNICEF’s Poverty Atlas says are their mental needs.

*name changed to protect her identity

(End)

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, Dec 3 2015 (IPS)

Investing in a low carbon infrastructure, particularly renewable energy, is key to addressing climate change. The really big investment challenges are in the developing world where access to modern energy services is far below what is needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals; indeed, almost two billion people still lack access to electricity.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram. Credit: FAO

Raising income levels in poorer countries will require closing these massive energy gaps. The big challenge is to do this cleanly.

The threshold for energy sufficiency can be established at around 100kwh per capita per day. Up to this level, there is a very strong correlation between increased energy consumption and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. At current prices, between 10 and 20 dollars per day are needed to buy the requisite energy services. But spending 10 dollars per day on energy services would exhaust the average incomes of even middle income countries such as Angola, Ecuador and Macedonia. This takes the challenge well beyond the ‘bottom billion’ or less living below the World Bank’s recently revised $1.90 per capita per day poverty line.

Today, coal and some large hydroelectric dams are the only sources that generate energy at sufficiently low cost. Consequently, while the only way to achieve sustainable development in the face of accelerating climate change is with an energy infrastructure built around renewable energy (of which the most significant are probably solar power, wind and biofuels) as well as carbon capture and storage, these are currently still unaffordable options. Without subsidies, modern energy would remain beyond the reach of poor families and communities for generations to come.

Currently much touted market-based solutions run the risk, particularly if insufficiently regulated, of actually working against sustainable development objectives because they seek to raise energy prices to make renewable energy more attractive to private investors. Instead, what is needed is a strategy that will significantly reduce the cost of renewable energy services.

The most promising option is a massive public investment push, coupled with appropriate subsidies to offset high initial prices in the short term. If targeted at the most promising technology options (e.g., solar and wind), such a strategy would trigger an early cost write down through innovation and scale economies, giving the private sector clear and credible signals, and encouraging energy efficiency.

The main constraint to such a big push is access to predictable and affordable finance, particularly where domestic markets are small. As their carbon-fueled economic prosperity has brought us to the brink of climate catastrophe, the onus is on rich country governments to fund the big push into clean energy sources in the developing world. So far, they have not risen to the challenge; despite commitments made at Kyoto, before Copenhagen in 2009 and elsewhere since, the resources for climate change adaptation and mitigation in developing countries remain paltry.

Supporting a big push into clean energy services in the developing world will, almost certainly, exceed the Marshall Plan which committed one per cent of US annual GDP to finance European reconstruction after World War Two, equivalent to well over 150 billion dollars today. This time, the onus should not fall on one country alone, and a broader mix of additional financing sources will be needed to fund the required public investment programmes in energy efficiency, renewables and forest management.

A range of financing instruments is now on the table, from green bonds to international taxes on financial transactions and air travel. But scaling-up multilateral support will require an overhaul of international finance, particularly when the energy challenge facing developing countries is combined with the need for adaptation investments to limit the growing damage they face due to rising global temperatures.

Establishing a viable new ‘framework for climate finance’ remains a pressing challenge despite the establishment of the Climate Fund at the Durban Conference of Parties (CoP). The scale of the challenge to avoid catastrophic climate change means that addressing it cannot be delayed and short-changed anymore, as it has been so far. It will be key to restoring trust to ensure that the deal to be struck in Paris later this year will take us closer to sustainable development and climate justice.

(End)

Excerpt:

By Hazel Henderson
ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida, Dec 2 2015 (IPS)

Civil society organizations, known as NGOs, have for decades used their non-government status to prod officials, politicians and business on climate issues. Veteran campaigners Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, Kenya’s tree planters, India’s Chipko tree-hugging protectors and indigenous movements worldwide first raised the issues of protecting the Earth and its atmosphere.

Hazel Henderson

Social change rarely comes from elites since those in power are insulated from the hunger, desperation, pollution and resource depletion their populations experience. Change comes from societies’ periphery, those marginalized, excluded, voiceless in policy discussions of governments and business.

Thus civic and voluntary associations, movements and protests become the vanguards of social change – often positive, but negative if ignored or suppressed. These ancient forces in human societies are rooted in our earliest experiences of dangers and risks and our responses to our fears: competing with other groups for territory, accumulating and hoarding resources – or more positive responses of bonding, sharing and cooperating as Charles Darwin saw as our evolutionary success.

Elites in Britain hijacked Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection and saw it as the “survival of the fittest” recast in The Economist by Herbert Spencer. The magazine apologized for its focus on competition and “this poisonous phrase” in December 2005 as I described in Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2006).

The NGOs leading the climate debate for decades include the Carbon Disclosure Project, now CDP, Rocky Mountain Institute, Natural Capital Solutions, Carbon Tracker and the Club of Rome of concientized and superannuated elites. Drivers are social and environmental justice groups, worldwide indigenous networks of ecovillages, local currencies, monetary reformers, ethical investors and, more recently, religious groups led by Pope Francis, followed by many others, including the movement Our Voices.

The official climate debates in the UN summits focused around the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, unfortunately captured by the economics profession into ineffective carbon markets and trading of pollution permits, offsets too easily gamed by financial players. While many reaped money rewards, these “markets” failed to reduce or even slow carbon dioxide and other GHG emissions.

The UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in 2009 saw officials naming, blaming and shaming between Tier I countries which had achieved development on fossil fuels and their emissions and Tier II countries still seeking their own development. The stalemate was largely influenced by this Kyoto Protocol. The major possibility for agreement was left on the table: accelerating the global transition of all countries to low-carbon, renewable resource economies – beyond the fossil-fuel era to the next Solar Age.

Fast forward to Paris and COP 21, the NGOs are still leading the way with their many approaches to this transition to 100 percent renewable resource economies and the equally necessary inclusion of all in the coming green prosperity. They drove the agenda at Rio +20 in 2012 with Brazilian groups, the Rainforest Alliance, the Committee on Sustainability Assessment, World Resources Institute, Biomimicry Institute, the International Institute for Sustainable Development and many others.

The historic deadly duo: resource depletion and inequality are at last being addressed as the single issue for human survival and evolution. This deadly duo is central in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ratified by the 193 member countries at the UN in New York, September 2015. This new inclusive development model supersedes the obsolete economic model measured by gross domestic product (GDP), its subsidies to fossil fuels and all pollution and social harm it treats as “externalities” omitted from business and government accounts. Even mainstream Wall Streeters are critiquing inequality in corporations. Hedge fund philanthropist Paul Tudor Jones, founder of JUSTCapital, is launching a JUST 100 Index of the fairest corporations. While 66 per cent of corporations now accept climate science, 95 per cent of them still belong to trade associations obstructing progress, according to InfluenceMap. At last, these past subsidies which caused global warming are being phased out.

Solar, wind, wave power, geothermal and energy efficiency are revealed as cheaper than unsubsidized fossil fuels and nuclear power. Full-spectrum accounting by SASB and IIRC drives the new NGOs promoting all these Solar Age technologies. Our Green Transition Scoreboard launched in 2009 now tracks private investment in green sectors worldwide at $6.22 trillion.

Helio International’s HIFI tool for investors will help steer them to those countries most hospitable to Solar Age investments, mostly in developing countries.

These societies are not trapped in obsolete infrastructure and can “leapfrog” directly to green technologies: beyond vulnerable national electric grids to decentralized local power from community-owned local solar and wind generation. Asset owners, pension funds are driving shifts of investments and portfolios to fossil-free, green sectors, including CERES, 2° Investing, Grantham Foundation, Climate Bonds Initiative, Sonen Capital, Green Alpha Advisors and others.

NGOs can continue driving the debates at COP21 with their new allies and accelerate the great global transition now underway to the next economy, equality-based and powered by the daily free photons from our Sun.

(End)

Excerpt:

By Samuel Musyoki
LUSAKA, Zambia, Nov 26 2015 (IPS)

The long-awaited African Girls’ Summit on Ending Child Marriage is here.

It presents an opportunity to share experiences and reflect on what we need to do differently if we want to step up our efforts towards ending child marriage, an issue close to my heart.

I’ve seen what being a child bride can do to a girl.

I have five sisters, three of whom were married as children. As such, my sisters did not get a good education. They gave birth at an early age and now they are faced with challenges and limited opportunities. Now I am a father to three girls. I want a different life for them and for all the other girls growing up across Africa – and the rest of the world.

The summit, hosted by the Government of the Republic of Zambia, is taking place in Lusaka this week. It follows the launch at the May 2014 Africa Heads of State meeting in Addis Ababa of the campaign to end early and forced child marriage.

Both the campaign and summit are significant for a continent, home to an estimated 7 million child brides.

While we have made good progress working in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) and national levels to influence policy and legal changes, more needs to be done at the grassroots level.

Long-term engagement with communities is key if we want to end child marriage across Africa.

Child rights organisation Plan International is dedicated to tackling child marriage and we’ve learnt time and time again, the perception of this issue is almost universally negative.

Yet why does it still happen?

Marriage for a 14 year old girl should not be seen as the only option for parents or for children. That’s fundamentally flawed.

If we want to make a difference, we need to look at how governments and civil society can change with communities to help them realise the impact of child marriage. We need to work with girls to help them understand the value of education and the benefits of the life they can have if they stay in school. But transforming attitudes and practices that have become acceptable over time requires investment in innovative approaches that draw on and build on the knowledge of all relevant actors at policy and grassroots levels.

Plan International has been working against child marriages alongside community-based organisations, regional traditional leaders, media and national governments. By creating local and regional platforms to raise awareness, to discuss and to take action, the pressure is building up to eliminate early child marriage in Africa.

Focusing on Southern Africa, Plan International´s “18+ Programme” on ending child marriages in Tanzania, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique has been engaging with and transforming communities and societies. It contributed significantly to convince the Malawian Parliament, which recently passed a law to declare 18 as the minimum legal age for marriage.

Now, more than ever, is the time to bring all actors together and tackle the issue of early child marriage across the continent. After all, we can neither keep the promise of the African Children’s Charter, nor attain the new Sustainable Development Goals if young girls and women continue to suffer early child marriage.

Progress is being made and it’s heartening to seeing discussions taking place across the board. It gives us hope that it is possible to end child marriage within a generation.

(End)

Excerpt:

The UN’s heavily-hyped Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were approved by more than 160 world leaders at a summit meeting in September, are an integral part of the world body’s post-2015 development agenda, including the eradication of hunger and poverty by 2030.

But that ambitious goal, warns the UN’s sister institution, the World Bank, can be thwarted by the devastating impact of climate change on the world’s poorest people.

In a new study released Monday, the World Bank says climate change is already preventing people from escaping poverty.

“And without rapid, inclusive and climate-smart development, together with emissions-reductions efforts that protect the poor, there could be more than 100 million additional people in poverty by 2030.”

The report, released ahead of the international climate conference in Paris November 30-December 11, finds that poor people are already at high risk from climate-related shocks, including crop failures from reduced rainfall, spikes in food prices after extreme weather events, and increased incidence of diseases after heat waves and floods.

Titled ‘Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty’, the study says such shocks could wipe out hard-won gains, leading to irreversible losses and, driving people back into poverty, particularly in Africa and South Asia.

According to the report, the poorest people are more exposed than the average population to climate-related shocks such as floods, droughts, and heat waves, and they lose much more of their wealth when they are hit.

In the 52 countries where data was available, 85 per cent of the population live in countries where poor people are more exposed to drought than the average.

Poor people are also more exposed to higher temperatures and live in countries where food production is expected to decrease because of climate change, the report notes.

“This report sends a clear message that ending poverty will not be possible unless we take strong action to reduce the threat of climate change on poor people and dramatically reduce harmful emissions,” said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim.

“Climate change hits the poorest the hardest, and our challenge now is to protect tens of millions of people from falling into extreme poverty because of a changing climate,” he added.

Asked for a response, Harjeet Singh, Climate Policy Manager at ActionAid, told IPS the World Bank’s analysis of poor people’s vulnerability to climate impacts is not new, but it rightly highlights that poverty cannot be addressed without tackling climate change.

He said poor people and poor countries are most vulnerable to climate change as they have limited assets, skills and knowledge to overcome the effects.

“However, the World Bank is coming late to the game with its talk of improving social protection to fight the effects of climate change”, Singh said.

In reality, he pointed out, the World Bank has had a long and dubious record of forcing developing countries to reduce their public expenditure to provide basic services, and protecting socially and economically weaker populations.

“It will need to address this before it can reliably practise what the report preaches,” he declared.

Louise Whiting, senior policy analyst, water security and climate change at the UK-based WaterAid, told IPS the world’s poorest are most at risk from climate change and are receiving the least amount of climate-change financing to help them adapt to climate-related weather shocks including flood, drought and heat waves.

“Our research tells us that in Bangladesh alone, an estimated 38 million lives are at risk between now and 2050 because of climate-change related disasters,” she pointed out.

“The climate path we are on now means an end to development – an end to all progress on extreme poverty.”

She said for families living in extreme poverty, with fragile access to safe water, good sanitation and hygiene, these lengthening dry seasons and intensifying monsoons wipe out years of work and further entrench the cycle of poverty.

“Safeguarding basic services including clean water, sanitation and hygiene helps communities recover faster and become more resilient to climactic extremes.”

Whiting said national governments in developing countries need more support in designing and implementing projects to help eradicate poverty while building communities’ resilience to climate change, as well as financing.

Leaders at this month’s crucial talks in Paris must not forget the world’s poorest, and include a strong focus on helping them to adapt to this challenging new reality, she added.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

The United Nations has estimated a hefty funding requirement of over 3.5 trillion to 5.0 trillion dollars per year for the implementation of its ambitious post-2015 development agenda, including 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), approved by world leaders in September.

But at least one key question remains unanswered: how will the UN convince rich nations and the world’s multinational corporations to help raise the necessary trillions to reach those global goals, including the eradication of poverty and hunger by 2030?

According to the UN, there is at least one “hidden source” for development funding, primarily for the world’s most impoverished continent: capturing the illicit financial outflows from Africa, estimated at over 50 billion dollars annually.

James Zhan, Director of Investment and Enterprise at the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), told delegates that tackling illicit financial flows was essential for Africa to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

The estimated resources leaving Africa in the form of illicit financial transfers, he pointed out, was nearly 530 billion dollars between 2002 and 2012.

“That was a huge cost for the continent’s development as those resources could have been invested into Africa’s economic development and structural transformation.”

He said illicit financial flows undermined institutions, drained the state of much needed economic resources, reduced the development resource base and led to higher domestic tax burdens to fill the resource gap.

The 17 SDGs also include quality education, improved health care, gender equality, sustainable energy, protection of the environment and global partnership for sustainable development.

Bhumika Muchhala, Senior Policy Researcher, Finance and Development Programme, at the Third World Network (TWN), told IPS the three key causes of illicit financial outflows are widely held to be commercial tax evasion, criminal activity and government corruption.

She said tax evasion and avoidance, as well as transfer mispricing (trade mis-invoicing) practices of multinational corporations (particularly in the extractives sector), constitute the leading problem, along with money laundering practices and criminal activity such as trafficking in drugs and labour.

As many social movements, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), academics and policymakers point out, this does not happen by accident, she said.

Many countries and their institutions actively facilitate, and reap enormous profits from, the theft of massive amounts of money from developing countries.

“This undoes decades of economic development and sabotages the chances of future generations to grow beyond the need for economic aid,” she added.

Following an investigation last year, a High-Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa had concluded that combating such flows was no longer a choice; it had become an imperative.

The Panel, established by the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), called upon the African Union (AU) to engage with its partner institutions to elaborate on a global governance framework to determine the “conditions under which assets are frozen, managed and repatriated.”

Ambassador Oh Joon of South Korea, President of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), told delegates at a UN panel discussion last month that Africa, like other regions, would have to mobilize resources from within the continent.

And the illicit outflows of finance represented an important loss of foreign exchange reserves, an erosion of legal tax base and bygone investment opportunities from natural resource rents, he added.

With an estimated 50 billion dollars per year in illicit financial flows, the effectiveness of domestic resource mobilization would be significantly curtailed if such illicit flows continued, he argued.

Addressing the high level segment of the General Assembly in September, the President of Senegal, Macky Sall, said illicit financial flows from Africa virtually exceeded official development assistance (ODA) to the continent (which amounts about 50 to 55 billion dollars annually).

“If 17 per cent of those assets were recovered, African countries could pay off their entire debts and finance their own development.”

UNCTAD’s Zhan said Africa was the only region where illicit financial flows reached about 5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

He urged transparency and accountability through the strengthening of civil society and called for the promotion of institutional reforms and the creation of anti-corruption commissions.

He said African governments had a big responsibility to tackle the problem but so did the international community.

But African countries could not do it alone. Multinational companies and foreign direct investment (FDI) were also an important part of the solution. United Nations agencies such as UNCTAD could offer advice to African governments to design investment policies and handle tax avoidance and illicit practices by multinationals, Zhan said.

Muchhala told IPS while many organisations highlight the urgent need for reforms in information-sharing and transparency policies in the European Union and the United States, the Tax Justice Network, a key social movement comprised of various NGOs, has been stressing the need to counter tax evasion and tax avoidance.

To this extent, an advocacy campaign to establish a UN global tax body, with the universal membership of the UN, was carried out during the 2014-2015 negotiations for the third Financing for Development (FfD) conference.

The conference, held in Addis Ababa in July 2015, failed to garner consensus for a global tax body due to the resistance of developed countries.

While this is a major disappointment, she said, the push for a global tax body by both developing countries and global social movements, will persist both inside and outside the UN.

This article is part of IPS North America’s media project jointly with Global Cooperation Council and Devnet Tokyo.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

By Paloma Duran
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 16 2015 (IPS)

Increasingly gender equality, rooted in human rights, is recognized both as a key development goal on its own and as a vital means to helping accelerate sustainable development. And while the field of gender has expanded exponentially over the years, with programmes focused exclusively on women and girls and greater mainstreaming of gender into many development activities, a range of challenges remain.

Women are still facing unequal access to economic and environmental resources. They often face numerous barriers linked to clear discrimination as well as bear the burden of low wages or unpaid work, and are susceptible to gender-based violence.

So despite the significant advances for women, the fact is that unless women and girls are able to fully realize their rights in all facets of society, human development will not be advanced. The year 2015 is a crucial time to further equality and if the new post-2015 development agenda is to be truly transformative, women must be at the front and also at its centre.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) contain a stand-alone goal on achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. All the goals are intrinsically interrelated and interdependant – and ideally gender will be adressed and mainstreamed amongst all goals. SDG 5 calls on governments to achieve, rather than just promote, gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.

The proposed targets include ending violence, eliminating harmful practices, recognizing the value of unpaid care, ensuring that women have full participation – and equal opportunities – in decision-making, and calling for reforms to give women equal access to economic resources. The new post-2015 agenda is a universal idea with high hopes to “leave no one behind,” but to make this a reality, we must keep pressure on governments to follow through on their commitments.

The Sustainable Development Goals Fund (SDG Fund) has placed gender equality and women’s empowerment at the heart of its efforts to acceleterate progress towards the SDGs. By directly empowering women and by bringing a gender perspective to all development work we can build a more equitable, sustainable future for all.

Stemming from the comitments established in 1995 at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the SDG Fund adopted a dual strategy for advancing gender equality to support both gender-targeted programmes while simultaneaously mainstreaming gender as a cross-cutting priority. Gender mainstreaming entails transforming existing policy agendas by integrating a gender perspective into all policies and programming.

There is no set recipe to creating programmes that will solve gender inequality and perhaps it would be good if there was one single universally applicable and empirically proven method for achieving gender equality in every country around the world. A multi-dimensional issue such as gender inequality is deeply rooted in economic and cultural structures of society and it requires comprehensive approaches. Furthermore, one needs to explore the issue in the specific context of the country in question to effectively improve the quality of life for women and girls everywhere.

The private sector, together with NGOs and governments, are key actors in addressing the variable causes of gender inequality. In other words, achieving equality and empowerment for women is a challenge that requires the synergistic intervention of multiple actors.

For example, the Fund is working in Bangladesh, where women are employed at the lower end of the productivity scale. Labor force participation of rural women is only 36.4 per cent compared to 83.3 per cent of men. Creating employment and income generating opportunities for women as well as enhancing women’s access to social protection will help reduce gender disparities which are exacerbated by women’s poverty and vulnerability.

The SDG Fund programme entitled “Strengthening Women’s Ability for Productive New Opportunities” is led by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in partnership with the International Labour Organisation (ILO), local governments and private partners with the overall goal to assist 2,592 women from ultra-poor households. As part of a pilot programme, women are trained in maintenance or rehabilitation of key community assets, public works and community service activities.

Furthermore, the programme is targeting 2,600 women in Kurigram District which has the highest incidence of poverty in Bangladesh. In particular, it aims to assist those who are alone because they are divorced, have been abandoned by their husbands or widowed and/or with low economic status including those with no assets or forced to beg due to poverty. The results will be replicated, targeting 1,900 women, in Satkhira district and the government is further committed scale-up this pilot in a further 20 districts. Overall, the 18 month programme is designed to:

– Helping primary beneficiaries permanently move out of poverty.
– Support human capital with activities to boost knowledge, skills, and confidence.
– Enhance economic inclusion with vocational skills training linked to viable job placement.
– Provide livelihoods options that are resilient in the face of climate change.
– Encourage wage saving or issued as a graduation bonus.
– Facilitate partnership linkages with small and medium enterprises and public-private partnerships to hire participant women after the programme ends.
– Integrate social protection, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.
– Enhance good local governance and develop the capacity of local government institutions.
Gender equality is often seen as the key to addressing the unfinished business of the Millennium Development Goals and accelerating global development beyond 2015. There is strong evidence that closing gender gaps accelerates progress towards other development goals. Poverty, education, health, jobs and livelihoods, food security, environmental and energy sustainability will not be solved without addressing gender inequality.

Urgent action is needed to empower women and girls, ensuring that they have equal opportunities to benefit from development and removing the barriers that prevent them from being full participants in all spheres of society. In the words of UN Women’s Executive Director, “equality for women, is progress for all” and so let us embark on this journey together.

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By Geeta Rao Gupta
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 9 2015 (IPS)

The new Sustainable Development Goals, agreed upon recently by the member states of the United Nations, are all interconnected, as has been reiterated time and again. However, it is in the new Goal 6 – “Ensure access to water and sanitation for all”—for which this interconnectedness is most apparent.

Geeta Rao Gupta

Water flows throughout the 2030 Development Agenda. And sanitation and hygiene underpin any possible gains from access to water.

If we do not reach Goal 6, the other goals and targets will not be reached. Progress in the areas of education, health, inequality and extreme poverty all depends on how well we do on water and sanitation.

The United Nations some years ago declared that access to water and sanitation is a basic human right. However today, 663 million people are without access to adequate drinking water and 2.4 billion lack adequate toilets.

We at UNICEF are particularly concerned about the children, who are disproportionately affected by the lack of access to these basic needs.

It affects their health. Water and sanitation related diseases are one of the leading causes of death in children under five. Without access to sanitation hundreds of them fall ill and die every single day from preventable causes, particularly diarrhoea and other fecal-oral diseases.

It affects their education. In many communities, girls stay out of school because they need to fetch water; because they do not have a safe space to use when they menstruate; because they must help their mothers care for those who are sick – often from water-borne diseases.

It affects their nutritional status and their development. There is emerging evidence of direct linkages between lack of access to water and sanitation, and chronic malnutrition. Around 159 million children worldwide are stunted (short height for age), a condition which causes irreversible physical and cognitive damage. The repercussions of stunting can be felt beyond the individual child. It can significantly diminish the learning and future earning potential of entire generations, and thus negatively affect the local and national economy.

It affects equality and equity. One important aim in the new SDGs is the goal to reduce inequalities. New evidence from the World Bank shows that investing in water and sanitation for the poorest 20 per cent of a population yields greater economic returns than investing in the other quintiles and thus has the potential to reduce societal inequalities.

Our data from 45 developing countries show that in 7 out of 10 households, the burden of collecting water falls to women and girls, so access would also aid gender equity.

A side event in the margins of the UN General Assembly, hosted by the governments of the Netherlands, South Africa, Hungary and Bangladesh, concluded that targeting the poorest and the most marginalized will require an immense mind-shift for governments. But it must be done.

It cannot be done without strengthening institutions and improving the accountability of governments and service providers. And it will not be done without involving those who have the most at stake – the poor, women, and adolescents – in planning and in monitoring of services. Their influence has already been brought to bear in the drafting of Goal 6, the fastest agreed-upon goal.

It is no coincidence that impressive results are achieved by working closely with those directly affected. Partnership with them is not a ‘nice-to-have’ but a must-have.

In short, access to water and sanitation is not only a matter of dignity and human rights, but fundamental to our ability to attain any of the goals the governments of the world have just adopted.

We must start right away on working on Goal 6, and it can’t be business as usual: we need to start with the most disadvantaged, or we risk losing the gains we have so painstakingly made in the last 15 years, and we endanger the future. There is no time to waste.

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By Roberto Azevêdo
GENEVA, May 2 2015 (IPS)

Up to 80 percent of global trade is supported by some form of financing or credit insurance. Yet in many countries there is a lack of capacity in the financial sector to support trade, and also a lack of access to the international financial system. Therefore the ability of these countries to use simple instruments such as letters of credit is limited.

The impact of these limitations on a country’s trading potential can be very, very significant.

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

After the financial crisis, the supply of trade finance has largely returned to normal levels in the major markets, but not everywhere and not for everyone.

The structural difficulties of poor countries in accessing trade finance have not disappeared – indeed the situation may well have declined due to the effects of the crisis.

There are indications that markets are even more selective now. Under increased regulatory scrutiny, many institutions have lowered their risk-appetites and are focusing more on their established customers. Some are deliberately decreasing their number of clients in a so-called “flight to quality”.

In this environment, the lower end of the market has been struggling to obtain affordable finance, with the smaller companies in the smaller, less-developed countries affected the most.

I was particularly struck by the fact that the financing gaps are the highest in the poorest countries, notably in Africa and Asia. And I was struck by the size of those gaps.

A survey by the African Development Bank of 300 banks operating in 45 African countries found that the market for trade finance was somewhere between 330 and 350 billion dollars.

It also found that this could be markedly higher if a significant share of the financing requested by traders had not been rejected.“The lower end of the market has been struggling to obtain affordable finance, with the smaller companies in the smaller, less-developed countries affected the most”

Based on such rejections, the estimate for the value of unmet demand for trade finance in Africa is between 110 and 120 billion dollars.

This gap represents one-third of the existing market.

The main reasons for the rejection of requests for financing were:

• the lack of creditworthiness or poor credit history
• the insufficient limits granted by endorsing banks to local African issuing banks
• the small size of the balance sheets of African banks, and
• insufficient U.S. dollar liquidity

Some of these constraints are structural, and can only be addressed in the medium to long term. The retreat of global banks from Africa, and from other poor countries, is one such issue.

The Asian Development Bank conducted a similar survey in Asia, looking at countries like Viet Nam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India.

According to preliminary estimates, the unmet demand there is around 800 billion dollars.

Small and medium-sized enterprises are the most credit-constrained as 50 percent of their requests for trade finance are estimated to be rejected. This is compared with just seven percent for multinational corporations.

Moreover, two-thirds of the companies surveyed reported that they did not seek alternatives for rejected transactions.

Therefore, these gaps may be exacerbated by a lack of awareness and familiarity among companies – particularly smaller ones – about the many options which exist.

A large majority of firms stated that they would benefit from greater financial education.

These findings are particularly striking as Africa and developing Asia are two areas of the world in which trade has grown fastest in the past decade.

But the potential evolution of new production networks is faster than the ability of the local financial sectors to support them.

In this way the lack of development of the financial sector can be a significant barrier to trade.

It can prevent developing countries from integrating into the trading system and accessing further trade opportunities.

And it can therefore prevent them from leveraging trade as a powerful source of development.

So we need to respond to this problem.

The exchanges that we have here can form part of this response. We need to join together in order to advocate action in this area and to devise practical solutions.

Of course, there is no magic bullet. This is a complex issue. However, that should not discourage our efforts.

The trade finance facilitation programmes that I outlined earlier are one example of practical action that we can take.

Of course this only fills part of the gap, so our response needs to be more fundamental.

In July this year, the United Nations’ major ‘Financing for Development’ conference will take place in Addis Ababa. And I think it is essential that we put trade finance on the agenda there.

In this way we can ensure that this issue is given its proper prominence in the development debate, especially at a time when the all-important U.N. Sustainable Development Goals are being finalised.

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. 

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