Amir Saeid Iravani, Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations, addresses the Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East (Syria). Credit: UN Photo/ Evan Schneider

By Jennifer Xin-Tsu Lin Levine
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 30 2025 (IPS)

As sectarian violence rises in Syria, the number of displaced people has climbed exponentially since Syrian forces joined clashes between the Druze and Bedouin groups in the Sweida region.

Spokesperson for the Secretary-General Stéphane Dujarric reported in the daily press briefing this Wednesday, “More than 145,000 people have now been displaced due to hostilities in the Suweida governorate.” This marks a rise of over 50,000 people since Monday, when the spokesperson reported 93,000 displaced.

The conflict originated as a dispute between the Druze and Bedouin, two minorities in southern Syria. In Sweida, a Druze-majority city, armed government forces were deployed to quell the violence and regain control of local government structures primarily led by Druze people.

However, after Israel bombed Damascus, citing harms against Druze civilians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined a new plan to demilitarize Syrian territory from “south of Damascus and the Golan Heights to the Druze Mountain.”

This decision was widely criticized by global actors, including Secretary-General António Guterres, who called it “essential that these attacks stop and that Israel respect Syria’s sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity, and independence.”

Israel is just one of the many countries involved in Syria’s politics and violence. During the Syrian civil war, a period of general pro-democracy political uprising in the Middle East, countries like Iran and Russia backed the current regime in efforts to prevent further Western influence. Supporting various rebel groups were Turkey, the United States, and Gulf nations like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, each with their own strategic and ideological goals.

As a result, Syria has become a battleground not only for internal factions but also for foreign powers vying for regional influence—often with devastating consequences for the civilian population.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 15.8 million people across Syria were in need of humanitarian assistance as of March 2025, the highest number recorded since the conflict began in 2011. The escalating violence in Sweida further intensifies the crisis and strains an already overstretched aid network.

Medical services have been especially hard-hit. The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that only 57 percent of hospitals and 37 percent of primary healthcare centers are operating at full capacity, many others struggling due to damaged infrastructure, medicine shortages and the departure of medical personnel.

According to UNDP assessments, there is only one doctor per 2,000 people due to migration over the past decades. Due to the sharp decline in public health spending, these flaws in healthcare infrastructure are particularly glaring in a time when violence has worsened.

However, problems in Syrian infrastructure extend beyond the immediate crisis. UNDP also reported that 30 percent to 50 percent of schools are out of service, damaged, destroyed or repurposed due to war-related destruction or lack of maintenance. Schools that are still operational often do not receive state funding for basic utilities like water, electricity, or heating.

UNICEF has raised alarms about the impact of the conflict on children. The agency estimates that over 2.4 million children are out of school, many of them having been displaced multiple times.

“Years of war and violence have shattered the lives of Syria’s children, with many enduring a lifetime of hardship,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. This has caused stagnation in Syria’s growth—without children to help rebuild infrastructure in education and healthcare, the system remains weakened.

Due to such precarious federal institutions, humanitarian access has similarly lessened. In past years, the UN Security Council has been unable to renew critical cross-border aid mechanisms due to vetoes from permanent members, leaving much of the aid delivery dependent on unstable domestic routes.

In a recent Geneva press briefing, it was confirmed that humanitarian convoys have been delayed or blocked from reaching Sweida and Daraa due to active fighting and lack of security guarantees.

As the power vacuum deepens in Syria, with the central government’s grip weakening and local militias and foreign actors carving out zones of influence, civilians are increasingly left without protection or basic services. The latest violence in Sweida illustrates the high cost of this fragmentation: an already fragile region now overwhelmed by displacement, cut off from aid, and exposed to indiscriminate attacks.

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Girl stands among the ruins in Gaza. The UNDP warns that the continued war with its loss of life and infrastructure could take years to recover from. Credit: UNICEF/UNI448902/Ajjour

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 13 2023 (IPS)

One month into the war in Gaza, Palestine has already seen major setbacks in development that will have severe ramifications for the people of Palestine that will impact any future efforts toward its economic recovery.

A new report from UNDP and the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) has projected the fallout of Palestine’s socioeconomic development as the conflict in Gaza enters its second month. Titled The Gaza War: Expected Socioeconomic Impacts on the State of Palestine, the joint report warns that the loss of life and infrastructure because of the conflict and military siege will have long- and short-term consequences on the entire state and will see a serious regression in development that would take years for the state to recover from. 

Since October 7, military operations in the Gaza Strip have caused dramatic downward trajectories in the state’s economy, public infrastructure, and development.

Rola Dashti, the Executive Secretary for UN-ESCWA, remarked on the “unprecedented deprivation of resources” since the conflict escalated. In a press briefing, she warned that this deprivation of resources, including public services, health, utilities, and freedom of movement, are emblematic of multidimensional poverty.

Over 45 percent of housing has been destroyed by bombardments; 35,000 housing units have been totally destroyed, and 212,000 units have been partially damaged. Over 40 percent of education facilities have been destroyed, which has left over 625,000 students with no access to education.

The report estimates that Palestine’s GDP is expected to decline by 4.2 percent within the first month of the war. A further loss of GDP is expected by 8-12 percent if the war continues into the second and third months. The poverty level is also expected to rise to 20-45 percent. These projections were predicted for the duration of the war, going on up to three months. As the economic value is largely centralized in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, it will have a ripple effect across the region. Unemployment in Gaza was already an issue, with a rate of 46 percent, compared to 13 percent at the West Bank. Yet, since the start of the war, around 390,000 jobs have been lost. The continued military involvement has already caused disruptions to trade and the agriculture and tourism sectors.

Other effects of the war, such as a reduction in trade and investments, will only further add to the overall insecurity of the State. There is also the risk that investors will take a more cautious approach when the region displays such volatility. The impact on neighboring countries would be to redirect resources from development to expanding security.

Hospitals have been contending with repeated attacks since the start of the war while keeping operations going as supplies dwindle. Sixteen out of the 35 hospitals in Gaza have been forced to suspend their operations due to fuel shortages. This included Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza, the only hospital that was providing maternal health services, where 80 percent of its patients were women and children. On Wednesday night, a spokesperson announced that the hospital would be forced to close down operations due to fuel shortages.

The threat to their safety and disruptions to education, healthcare, housing, and employment have already forcibly displaced over 1.5 million people in Palestine in just one month. The number of fatalities in this current conflict has now exceeded 10,000, including 4,104 children. It stands in stark contrast to the death toll during the major conflict in 2014, which capped at 2251. As Dashti told reporters, “There are faces behind these staggering numbers.”

Assistant Secretary-General and Director of the Regional Bureau for the Arab States for UNDP Abdallah Al Dadari mourns the loss in overall human development. These compounding losses and setbacks will “bring [Palestine] back to 2005, in terms of development”, he said.

Should a ceasefire be put into effect, even immediately, the time for recovery will be long and complex. Al Dadari remarked that rebuilding the lost infrastructure would be a challenge. He added that efforts toward a “top-down reconstruction” that did not include the participation and consideration of the Palestinian people would have “structural deformities” shortly thereafter. Many of the facilities, including hospitals, support centers, and schools, were established and supported by humanitarian organizations, such as UNRWA. Palestine is dependent on these facilities and on humanitarian assistance.

The UN report concludes that post-war recovery efforts should take a different approach, one that will not only deal with the immediate humanitarian and economic needs of the affected civilians through funding. The root causes of the conflict and the tensions in the region must be addressed, Dashti said. With a guarantee from all involved parties, is there a possibility for what the UN calls sustainable peace?

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Temporary medical camps are still the norm in some areas of Pakistan as the country struggles to recover from last year’s flooding. Now areas of the country are facing Cyclone Biparjoy and a monsoon season, and warnings are that food insecurity may increase. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Jun 13 2023 (IPS)

A warning by the UN that Pakistan may face acute food insecurity in the coming months should serve as a wake-up call for the government to focus on the flood-hit areas where the people still live without shelter, medication, and proper food, analysts say.

The warning comes as the National Forecasting Centre in Islamabad warned of an extremely severe cyclonic storm Biparjoy that is expected to make landfall in the country in the coming days.

A mass evacuation of about 80,000 people from its path in Sindh province and India’s Gujarat state is underway in areas where severe storms and high winds are expected.

Ahead of the storm and the expected monsoon season, a recent United Nations report warned that acute food insecurity in Pakistan is likely to be further exacerbated in coming months if the economic and political crisis further worsens, compounding the effects of the 2022 floods – which the country is yet to recover from.

The report titled “Hunger Hotspots” was jointly published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), is a stark reminder to the government, which is yet to cater to the needs of the population hit by severe floods in June-July last year. The two UN agencies have further warned that acute food insecurity will likely deteriorate further in 81 hunger spots — comprising 22 countries, including Pakistan, during the outlook period from June to November 2023.

The projected path of Cyclone Biparjoy.  About 80,000 people are expected to be evacuated ahead of the storm. Credit: India Meteorological Department

According to the report, Pakistan, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, Congo, and Syria are hotspots with great concern, and the warning is also extended to Myanmar.

Pakistan’s Federal Minister for National Food Security and Research, Tariq Bashir Cheema, disputed the report regarding possible “acute food insecurity” in Pakistan and termed it “an effort to spread sensationalism and declare the country a hunger hotspot like African countries.”

He alleged that the two UN agencies wanted to declare Pakistan a “hotspot” for famine like African countries.

“Pakistan had a bumper wheat crop this year, and 28.5 million tonnes of wheat production had been recorded, along with the carry-over stock of the previous year,” he told IPS.

However, analysts and NGOs working in the field said the report was accurate and urged the government to take strong measures for food security before the new wave of flooding.

Almost one year after unprecedented floods ravaged Pakistan, more than 10 million people living in flood-affected areas remain deprived of safe drinking water, leaving families with no alternative to use potentially disease-ridden water, Muhammad Zaheer, an economist, told IPS.

In January, donors pledged more than USD10.7 billion for Pakistan’s flood-stricken population in Geneva against an estimated USD16.3 billion recovery bill.

“All the amount pledged at the conference are loans which will be sent to the government from time to time. However, the flood-stricken people are yet to benefit,” he said.

Zaheer said that affected people in Sindh, Balochistan, and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa need support due to the fear of more rains.

According to the report, over 8.5 million people were likely to experience high levels of acute food insecurity.

The situation has been compounded by last year’s floods which caused damage and economic losses of Rs30bn to the agriculture sector.

According to the UN Development Programme (UNDP), a  Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) estimated flood damages to exceed USD 14.9 billion, economic losses over USD 15.2 billion, and reconstruction need over $16.3 billion.

The food insecurity and malnutrition situation will likely worsen in the outlook period, as economic and political crises are reducing households’ purchasing power and ability to buy food and other essential goods, it notes.

A UNICEF report said that an estimated 20.6 million people, including 9.6 million children, need humanitarian assistance in hard-hit districts with high malnutrition, poor access to water and sanitation, and low school enrollment.

“Frail, hungry children are fighting a losing battle against severe acute malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria, dengue fever, typhoid, acute respiratory infections, and painful skin conditions. As well as physical ailments, the longer the crisis continues, the greater the risk to children’s mental health,” it said.

UNICEF will continue to respond to urgent humanitarian needs while also restoring and rehabilitating existing health, water, sanitation, and education facilities for families returning home. An estimated 3.5 million children, especially girls, are at high risk of permanently dropping out of school.

“But much more support is needed to ensure we can reach all families displaced by floods and help them overcome this climate disaster. It will take months, if not years, for families to recover from the sheer scale of the devastation,” it said.

The floods affected 33 million people, while more than 1,700 lives were lost, and more than 2.2 million houses were damaged or destroyed. The floods damaged most of the water systems in affected areas, forcing more than 5.4 million people, including 2.5 million children, to rely solely on contaminated water from ponds and wells.

Sultana Bibi, who lost her home and a few cattle in the flood in Swat district, said there was no government assistance so far.

“We have received some foodstuff from the local NGO in the early days, but we need financial assistance to rebuild our homes. Many people still live with their relatives,” Bibi, 50, told IPS.

Representatives of Al-Khidmat Foundation, a national NGO, which is on the ground in Swat and other areas to help the people, said the situation is yet to improve.

“Unsafe water and poor sanitation are key underlying causes of malnutrition. The associated diseases, such as diarrhea, prevent children from getting the vital nutrients they need. Malnourished children are also more susceptible to waterborne diseases due to already weakened immune systems, which perpetuates a vicious cycle of malnutrition and infection,” he said.

“We fear more flood as June has begun. Last year, we faced severe floods during this month. The government is required to help the people,” analyst Abdul Hakim said.

Hakim, a university lecturer in environmental sciences in Swat district, told IPS that the people would be worst-hit in case of floods this year, and the people haven’t recovered from the last year’s devastating rainwaters.

Pakistan Medical Association’s Dr Abdul Ghafoor said that people still rely on medical camps organized by NGOs as health facilities destroyed by floods haven’t been operational.

“We want the government to take the FAO/WFP report seriously and safeguard the affected people against water and food-borne ailments,” he told IPS.

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Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) promotes consciousness as a key evidence-based practice to support systemic change – reframing how people think about food to unlock food systems transformation, nourishing all people, and regenerating planet Earth. Pictured here a farmer in Katfoura village on the Tristao Islands in Guinea benefits from opportunities to generate income and improve community life. Credit: UN Women/Joe Saade

By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Jun 12 2023 (IPS)

Deep in the Egyptian desert, the SEKEM community celebrates its first wheat crop – grown to alleviate shortages and price increases caused by the war in Ukraine, and the latest crop in a 46-year history of regenerative development, which has effectively made the desert bloom. On another continent, a consumer who buys acai collected and produced by the Yawanawá in Brazil helps protect 200,000 acres of land.

Food connects people, cultures, and planet Earth. But rather than nourishing global health and well-being, food systems remain at the heart of the global community’s social and environmental crises today.

Massive investment and efforts to transform food systems and existing policy and technical solutions are not delivering the desired impact. In the face of the global food systems crises manifested in food insecurity, unsustainable agricultural practices, and climate change, re-examining the origins of ongoing crises and barriers to transformation is critical.

Reframing How People Think About Food

Against this backdrop, the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) promotes consciousness as a key evidence-based practice to support systemic change. The alliance is built on the premise that reframing how people think about food is the key to unlocking food systems transformation, nourishing all people, and regenerating planet Earth.

“We know our food systems are in a critical state and sit at the core of the regeneration process this world greatly needs, and we believe this can only happen with a change of mindsets and heart-sets, with different values and worldviews,” says Thomas Legrand, CoFSA Lead Technical Advisor.

Convened by UNDP, CoFSA is a movement of food, agriculture, and consciousness practitioners united around a common goal: to support people from across food and agriculture systems to cultivate the inner capacities that activate systemic change and regeneration.

The alliance aims to leverage “the power of consciousness and inner transformation, including proven approaches such as mindfulness, compassion, systems leadership, indigenous and feminine wisdoms, to support systemic change towards sustainability and human flourishing in the food and agriculture sector.”

CoFSA Challenge Fund to Support Regenerative Food System Projects

The CoFSA Challenge Fund, which is about to be launched, intends to support the development of strategic, innovative ideas and solutions to scale up and accelerate progress toward the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development through the transformation of food systems, which is critical to achieving the UN’s SDGs.

The Challenge Fund focuses on cultivating inner capacities for regenerative food systems. This constitutes a new field of practice that requires testing and innovation to identify, develop and nurture potentially transformative solutions.

In this first round of calls for proposals, UNDP will support approximately four pilot projects of up to USD 20,000.

Conscious Food System Links Supply Chain

A conscious food system is a holistic approach to the well-being of people and ecosystems, and where there is a connection and awareness between stakeholders across the whole supply chain, says Helmy Abouleish, SEKEM’s CEO. He heads the holistic, sustainable development community established in 1977 by his father, Dr Ibrahim Abouleish, in the Egyptian desert.

According to UNDP, to transform the systems that harm people and the planet and how food is produced and consumed, “We need to look beyond the problems’ symptoms and even systems’ patterns and structures, at what fundamentally drives the systems.”

Consciousness and mental models, or regenerative mindsets and cultures, are increasingly recognized as the key to unlocking systems change in food and agriculture. To this end, CoFSA applies consciousness approaches to technical solutions to support the cultivation and consideration of inner capacities based on the premise that sustainable change comes from within.

Christine Wamsler, Professor of Sustainability Science at LUND University, emphasizes that there is “increasing scientific consensus that creating sustainable, regenerative systems do not only require a change in our external worlds. Instead, it has to go hand-in-hand with a fundamental shift in our relationships — in the way we think about ourselves, each other, and life as a whole.”

Graphic representation of the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) concept. Credit: UNDP/CoFSA

Similarly, senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Otto Scharmer, stresses, “You cannot change a system unless you change the mindsets or the consciousness of the people who are enacting that system.”

At the heart of it, mindful eating and activating transformation from the inside is a recognition that changing behavior is, at times, more about identity, emotions, and connections than data and analyses in the same way elections are campaigned and won against a backdrop of long-held beliefs and opinions.

Question Impact of Consumer Choices

“I think today, whatever you eat, however you dress, you need to ask yourself where they come from, what kind of impact they are giving back to the Mother Earth, cultural, economic, and spiritual environment,” says Tashka Yawanawá, Chief of the Yawanawá that has survived for centuries in the Brazilian rainforests.

Awareness of the people and processes in food and agriculture systems aligns with indigenous wisdom and is at the heart of the approach taken by the Yawanawá people. For instance, Tashka Yawanawá says: “When somebody drinks the acai collected and produced by the Yawanawá, they’re helping protect 200,000 acres of land.”

“They are also supporting the preservation of our language, our culture, our cultural and spiritual manifestation. Making that link gives value to where you source these products from … when you buy acai made by Yawanawá, you have an awareness that you’re supporting conscious food.”

UNDP stresses that farmers’ lives depend on being seen as human beings, not just economic agents, and says it is “Time to build safe, reflective and connecting spaces to engage in the deep conversations we need for right relationships to replace market rules.”

In the world of conscious thinking and mindful eating, everyone has a role.

A marker trader at a vegetable stall in the village of El-Maadi near Cairo with heaps of fresh vegetables. CoFSA aims to renew lost ties between producers, the foods they grow, cooks, and consumers. Credit: Gavin Bell

Teresa Corção, founder of Instituto Maniva, a non-profit in Brazil that values ​​traditional food knowledge and renews the ties lost between producers, the foods they grow, cooks, and consumers, says chefs have a critical role in listening more to the people who grow the food.

“I think we all see now more and more we need other ways of both changing ourselves and helping others change the way they think in order for us to have the right mindsets to make choices that are more sustainable,” says Andrew Bovarnick, UNDP’s Food, and Agricultural Commodity Systems, Global Head.

CoFSA is built on bringing consciousness to food systems to support the transition to a holistic, bio-regional approach and creating productive landscapes of regeneration.

That consciousness can help restore the balance in food systems between food production, conservation, and well-being, support the uptake of agroecological practices which regenerate the soil, and strengthen the capacity of food to distribute wealth and well-being in communities.

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Shymoli Boiragi is a beneficiary of the rainwater harvesting scheme. Credit: Rafiqul Islam/IPS

By Rafiqul Islam
KHULNA, Bangladesh, Sep 23 2022 (IPS)

Like many other women in Bangladesh’s salinity-prone coastal region, Lalita Roy had to travel a long distance every day to collect drinking water as there was no fresh water source nearby her locality.

“In the past, there was a scarcity of drinking water. I had to travel one to two kilometers distance each day to bring water,” Roy, a resident of Bajua Union under Dakope Upazila in Khulna, told IPS.

She had to collect water standing in a queue; one water pitcher was not enough to meet her daily household demand.

“We require two pitchers of drinking water per day. I had to spend two hours each day collecting water. So, there were various problems. I had health complications, and I was unable to do household work for lack of time,” she said.

After getting a rainwater harvesting plant from the Gender-Responsive Coastal Adaptation (GCA) Project, which is being implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Roy is now collecting drinking water using the rainwater harvesting plant, which makes her life easier.

“I am getting the facilities, and now I can give two more hours to my family… that’s why I benefited,” she added.

Shymoli Boiragi, another beneficiary of Shaheber Abad village under Dakope Upazila, said women in her locality suffered a lot in collecting drinking water in the past because they had to walk one to three kilometers every day to collect water.

“We lost both time and household work. After getting rainwater harvesting plants, we benefited. Now we need not go a long distance to collect water so that we can do more household work,” Boiragi said.

Shymoli revealed that coastal people suffered from various health problems caused by consuming saline water and spent money on collecting the water too.

“But now we are conserving rainwater during the ongoing monsoon and will drink it for the rest of the year,” she added.

THE ROLE OF PANI APAS

With support from the project, rainwater harvesting plants were installed at about 13,300 households under 39 union parishads in Khunla and Satkhira. One pani apa (water sister) has been deployed in every union from the beneficiaries.

Roy, now deployed as a pani apa, said the GCA project conducted a survey on the households needing water plants and selected her as a pani apa for two wards.

“As a pani apa, I have been given various tools. I go to every household two times per month. I clean up their water tanks (rainwater plants) and repair those, if necessary,” he added.

Roy said she provides services for 80 households having rainwater harvesting plants, and if they have any problem with their water tanks, she goes to their houses to repair plants.

“I go to 67 households, which have water plants, one to two times per month to provide maintenance services. If they call me over the cellphone, I also go to their houses,” said Ullashini Roy, another pani apa from Shaheber Abad village.

She said a household gives her Taka 20 per month for her maintenance services while she gets Taka 1,340 (US$ 15) from 67 households, which helps her with family expenses.

Ashoke Kumar Adhikary, regional project manager of the GCA, said it supported installing rainwater harvesting plants at 13,300 households. Each plant will store 2,000 liters of rainwater in each tank for the dry season.

The water plants need maintenance, which is why the project has employed pani apas for each union parishad (ward or council). They work at a community level on maintenance.

“They provide some services, and we call them pani apas. The work of pani apas is to go to every household and provide the services,” Adhikary said.

He said the pani apas get Taka 20 from every household per month for providing their services, and if they need to replace taps or filters of the water plants, they replace those.

The pani apas charge for the replacements of equipment of the water plants, he added.

NO WATER TO DRINK

The coastal belt of Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable areas to climate change as it is hit hard by cyclones, floods, and storm surges every year, destroying its freshwater sources. The freshwater aquifer is also being affected by salinity due to rising sea levels.

Ullashini Roy said freshwater was unavailable in the coastal region, and people drinking water was scarce.

“The water you are looking at is saline. The underground water is also salty. The people of the region cannot use saline water for drinking and household purposes,” Adhikary said.

Ahmmed Zulfiqar Rahaman, hydrologist and climate change expert at Dhaka-based think-tank Center for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS), said if the sea level rises by 50 centimeters by 2050, the surface salinity will reach Gopalganj and Jhalokati districts – 50 km inside the mainland from the coastal belt, accelerating drinking water crisis there.

PUBLIC HEALTH AT RISK

According to a 2019 study, people consuming saline water suffer from various physical problems, including acidity, stomach problems, skin diseases, psychological problems, and hypertension.

It is even being blamed for early marriages because salinity gradually changes girls’ skin color from light to gray.

“There is no sweet water around us. After drinking saline water, we suffered from various waterborne diseases like diarrhea and cholera,” Ullashini said.

Hypertension and high blood pressure are common among coastal people. The study also showed people feel psychological stress caused by having to constantly collect fresh water.

Shymoli said when the stored drinking water runs out in any family; the family members get worried because it’s not easy to collect in the coastal region.

SOLUTIONS TO SALINITY

Rahaman said river water flows rapidly decline in Bangladesh during the dry season, but a solution needs to be found for the coastal area.

The hydrologist suggested a possible solution is building more freshwater reservoirs in the coastal region through proper management of ponds at a community level.

Rahaman said low-cost rainwater harvesting technology should be transferred to the community level so that coastal people can reserve rainwater during the monsoon and use this during the dry season.

He added that the government should provide subsidies for desalinization plants since desalinizing salt water is costly.

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Workers with the United Nation’s body, the International Organisation for Migration register returned migrants at Yaounde Nsimalen Airport in Cameroon. United Nations researchers interviewed 1,970 migrants from 39 African countries who had traveled without official papers and lived in 13 European nations and found many migrated primarily for job prospects and were not seeking asylum. Credit: Mbom Sixtus/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 22 2019 (IPS)

Sub-Saharan African migrants who risk perilous sea crossings to Europe are often assumed to be illiterate, jobless chancers in desperate bids to flee stagnation and rampant corruption in their home countries. But a survey of some 2,000 irregular African migrants in Europe found them to be more educated than expected, while many of them were leaving behind jobs back home that paid better-than-average wages.

While economic factors do indeed drive many Africans to irregularly migrate across the Mediterranean Sea, a new United Nations report provides some startling data that could change the way migrants are perceived in Europe.

“The report finds that getting a job was not the only motivation to move and that not all irregular migrants were poor in Africa or had lower education levels,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters on Monday.

“Over half of those interviewed were employed or in school at the time of their departure, with the majority of those working earning competitive wages.”

The report, called Scaling Fences: Voices of Irregular African Migrants to Europe, also found that more than 90 percent of those surveyed were undeterred by risky sea crossings and other dangers and would brave such a journey again.

Researchers interviewed 1,970 migrants from 39 African countries who had traveled without official papers and lived in 13 European nations. They had migrated primarily for job prospects and were not seeking asylum.

#ScalingFencesUNDP: why does risking death travelling to another country hold more promise than staying? @ahunnaeziakonwa on how the #migration crisis is disrupting Africa’s development progress and the need to understand the drivers. https://t.co/frd0eh0DWW pic.twitter.com/ay6ZjKaS1d

— UNDP Africa (@UNDPAfrica) 21 October 2019

They found that the undocumented migrants had often not been struggling by sub-Sahara African standards. Some 58 percent either had a job or were in school at the time they decided to take a risky journey north.

On average, the respondents had three more years of education under their belts than peers. For those who were leaving jobs in their African homelands, they tended to have commanded better-than-average wages.

Still, money was a big motivating factor to leave. About half of the respondents who left jobs said they had not been earning enough. Wages earned in Europe were typically much higher than those paid back home.

“The report is meant to paint a clearer picture of why irregular migrants move from Africa to Europe,” added Dujarric. 

“The report calls for more opportunities and choices in Africa while enhancing opportunities to move from ungoverned to governed migration.”

According to researchers, jobs and money were not the only factors. Of those surveyed, 77 percent said they lacked a political voice back home, and 62 percent said they had been treated unfairly by their governments.

Achim Steiner, Administrator of the U.N. Development Programme, said the 71-page report showed how African migrants often left home because of “barriers to opportunity” and “choice-lessness” in graft-ridden economies.

“Migration is a reverberation of development progress across Africa, albeit progress that is uneven and not fast enough to meet people’s aspirations,” said Steiner.

The European Union has witnessed mounting migrant flows in recent years, with folks drowning at sea during perilous crossings in rickety boats and often getting stuck in sprawling, unsanitary camps in Greece and elsewhere.

This has raised political tensions across the 28-nation bloc, with Italy and others adopting anti-immigrant policies and members struggling to agree on how to process and host new arrivals.

The #EU requires bold leadership in telling a story about #migration as a normal and necessary phenomenon. Currently, it is undermining its own credibility and failing to take responsibility for the situation.

? New from @Shoshana_Fine
@ECFRMenahttps://t.co/RhJZxViI00

— ECFR (@ecfr) 15 October 2019

“As it stands, the bloc has no system through which member states can share responsibility for hosting migrants in a fair manner,” Shoshana Fine, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said in a report this month.

“As a consequence, they continue to wrangle with one another over which of them should host the asylum seekers and other migrants who reach Europe’s shores.”

A wind farm outside Tianjin. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

By Nicholas Rosellini
BEIJING, Apr 18 2017 (IPS)

“Pursuing protectionism is like locking oneself in a dark room,” Chinese President Xi Jinping warned the assembled leaders at the World Economic Forum earlier this year. “While wind and rain may be kept outside, that dark room will also block light and air.”

All signs are that China has been heeding its own advice.

With the current geopolitical balance seeming to teeter on every tweet, China’s brand of multilateralism – which President Xi has described as “a win-win, opening-up strategy,” an engine of development for the world – is an alternative to the zero-sum calculus that has fed a wave of nationalism across developed countries.

At the United Nations, where Member States have pledged to ‘leave no one behind’ with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, China has been positioning itself as a champion for inclusive growth and peace. China’s engagement combines development assistance, soft loans and direct investment, reimagining possibilities in a transformed landscape in which leveraged financing, rather than grant-making, is fast becoming the new normal.

China has become the largest contributor of troops and second-largest contributor of funds to UN peacekeeping missions among the five permanent members of the Security Council, which also include France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Through its new UN Peace and Development Trust Fund, it has pledged USD 1 billion to support multilateral cooperation. China is also committing to increase its contributions to the UN development system by USD 100 million by the year 2020.

It is taking a lead on supporting implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), earmarking hundreds of millions to support global efforts to reduce poverty and improve education and health. And, to much relief, it is holding fast to commitments it made during the international climate negotiations to achieve the historic Paris Agreement and its concrete follow-ups.

Regionally and among emerging economies, China has been proactive in building a multipolar architecture of cooperation. Its presidency of the G20 has helped to build consensus around inclusive growth as a shared agenda.

Some 57 countries have signed on to the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, in which China has a 30 percent stake. The BRICS New Development Bank, with 20 percent Chinese contribution, is aiming to support sustainable development initiatives in emerging economies. Both are widely seen as an alternative to Western dominance of multilateral financial institutions and represent China’s leadership in creating new development financing mechanisms and reconfiguring the global governance architecture.

Examples like these are encouraging for proponents of inclusive growth and equity. Yet practice does not always match principle. China has become one of the major South-South development partners in the world, providing by end 2015 some US$63 billion worth of development assistance to 166 countries, both directly and through regional and international organisations. Under the framework of South-South cooperation, China observes principles of mutual benefit, no-strings attached, equality and non-interference in its engagement with other countries. In reality, however, support sometimes comes tied to national regulations and requirements that Chinese parts and labour be used. Opportunities to build capacity and sustainability sometimes are missed in the transfer of technology or equipment, or in the building of infrastructure.

China will need to perfect the balance of interests underpinning its multilateral approach. How does pursuit of the ‘Chinese dream’ – that of a prosperous country, strong and proud at home, powerful and influential abroad – square with the cultivation and preservation of global public goods like clean air and water? Are they mutually reinforcing? Is there a point at which one ends and the other begins?

Even those not charged with creating public goods must be responsible custodians of them. As China’s cities grapple with the effects of pollution caused by decades of neglect, the Chinese private sector has increasingly embraced sustainability as a pillar of good business at home and abroad.

Since Chinese companies are, as a bloc, the third largest investor in the world – their direct investments overseas reached USD 145.7 billion in 2015 – this is welcome news for global development. UN development practitioners are working with the Chinese private sector to promote inclusive practices in business operations, create partnerships that contribute to achieving the SDGs, and ensure that capital markets are aligned to the SDG agenda.

As it rises in prominence as a development partner, China has an opportunity to avoid the mistakes of well-intentioned initiatives of the past. It can be demand- rather than supply-driven, contributing solutions to challenges that the countries it engages with have themselves identified as priorities. And it can use its massive investment, through its blended offer, to support around the world new models of growth and cooperation that are anchored in the principles of inclusivity and sustainability it espouses.

For all its visibility and might, China is still very much a developing country. Yet its adoption of a complementary brand of multilateralism offers welcome grounds for hope in these times.

Excerpt:

A collapsed irrigation system has led the local community to try and improvise a solution—with unfortunate timing as the rice fields need the water now for spring yields. Credit: UNDP in Indonesia

By Jen Stephens
UNITED NATIONS, May 9 2016 (IPS)

Helping at-risk communities adapt to climate change impacts is an important part of the Paris Climate Change agreement, but adaptation will not be complete without considering disaster risk.

Disasters and climate change pose major challenges to sustainable development. They undermine livelihoods, access to natural resources, and food security for billions of people. From 1980 to 2012, disasters caused nearly $3.8 billion in economic loss and claimed a total of 1.4 million lives.

In developing countries, vulnerable population’s ability to recover from the impact of these events can be weakened by poverty, inadequate or unsustainable development practices, environmental degradation, and population growth.

When it comes to climate change, there is no shortage of urgency. We are no longer placing our worry for the future in our grandchildren’s era. Our immediate global condition is at stake.

If you ask the pastoralists in the Turkana region of Kenya – a place already facing drought every two to three years – they will tell you first hand that the rain they depend on has become completely unreliable. For them, as for millions more, risk management now has to be calibrated to an ever-changing climate in order to be effective.

At the same time, as we rush to adapt to climate change, we must not forget the resources and lessons offered from decades of risk management to address landslides, earthquakes, floods, droughts, and storms—encompassing both climate risk and non-climate risk.

During a recent visit to a village in rural Indonesia in March I saw firsthand the impact of disaster on climate adaptation initiatives. Just the year before, an adaptation project had been implemented—benefiting the local women in particular with alternative livelihoods – introducing an irrigation system for traditional and new crops.

On paper this sounds wonderful, and in many respects it is, however, in person you would see that the location of this village is on a very steep mountainside extremely prone to landslides. No risk assessment (nor risk-mitigating measures) had been completed, and a recent landslide had completely destroyed the irrigation channel.

Despite the ingenuity of the community to devise a makeshift replacement channel, the village now faces severe losses in their crop yield this year.

Had a risk assessment been done to catalogue the likelihood of a landslide, risk mitigation and management measures could have been added on to the project, preventing losses.

2016 represents an opportunity for disaster risk management because of three important global policy agendas. Never before has the world been so committed—and in favor of working in tandem—to achieving sustainable development, reducing disaster risks, and adapting to and combatting climate change.

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction was adopted in 2015 and promotes actions that go beyond reactionary disaster management to addressing the complex nature of risk, including from climate change.

The Paris Climate Agreement marks a critical opportunity to launch an era of innovation, emphasizing adaptation, mitigation and national targets that can accelerate low-emission and climate-resilient development. And uniting them all are the Sustainable Development Goals, the ambitious agenda that plots progress on everything from food security to education to resilient infrastructure.

Having these agendas in place at the global level is highly motivating, but what we need now is effective action on the ground that will not fail the ‘last-mile’ communities we support. This very simply means working together.

A longstanding perception is finally changing—that limited resources means investment in one area takes away from another. The reality on the ground is proving time and again that strategic investment in combined approaches not only maximizes co-benefits but also protects and makes investments sustainable.

Disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation both share an overarching aim to reduce vulnerability and build resilience as a means to achieve sustainable human development. Nevertheless, these two practices have often been implemented separately, thus creating duplications and in some cases competition reducing progress towards the shared objective.

This has to change. The Integrated Climate Risk Management Programme, funded by the Government of Sweden, is an example where participating countries have been using integration to make headway for sustainable development at national and local levels, while being connected to a global South-South network to exchange tools and good practices.

The support has enabled early warning systems, and riverbed and slope stabilization in Nepal; risk-informed livelihood diversification in Kenya where pastoralists are taking up bee-keeping; and climate-smart agriculture and agroforestry in Uganda. These interventions were built on and informed by an integrated and evidence-based review of local contexts, including risk-profiles.

This brought together both climate change and gender-sensitive risk analyses and led to a better approach that addresses climate change and possible disasters in tandem.

Lessons need to be shared and good practices like this need to be expanded. Development, if it is going to be sustainable must be resilient. We will fall short of true resilience if disaster risk is not recalibrated to climate change and equally if adaptation is not risk-informed.

Jen Stephens is Programme Coordinator, Integrated Climate Risk Management Programme in the United Nations Development Program’s Bureau for Policy and Programming Support.

Sipian Lesan, a semi-nomadic pastoralist from Lekuru village in Samburu County, Kenya, taking care of one of his edible fruit-producing plants. Credit: Robert Kibet/IPS

By Robert Kibet
SAMBURU, Kenya, Jul 30 2015 (IPS)

Sipian Lesan bends to attend to the Vangueria infausta or African medlar plant that he planted almost two years ago. He takes great care not to damage the soft, velvety, acorn-shaped buds of this hardy and drought-resistant plant. ”All over here it is dry,” says the 51-year-old Samburu semi-nomadic pastoralist.

“We hope that every manyatta [homestead] will have a small food forest and that these will grow in concentric circles until they meet and touch each other and expand, creating a continuous food forest" – Aviram Rozin, founder of Sadhana Forest
Sipian is from Lekuru, a remote village located in the lower ranges of the Samburu Hills, an area dotted by Samburu homesteads commonly known as ‘manyattas’, some 358 km north of Kenya’s capital Nairobi. Here, the small villages are hot and arid, dominated by thorny acacia and patches of bare red earth that signify overgrazed land.

Samburu County is one of the regions in Kenya ravaged by recurrent drought, with most of the population living below the poverty line.

Climate change has made pastoralism an increasingly unsustainable livelihood option, leaving many households in Samburu without access to a daily meal, let alone a balanced diet.

“Animals have and will continue to die due to severe drought,” said Joshua Leparashau, a Samburu community leader. “The community still wants to hold on to the concept that having many livestock is a source of pride. This must change. If we as a community do not become proactive in curbing the menace, then we must be prepared for nature to destroy us without any mercy.”

As he looks after his fruit-producing sapling, Sipian tells IPS that some decades ago, before people he calls “greedy” started felling trees to satisfy the growing demand for indigenous forest products, his community used to feed on their readily available wild fruits during extreme hunger.

Now, through a concept new to them – dubbed food or garden forest, and brought to Kenya by Israeli environmentalist Aviram Rozin, founder of Sadhana Forest, an organisation dedicated to ecological revival and sustainable living work – the locals here are adopting planting of trees and shrubs that are favourable to the harsh local weather in their manyattas.

Community tree-planting in semi-arid Samburu County, Kenya. Robert Kibet/IPS

On a voluntary mission to help alleviate the degraded land and food insecurity in this part of northern Kenya, Rozin said that his vision would be to see at least each manyatta owning a food forest.

“The rate at which the community is embracing the concept is positive,” he said. “We hope that every manyatta will have a small food forest and that these will grow in concentric circles until they meet and touch each other and expand, creating a continuous food forest.”

However, the work of Sadhana Forest is not limited to forestation, as 35-year-old Resinoi Ewapere, who has eight children, explained.

“I used to leave early in the morning in search of water and return after noon. My children frequently missed school owing to the shortage of water and food.” But this daily routine came to an end after Sadhana Forest drilled a borehole from which water is now pumped using green energy – a combined windmill and solar energy system.

“Apart from the training we receive on planting fruit-producing trees and practising low-cost permaculture farming, we currently receive water from this centre at no cost,” Ewapere told IPS.

According to Rozin, Sadhana Forest’s initiative to help the Samburu community plant the 18 species of indigenous fruit trees which are drought-resistant and rich in nutrients is also part of a major conservation effort in that the combination of “small-scale food security and conservation of indigenous trees. will also create a linkage between people and trees and they will protect them.”

“We produce the seedlings and then supply them to the locals at no charge for them to plant in their manyattas,” said Rozin. Then, with careful management of the land and water-harvesting structures (swales or ditches dug on contours), water is fed directly into the plants.

The quality of the soil on the swales is improved by planting nitrogen-fixing plants such as beans, while the soil is watered and covered with mulch to prevent evaporation, thus remaining fertile.

One of the tree species being planted to create the food forests is Afzelia africana or African oak, the fruits of which are said to be rich in proteins and iron.  Its seed flour is used for baking. Another species is Moringa stenopetala, known locally as ‘mother’s helper’ because its fruit helps increase milk in lactating mothers and reduces malnutrition among infants.

“Residents here understand that their semi-nomadic life has to be slightly adjusted for survival,” noted George Obondo, coordinator of the NGO Coordination Board, who played a role in ensuring that Sadhana received 50,000 dollars from the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) to jump start its Samburu project.

The money was used to set up a training centre with over 35 volunteers from various countries, including Haiti, to train locals and at the same time produce seedlings, and to build the green energy system for pumping water from the borehole it drilled.

“Things are changing,” said Obondo, “and Samburus know that their lifestyle needs to be altered and also tied to greater dependence on plant growing and not just livestock.” This is why the Sadhana Forest initiative is important, he added, because it is training people and giving them the knowledge and ability to create the resilience that they will need to avoid a harsh future.

Edited by Phil Harris

By Daya Thussu
LONDON, Jul 1 2015 (IPS)

As the leaders of the BRICS five meet in the Russian city of Ufa for their annual summit Jul. 8–10, their agenda is likely to be dominated by economic and security concerns, triggered by the continuing economic crisis in the European Union and the security situation in the Middle East.

The seventh annual summit of the large emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – also takes place with a background of escalating tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine and the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), as well as the growing economic power of Asia, in particular, China.

Daya Thussu

Nearly a decade and a half has passed since the BRIC acronym was coined in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, a Goldman Sachs executive, now a minister in David Cameron’s U.K. government, to refer to the four fast-growing emerging markets. South Africa was added in 2011, on China’s request, to expand BRIC to BRICS.

Although in operation as a formal group since 2006, and holding annual summits since 2009, the BRICS countries have escaped much comment in international media, partly because of the different political systems and socio-cultural norms, as well as stages of development, within this group of large and diverse nations.

The emergence of such groupings coincides with the relative economic decline of the West.

This has created the opportunity for emerging powers, such as China and India, to participate in global governance structures hitherto dominated by the United States and its Western allies.

That the centre of economic gravity is shifting away from the West is acknowledged in the view of the U.S. Administration of Barack Obama that the ‘pivot’ of U.S. foreign policy is moving to Asia.“The major countries of the global South have shown impressive economic growth in recent decades … [it is predicted that] by 2020 the combined economic output of China, India and Brazil will surpass the aggregated production of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy”

And there is evidence of this shift. In the Fortune 500 ranking, the number of transnational corporations based in Brazil, Russia, India and China has grown from 27 in 2005 to more than 100 in 2015. China’s Huawei, a telecommunications equipment firm, is the world’s largest holder of international patents; Brazil’s Petrobras is the fourth largest oil company in the world, while the Tata group became the first Indian conglomerate to reach 100 billion dollars in revenues.

Since 2006, China has been the largest holder of foreign currency reserves, estimated in 2015 to be more than 3.8 trillion dollars. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), China’s gross domestic product (GDP) surpassed that of the United States in 2014, making it the world’s largest economy in purchasing-power parity terms.

More broadly, the major countries of the global South have shown impressive economic growth in recent decades, prompting the United Nations Development Programme to proclaim The Rise of the South (the title of its 2013 Human Development Report), which predicts that by 2020 the combined economic output of China, India and Brazil will surpass the aggregated production of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy.

Though the individual relationships between BRICS countries and the United States differ markedly (Russia and China being generally anti-Washington while Brazil and South Africa relatively close to the United States and India moving from its traditional non-aligned position to a ‘multi-aligned’ one), the group was conceived as an alternative to American power and is the only major group of nations not to include the United States or any other G-7 nation.

Nevertheless, none of the five member nations are eager for confrontation with the United States – with the possible exception of Russia – the country with which they have their most important relationship. Indeed, China is one of the largest investors in the United States, while India, Brazil and South Africa demonstrate democratic affinities with the West: India’s IT industry is particularly dependent on its close ties with the United States and Europe.

Although the idea of BRIC was initiated in Russia, it is China that has emerged as the driving force behind this grouping. British author Martin Jacques has noted in his international bestseller When China Rules the World, that China operates “both within and outside the existing international system while at the same time, in effect, sponsoring a new China-centric international system which will exist alongside the present system and probably slowly begin to usurp it.”

One manifestation of this change is the establishment of a BRICS bank (the ‘New Development Bank’) to fund developmental projects, potentially to rival the Western-dominated Bretton Woods institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF. Headquartered in Shanghai, China has made the largest contribution to setting it up and is likely that the bank will further enhance China’s domination of the BRICS group.

Beyond BRICS, Beijing has also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which already has 57 members, including Australia, Germany and Britain, and in which China will hold over 25 percent of voting rights. Two other BRICS nations – India and Russia – are the AIIB’s second and third largest shareholders.

Such changes have an impact on the media scene as well. As part of China’s ‘going out’ strategy, billions of dollars have been earmarked for external communication, including the expansion of Chinese broadcasting networks such as CCTV News and Xinhua’s English-language TV, CNC World.

Russia has also raised its international profile by entering the English-language news world in 2005 with the launch of the Russia Today (now called RT) network, which, apart from English, also broadcasts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in Spanish and Arabic.

However, as a new book Mapping BRICS Media – which I co-edited with Kaarle Nordenstreng of the University of Tampere, Finland – shows, there is very little intra-BRICS media exchange and most of the BRICS nations continue to receive international news largely from Anglo-American media.

The growing economic cooperation between Moscow and Beijing – most notably in the 2014 multi-billion dollar gas deal – indicates a new Sino-Russian economic equation outside Western control.

Two key U.S.-led trade agreements being negotiated – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and both excluding the BRICS nations – are partly a reaction to the perceived competition from nations such as China.

For its part, China appears to have used the BRICS grouping to allay fears that it is rising ‘with the rest’ and therefore less threatening to Western hegemony.

The BRICS summit takes place jointly with Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Heads of State Council meeting. The only other time that BRICS and the SCO combined their summits was also in Russia – in Ekaterinburg in 2009.

Apart from two BRICS members, China and Russia, the SCO includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. SCO has not expanded its membership since it was set up in 2001. India has an ‘observer’ status within SCO, though there is talk that it might be granted full membership at the Ufa summit.

Were that to happen, the ‘pivot’ would have moved a few notches further towards Asia.

Edited by Phil Harris    

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

Excerpt:

During re:publica 2015, Juliet Wanyiri (centre), illustrates a practical workshop organised by Foondi*, of which she is founder and CEO. Credit: re:publica/Jan Zappner

By Francesca Dziadek
BERLIN, Jun 26 2015 (IPS)

In a major paradigm shift, the German government is now placing its bets on digitalisation for its development cooperation policy with Africa, under what it calls a Strategic Partnership for a ’Digital Africa’.

According to the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), “through a new strategic partnership in the field of information and communication technology (ICT), German development cooperation will be joining forces with the private sector to support the development and sustainable management of Digital Africa’s potential.”

“Digitalisation offers a vast potential for making headway on Africa’s sustainable development,” said Dr Friedrich Kitschelt, a State Secretary in BMZ, noting however that this “benefits all sides, including German and European enterprises.”

Broad consensus about the overlap between public and private interests in attaining sustainable development goals was apparent at two high-profile events earlier this year – the annual re:publica conference on internet and society, and BMZ’s ‘Africa: Continent of Opportunities – Bridging the Digital Divide’ conference, both held in Berlin."Governments will put up walls, but young people will always find ways of circumventing barriers – the key issue is how to bring services locally and work together in democratic internet governance, promoting civil society engagement and private sector partnerships” – Muhammad Radwan of icecairo

In Berlin for re:publica 2015 in May, Mugethi Gitau, a young Kenyan tech manager from Nairobi’s iHub, an incubator for “technology, innovation and community”, delivered a sharp presentation titled ‘10 Things Europe Can Learn From Africa’.  “We are pushing ahead with creative digital solutions,” said Gitau, delivering sharp know-how and hard facts.

The Kenyan start-up iHub is a member of the m:lab East Africa consortium, the region’s centre for mobile entrepreneurship, which was established through a seed grant from the World Bank’s InfoDev programme for “creating sustainable businesses in the knowledge economy”.

In turn, m:lab East Africa is part of the Global Information Gathering (GIG) initiative, which was founded in Berlin in 2003 as a partnership of BMZ, the German Federal Enterprise for International Cooperation (GIZ), the Centre for International Peace Operations (ZIF) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The m:lab East Africa consortium has spawned 10 tech businesses which have gone regional, and boasts a portfolio of 150 start-ups, including Kopo Kopo, an add on to the M-Pesa money transfer application which has scaled into Africa, the PesaPal application for mobile credits, the Eneza ‘one laptop per child’ project, and locally relevant rural applications such as iCow and M-Farm which help farmers keep track of their yields and cut out the middleman to reach buyers directly.

“We are by nature a people who love to give, crowdsourcing is in our genes, our local villages have a tradition of coming together to help each other out, so it’s no wonder we have taken to sharing and social media like naturals,” Gitau told IPS, mentioning the popular chamas or “merry-go-rounds” whereby people bank with each other, avoiding banking interest costs.

Referring to the exponential tide of 700 million mobile phone users in Africa, which has already surpassed Europe, Thomas Silberhorn, a State Secretary in BMZ, told a re:publica meeting on e-information and freedom of information projects in developing countries: “This is a time of huge potential, like all historical transformations.”

The pace and range of innovative mobile solutions from Africa has been formidable. The creative use of SMS has enabled a range of services which enable urban and, significantly, rural populations to access anything from banking to health services, job listings and microcredits, not to mention mobilising “shit storms” against public authority inefficiencies.

However, the formidable pace of digital penetration has raised concerns about the “digital divide” – the widening socio-economic inequalities between those who have access to technology and those who have not.

Increasingly a North-South consensus is growing concerning three core aspects of digital economic development – the regulation of broadband internet as a public utility; the sustainable potential of mobile technology and low price smart devices to bring effective solutions to a whole gamut of local needs; and the need for good infrastructure as a precondition for environmental protection and as the leverage people need to lift themselves out of poverty.

New models of development cooperation, technology transfer and e-participation governance are emerging in response to the impact of digitalisation on all sectors of society and service provision in areas as disparate as they are increasingly connected including health, food and agriculture – access to education, communication, media, information and data and democratic participation.

“Tackling the digital divide is crucial,” said Philibert Nsengimana, Rwandan Minister of Youth and ICT, addressing BMZ’s ‘Africa: Continent of Opportunities – Bridging the Digital Divide’ conference. “It encompasses a package of vision, implementation and much needed coordination among stakeholders.”

Rwanda, which now boasts a number of e-participation projects such as Sobanukirwa, the country’s first freedom of information project, is committed to universally accessible broadband and is rising to the forefront of Africa’s power-sharing technical revolution. 

The most active proponents of the e-revolution argue that digitalisation also offers the possibility to place governments under scrutiny and have leaders judged from the vantage point of e-participation, open data, freedom of expression and information – all elements of the power-sharing models that have seen the light  in the internet age.

“Governments will put up walls, but young people will always find ways of circumventing barriers – the key issue is how to bring services locally and work together in democratic internet governance, promoting civil society engagement and private sector partnerships,” said Muhammad Radwan of icecairo.

The icecairo initiative is part of the international icehubs network, which started with iceaddis in Ethiopia and icebauhaus in Germany.

The icehubs network (where ‘ice’ stands for Innovation-Collaboration-Enterprise) is an emerging open network of ‘hubs’, or community-driven technology innovation spaces, that promote the invention and development of home-grown, affordable technological products and services for meeting local challenges.

The network is enabled by GIZ, a company specialising in international development, which is owned by the German government and mainly operates on behalf of BMZ, which is now intent on using a “digital agenda” to guide German development cooperation with Africa.

“Let us take digitalisation seriously,” said Kitschelt. “Let us use the potential of ICT for development, address the digital and educational divide and build on that resourcefulness in our partnerships by advocating for digital rights and engaging in dialogue with the tech community, software developers, social entrepreneurs, makers, hackers, bloggers, programmers and internet activists worldwide.”

Kitschelt’s words certainly found their echo among African e-revolutionaries whose rallying cry has moved forward significantly from “fight the power“ to “share the power”.

However, while this may be well be what the future looks like, there were also those at the re:publica meeting on e-information and freedom of information who wondered about priorities when Silberhorn of BMZ told participants: “”The fact that in many development countries we are witnessing better access to mobile phones than toilets is a clear catalyser for changing development priorities.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

*  Foondi is an African design and training start-up that focuses on creating access to open source, low-cost appropriate technology-related sources to leverage local technologies for bottom-up innovation. It provides a platform for problem setting, designing and prototyping entrepreneurial-based ventures. Its larger vision is to nurture a group of young innovators in Africa working on building solutions that target emerging markets and under-served communities in Africa.

By Magdy Martinez-Soliman
UNITED NATIONS, May 15 2015 (IPS)

The Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) Forum will take place May 18-21 in New York. Success in achieving sustainable development and tackling climate change challenges requires investment in clean energy solutions.

Magdy Martinez-Soliman

The Millennium Development Goals were all contingent on having access to energy services. If you want to get more children into school, you need energy. To guarantee food security and manage water, you need energy. To combat HIV/AIDS and reduce maternal mortality, you need energy. The list goes on.

Poverty can be lived and measured, also, as energy poverty. The poor don’t have access, or very bad supply. In fact, about 1.3 billion people globally do not have access to electricity, and nearly three billion use harmful, polluting and unsustainable methods, such as burning wood and charcoal at home for cooking.

Not only are these methods bad for health and the environment, but they eat into time that could be spent in school or at work, limiting people’s potential – especially women’s. Expanding access to energy services therefore goes hand-in-hand with poverty eradication, gender equality and sustainable development.Many countries and cities are already moving towards low carbon, clean energy transformations. Germany, for instance, is undertaking the ‘Energiewende’, an economic watershed that aims to produce 80 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2050.

Recognising this fact, sustainable energy is already included in the current draft of the Sustainable Development Goals through Goal 7: “Ensure(s) access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all”.

Harnessing clean, renewable, and more efficient energy solutions will contribute not only to tackling a country’s or community’s energy challenges but also to the target of limiting global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius. As it is, a significant amount of GHG emissions are generated from energy production, thus tying sustainable energy directly to the climate change negotiations.

Many countries and cities are already moving towards low carbon, clean energy transformations. Germany, for instance, is undertaking the ‘Energiewende’, an economic watershed that aims to produce 80 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2050; and Vancouver, in Canada, recently announced that it would shift to 100 percent renewable energy.

In both cases these are ambitious but forward-looking plans that weave together sustainable development, economic prosperity, and climate change mitigation.

What this means for the developing world

Are such transformations viable in poorer countries and cities? Energy access, efficiency and sustainability includes actions ranging from technology transfer and skills enhancements, to legal and policy changes that remove barriers and attract investments.

Over the last 20 years UNDP has developed a portfolio of more than 120 sustainable energy projects, amounting to more than 400 million dollars invested and almost one billion in co-financing. We have learned that sustainable energy is a key component in sustainable human development.

In Uruguay, UNDP, together with the Global Environment Facility (GEF), worked with the Government from 2008-2012 to remove regulatory, financial, and technical barriers to the energy market. This addressed issues that had impeded private sector investment and set off a boom in clean energy development.

Working with the National Administration of Power Plants and Energy Transmission (UTE), which manages electricity in the country, UNDP helped to refocus development on wind and renewable energy, and helped to open up a ‘space’ for private sector investors to get involved.

This included a series of ‘energy auctions’ that brought private sector partners into the energy sector, as well as technology transfers, skills training and support to identify areas with high wind-generating capacity. The end result was a strong series of public-private partnerships on renewable energy, with the Government and UTE taking the lead.

The economic case for such shifts is also clear: the 30 million dollars initially invested by the Government and partners has since triggered over two billion dollars in private sector investment. This has resulted in the establishment of 32 wind farms, of which 17 are currently in operation, and an installed capacity of 530 MW.

Once the remaining 15 farms that are under construction become operational, capacity will reach over 1500 MW, supplying over 30 percent of the country’s total electricity demand. Beyond the green-energy shift, this has also created jobs, diversified energy sources (critical when reliant on fossil fuel imports), and helped Uruguay mitigate its carbon emissions.

Supporting innovation and de-risking clean energy investments are critical to success. The SE4ALL Forum next week is a chance for the global community to not only reaffirm the need for sustainable energy (and cement its inclusion in the SDGs) but also a chance to bring together partners around the idea of “leaving no one behind” without energy.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

The 28 Ethiopian migrants of Christian faith murdered by the Islamic State (IS) on Apr. 19 in Libya had planned to cross the Mediterranean Sea in search of work in Europe.

Commenting on the killings to Fana Broadcasting Corporation (FBC), Ethiopian government spokesperson Redwan Hussien urged potential migrants not to risk their lives by using dangerous exit routes.

Hussein’s call sparked anger among hundreds of Ethiopian youths and relatives of the deceased, who took to the streets in the capital Addis Ababa this week before the demonstration was disbanded by the police, local media reported.

Protestors cited the government’s lukewarm response to the massacre of Orthodox Christians for their outrage, the Addis Standard reported. Later in the week, during a public rally organised by the government in the capital, violence again broke out between security forces and protesters resulting in injuries and the detention of over a hundred protesters, local and international media reported.“Pervasive repression and denial of fundamental freedoms has led to frustration, alienation and disillusionment among most Ethiopian youth” – Yared Hailemariam, former senior researcher for the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (now Human Rights Council)

Almost two-thirds of Ethiopians are Christians, the majority of those Orthodox Copts – who say that they have been in the Horn of Africa nation since the first century AD — as well as large numbers of Protestants.

In the widely-reported incident in Libya, IS militants beheaded 16 Ethiopian migrants in one group on a beach and shot 12 in the head in another group in a desert area. Eyasu Yikunoamilak and Balcha Belete, residents of the impoverished Cherkos neighbourhood in Addis Ababa, were among the victims, it was learnt, along with three other victims from Cherkos.

Seyoum Yikunoamilak, elder brother of Eyasu Yikunoamilak, told FBC that Eyasu and Balcha left their country for Sudan two months ago en route to reach the United Kingdom for work to help themselves and their families, but this was not meant to be.

“I used to talk to them on phone while they were in the Sudan,” Seyoum said in grief. “But I never heard from them since they entered Libya one month ago.” Eyasu had previously been a migrant worker in Qatar and had covered his friend’s expenses with his savings to reach Europe, said Seyoum.

In defiance of the warning of the government spokesperson, Meshesa Mitiku, a long-time friend of Eyasu and Balcha living in Cherkos, told the Associated Press on Apr. 20: “I will try my luck too but not through Libya. Here there is no chance to improve yourself.” Meshesha’s intentions came even after learning about the fate of his friends.

Ethiopian lawmakers declared a three-day national mourning on Apr. 21. The government also expressed its readiness to repatriate all migrants in dangerous foreign countries, the Washington-based VOA Amharic radio reported.

The rally earlier in the week came one month before Ethiopia holds parliamentary elections, the first since the death of long-time leader Meles Zenawi, and current prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn is expected to face little if any opposition challenge.

“We will redouble efforts to fight terrorism,” foreign ministry spokesman Tewolde Mulugeta said in response to demands for action from protesters.

Ethiopia is trying to create jobs so that people do not feel the need to leave to find work, he added. “We’re trying to create opportunities here for our young people. We encourage them to exploit those opportunities at home.”

Nevertheless, disenchantment marked by asserted claims of repression, inequality and unemployment has spurred a series of protests against the regime over the last few years.

These and other issues have prompted the exodus of Ethiopian migrants to Europe, according to several observers. “The idea that the majority of Ethiopian migrants relocate due to economic reasons appears flawed,” contends Tom Rhodes, East Africa Representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists, in an email interview with IPS. Rhodes also maintained that the violation of fundamental freedoms is closely tied with poverty and economic inequality.

In an email interview with IPS, Yared Hailemariam, a former senior researcher for the Ethiopian Human Rights Council, agreed. “Pervasive repression and denial of fundamental freedoms has led to frustration, alienation and disillusionment among most Ethiopian youth.”

“Citizens have the right to peacefully protest,” said Felix Horne, East Africa researcher with Human Rights Watch. “It’s no surprise given the steps government takes to restrict peaceful protests that disenfranchised youth would use the rare opportunity of an officially sanctioned public demonstration to express their frustrations. That’s the inevitable outcome when there are no other means for them to express their opinions.”

The main opposition parties say that the government has failed to create job opportunities, making migration inevitable. The regime, they charge, favours members of the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front and creates economic inequality.

Recently dubbed an “African tiger”, Ethiopia is one of Africa’s most populous nations with 94 million people (Nigeria has 173.6 million). It has been celebrated for its modest economic growth over the last years. But the average unemployment rate (the number of people actively looking for a job as a percentage of the labour force) was stuck at 20.26 percent from 1999 to 2014.

“The regime allocates state resources and job opportunities to members of the ruling party who are organised in small-scale and micro enterprises,” noted Horne. The CPJ representative agreed. “Ethiopian government authorities tend to reward their political supporters and ethnic relations with lucrative political and business positions” at the expense of ingenuity in the business sector.

In its 2015 report, the World Bank shared this discouraging view. Some 37 million Ethiopians – one-third of the country’s population – are still “either poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty”, the World Bank said, adding that the “very poorest in Ethiopia have become even poorer” over the last decade or so.

The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has estimated that about 29 percent of the population lives below the national poverty line. This explains Ethiopia’s rank at 174 out of 187 countries on the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Index.

The Oakland Institute, a U.S.-based non-governmental organisation that spotlights land grabs, was recently denounced by Ethiopian officials for its latest report ‘We Say the Land is Not Yours’. According to the government, the institute used “unverified and unverifiable information”.

In a reply to the Ethiopian Embassy in the United Kingdom on Apr. 22, Oakland Institute challenged the government’s claim that ongoing development was improving life standards in the country.

The institute maintained that the government’s development endeavours are “destroying the lives, culture, traditions, and livelihoods” of many indigenous and pastoralist populations, further warning that the strategy was “unsustainable and creating a fertile breeding ground for conflict.”

More than half of Ethiopia’s farmers are cultivating plots so small as to barely provide sustenance. These one hectare or less plots are further affected by drought, an ineffective and inefficient agricultural marketing system and underdeveloped production technologies, says FAO. Several studies indicate that this phenomenon has induced massive rural-urban migration.

According to Yared Hailemariam, state ownership of land has contributed to poverty and inequality. “People don’t have full rights over their properties so that they lack the motivation to invest,” he stressed. The ruling regime insists that land will remain in the hands of the state, and selling and buying land is prohibited in Ethiopia.

Yared also pointed out that the ruling party owns several huge businesses which has created unfair competition in the economy. “The party’s huge conglomerates have weakened other public and private businesses” he told IPS. “Only the ruling party’s political elites and their business cronies are benefitting at the expense of the majority of the people.”

The tragic news of the massacre in Libya came amid news of xenophobic attacks against Ethiopian migrants in South Africa last week including looting and burning of properties. Unknown numbers of Ethiopian economic migrants are also trapped in the Yemeni conflict, according to state media.

Edited by Lisa Vives/Phil Harris    

By Paloma Duran
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 5 2015 (IPS)

The countdown has begun to September’s Summit on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with world leaders discussing the 17 goals and 169 targets proposed by the United Nations Open Working Group.

The post-2015 development agenda will focus primarily on strengthening opportunities to reduce poverty and marginalisation in ways that are sustainable from an economic, social and environmental standpoint.

Courtesy of Paloma Duran/UNDP

How shall the world set the measure for all subsequent work?

The SDG Fund, created by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with an initial contribution from the government of Spain, has been designed to smoothen the transition from the Millennium Development Goals phase into the future Sustainable Development Goals.

The rationale of the joint programme initiative is to enhance the development impact of technical assistance by combining inputs from various U.N. entities, each contributing according to its specific expertise and bringing their respective national partners on board.

To illustrate, we are currently implementing joint programmes in 18 countries addressing challenges of inclusive economic growth for poverty eradication, food security and nutrition as well as water and sanitation.

The majority of our budget is invested in sustainable development on the ground and is directly improving the lives of more than one million people in various regions of Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Arab States and Africa.The main objective of the SDG fund is to bring together U.N. agencies, national governments, academia, civil society and businesses to find ways in which we can reduce poverty, improve nutrition and provide access to affordable water and sanitation.

National and international partners provide approximately 56 percent of these resources in the form of matching funds.

Each programme was originally chosen through a selection process including the review by thematic and development independent experts.

In addition, we ensure that local counterparts engage in the decision-making processes from programme design to implementation and evaluation. More than 1,500 people were directly involved in designing the various programmes.

The main objective of the SDG fund is to bring together U.N. agencies, national governments, academia, civil society and businesses to find ways in which we can reduce poverty, improve nutrition and provide access to affordable water and sanitation.

Drawing from extensive experience of development practice as well as the former Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund, we are continually seeking better ways in which to deal with challenges that present themselves.

Gender equality, women’s empowerment, public-private partnerships and sustainability are cross-cutting priorities in all areas of our work.

It is noteworthy to point out that we are focusing our efforts on forging partnerships with the private sector as we recognise the importance of actively engaging with businesses and ensuring their full participation in the development process.

It is in this vein that a Private Sector Advisory Group will be established this spring, consisting of representatives from various industries worldwide with the aim to collaborate and discuss practical solutions pertaining to the common challenges of contemporary sustainable development.

Together we will work diligently to identify areas of common interest and promote sustainability of global public goods.

As an example of how we work on the ground, we are setting into motion programme activities that relate to alleviating child hunger and under-nutrition as well as projects that promote sustainable and resilient livelihoods for vulnerable households, especially in the context of adapting to climate change.

To illustrate, in Peru we are contributing towards establishing an inclusive value chain in the production of quinoa and other Andean grains, so that the increase of demand in the international market can convert into economic and social improvements on the ground.

In addition, we are supporting programme activities that promote the integration of women in the labour market as it is key to equitable, inclusive and sustainable development. We are conscious of the fact that gender equality and the full realisation of human rights for women and girls have a transformative effect on development and is a driver of economic growth.

To illustrate, the SDG Fund is currently financing five joint programmes in Africa that address some of the most pressing issues in the region, and seek to achieve sustainable development through inclusive economic growth.

In Ethiopia, rural women lag behind in access to land property, economic opportunities, justice system and financial assets. Female farmers perform up to 75 per cent of farm labour and yet hold only 18.7 per cent of agricultural land in the country.

We are taking a multifaceted approach to generate gender-sensitive agricultural extension services, support the creation of cooperatives, promote the expansion of women-owned agribusiness and increase rural women’s participation in rural producer associations, financial cooperatives and unions.

To conclude, we are looking forward to making a significant impact in the coming years with the hope to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

A shantytown in Guatemala. UNDP estimates suggest that more than 1.5 million people in the Latin American region will fall into poverty by the end of 2015. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Jessica Faieta
NEW YORK, Feb 23 2015 (IPS)

Recent new data show a worrying picture of Latin America and the Caribbean. Income poverty reduction has stagnated and the number of poor has risen — for the first time in a decade — according to recent figures from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

This means that three million women and men in the region fell into poverty between 2013 and 2014. Given the projected economic growth for this year, at 1.3 percent according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) figures, our U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) estimates suggest that in 2015, more than 1.5 million people will also fall into poverty by the end of this year.We need to invest in the skills and assets of the poor and vulnerable — tasks that may take years, and in many cases, an entire generation.

They could be coming from the nearly 200 million vulnerable people in the region — those who are neither poor (living on less than four dollars a day) nor have risen to the middle classes (living on 10-50 dollars a day). Their incomes are right above the poverty line but still too prone to falling into poverty as soon as a major crisis hits, as another recent UNDP study showed.

Up and down the poverty line

Our analysis shows a clear pattern: what determines people to be “lifted from poverty” (quality education and employment) is different from what “avoids their fallback into poverty” (existence of social safety nets and household assets).

This gap suggests that, alone, more economic growth is not enough to build “resilience”, or the ability to absorb external shocks, such as financial crisis or natural disasters, without major social and economic losses. We need to invest in the skills and assets of the poor and vulnerable — tasks that may take years, and in many cases, an entire generation.

Exclusion beyond income

We simulated what would happen if the region grew during 2017-2020 at the same rate as it did during the last decade — that is 3.9 percent annually — yet our estimates show that fewer people in Latin America and the Caribbean would be lifted from poverty than in the previous decade.

While an average of 6.5 million women and men in the region left poverty every year during 2003 and 2012, only about 2.6 million a year would leave poverty behind (earning more than four dollars a day) between 2017 and 2020.

Clearly, ‘more of the same’ in terms of growth — and public policies — will no longer yield ‘more of the same’ in poverty and inequality reduction, according to our analysis. There are two reasons: easy sources of increased wages are declining and fiscal resources, crucial to expand social safety nets, have shrunk.

What lies ahead are harder challenges: addressing exclusion, discrimination and historical inequalities that are not explained by income alone.

Fundamentally, progress is a multidimensional concept and cannot simply reflect the idea of living with less or more than four or 10 dollars a day. Wellbeing means more than income, not a consumerist standard of what a “good life” entails.

These are central elements to our next Human Development Report for Latin America and the Caribbean, which we are now preparing. It will also include policy recommendations that help decision makers lead an agenda that not only focuses on growth recovery and structural adjustment, but also redefines what is progress, development and social change in a region of massive inequalities and emerging and vulnerable middle classes.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edited by Phil Harris   

A woman dries blankets after her home went underwater for five days in one of the villages of India's Morigaon district. The woven bamboo sheet beyond the clothesline used to be the walls of her family’s toilet. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

By Susan McDade
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 12 2014 (IPS)

Among all the impacts of climate change, from rising sea levels to landslides and flooding, there is one that does not get the attention it deserves: an exacerbation of inequalities, particularly for women.

Especially in poor countries, women’s lives are often directly dependent on the natural environment.The success of climate change actions depend on elevating women’s voices, making sure their experiences and views are heard at decision-making tables and supporting them to become leaders in climate adaptation.

Women bear the main responsibility for supplying water and firewood for cooking and heating, as well as growing food. Drought, uncertain rainfall and deforestation make these tasks more time-consuming and arduous, threaten women’s livelihoods and deprive them of time to learn skills, earn money and participate in community life.

But the same societal roles that make women more vulnerable to environmental challenges also make them key actors for driving sustainable development. Their knowledge and experience can make natural resource management and climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies at all levels more successful.

To see this in action, just look to the Ecuadorian Amazon, where the Waorani women association (Asociación de Mujeres Waorani de la Amazonia Ecuatoriana) is promoting organic cocoa cultivation as a wildlife protection measure and a pathway to local sustainable development.

With support from the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), the women’s association is managing its land collectively and working toward zero deforestation, the protection of vulnerable wildlife species and the production of certified organic chocolate.

In the process, the women are building the resilience of their community by investing revenues from the cocoa business into local education, health and infrastructure projects and successfully steering the local economy away from clear-cutting and unregulated bushmeat markets.

Indigenous women are also driving sustainable development in Mexico. There, UNDP supports Koolel-Kab/Muuchkambal, an organic farming and agroforestry initiative founded by Mayan women that works on forest conservation, the promotion of indigenous land rights and community-level disaster risk reduction strategies.

The association, which established a 5,000-hectare community forest, advocates for public policies that stop deforestation and offer alternatives to input-intensive commercial agriculture. It has also shared an organic beekeeping model across more than 20 communities, providing an economic alternative to illegal logging.

Empowered women are one of the most effective responses to climate change. The success of climate change actions depend on elevating women’s voices, making sure their experiences and views are heard at decision-making tables and supporting them to become leaders in climate adaptation.

By ensuring that gender concerns and women’s empowerment issues are systematically taken into account within environment and climate change responses, the world leaders who wrapped up the U.N. Climate Change Conference 2014 in Lima, Peru, can reduce, rather than exacerbate, both new and existing inequalities and make sustainable development possible.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Faced with starvation, hordes of jobless Zimbabweans in towns and cities here have turned to vending on streets pavements to put food on their tables. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Dec 9 2014 (IPS)

As unemployment deepens across this Southern African nation and as the country battles to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ahead of the December 2015 deadline, thousands of urban Zimbabweans here are facing starvation.

The MDGs are eight goals agreed to by all U.N. member states and all leading international development institutions to be achieved by the target date of 2015. These goals range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education.

Zimbabwe has a total population of just over 13 million people, according to the 2012 National Census – of these, 67 percent now live in rural areas while 33 percent live in urban areas.

According to the Poverty, Income, Consumption and Expenditure Survey report for 2011-2012 from the Zimbabwe Statistical Agency (ZIMSTAT), 30.4 percent of rural people in Zimbabwe are “extremely poor” – and are also people facing starvation – compared with 5.6 percent in urban areas.“The current inability of the economy to address people’s basic needs is leading to hunger in most urban households, with almost none of urban residents in Zimbabwe being able to afford three meals a day nowadays” – Philip Bohwasi, chairperson of Zimbabwe’s Council of Social Workers

Social workers find the stay of urban dwellers in Zimbabwe’s cities justifiable, but ridden with hardships.

“Remaining in towns and cities for many here is better than living in the countryside as every slightest job opportunity often starts in urban areas in spite of the expensive living conditions in towns and cities,” independent social worker Tracey Ngirazi told IPS.

According to Philip Bohwasi, chairperson of Zimbabwe’s Council of Social Workers, urban starvation is being caused by loss of jobs – the World Food Programme (WFP) estimates unemployment in Zimbabwe to be at 60 percent of the country’s total population.

“The current inability of the economy to address people’s basic needs is leading to hunger in most urban households, with almost none of urban residents in Zimbabwe affording three meals a day nowadays,” Bohwasi told IPS.

True to Bohwasi’s words, for many Zimbabwean urban residents like unemployed 39-year-old qualified accountant Josphat Madyira from the Zimbabwean capital Harare, starvation has become order of the day.

“Food stores are filled to the brim with groceries, but most of us here are jobless and therefore have no money to consistently buy very basic foodstuffs, resulting in us having mostly one meal per day,” Madyira told IPS.

Madyira lost his job at a local shoe manufacturing company after it shut down operations owing to the country’s deepening liquidity crunch, thanks to a failing economy here that has rendered millions of people jobless.

Asked how city dwellers like him are surviving, Madyira said: “People who are jobless like me have resorted to vending on streets pavements, selling anything we can lay our hands on as we battle to put food on our tables.”

The donor community, which often extends food aid to impoverished rural households, has rarely done the same in towns and cities here despite hunger now taking its toll on the urban population, according to civil society activists.

“Whether in cities or remote areas, hunger in Zimbabwe is equally ravaging ordinary people and most of the donor community has for long directed food aid to the countryside, rarely paying attention to towns and cities, which are also now succumbing to famine,” Catherine Mukwapati, director of the Youth Dialogue Action Network civil society organisation, told IPS.

Apparently failing to combat hunger in line with the MDGs, over the years Zimbabwe has not made great strides in eradicating extreme poverty and hunger due to the economic decline that has persisted since 2000.

As a result, earlier this year, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in partnership with the Zimbabwean government, extended its monthly cash pay-out scheme to urban areas.

Under this scheme, which started at the peak of Zimbabwe’s economic crisis in 2008, families living on less than 1.25 dollars a day receive a monthly pay-out of between 10 and 20 dollars, depending on the number of family members.

Economists and development experts here say that achieving the MDGs without food on people’s tables, especially in cities whose inhabitants are fast falling prey to growing hunger, is going to be a nightmare, if not highly impossible for Zimbabwe.

“Be it in cities or rural areas, Zimbabwe still has a lot of people living on less than 1.25 dollars a day, which is the global index measure of extreme poverty, a clear indication that as a country we are far from successfully combating hunger and poverty in line with the U.N. MDGs whose global deadline for world countries to achieve is next year,” independent development expert Obvious Sibanda told IPS.

According to the 2013 Human Development Index of the U.N. Development Programmer (UNDP), Zimbabwe is a low-income, food-deficit country, ranked 156 out of 187 countries globally and UNDP says that currently 72 percent of Zimbabweans live below the national poverty line.

Although hunger is now hammering people in both urban and rural areas, government sources also recognise that the pinch is being felt more by urban dwellers.

“The decline in formal employment, mostly in towns and cities, with many workers engaged in poorly remunerated informal jobs, has a direct bearing on both poverty and hunger, which is on a sharp rise in urban areas,” a top government economist, who declined to be named, admitted to IPS.

For the many hunger-stricken Madyiras in Zimbabwe’s towns and cities, meeting the MDGS by the end of next year matters little.

“Defeating starvation is far from me without decent and stable employment and whether or not my country fulfils the MDGs, it may be of no immediate result to many people like me,” Madyira told IPS.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The huge student protests in Chile have spread the idea that adolescents have the right to vote. Credit: Pamela Sepúlveda/IPS

By Jessica Faieta
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 16 2014 (IPS)

Women’s empowerment and political participation are not only crucial for women: they are essential for effective democratic governance, one which promotes human rights and equity.  The same can be said about the importance of boosting youth political participation.

The U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) invited three young women parliamentarians from Latin America and the Caribbean to join a recent discussion in Salamanca, Spain, on young women’s political participation in the region.In the digital age of flourishing social media activism, these protests also provide opportunities to rethink democratic governance in the 21st century.

That’s what Paola Pabón from Ecuador, Silvia Alejandrina Castro from El Salvador and Gabriela Montaño from Bolivia have in common. They are among the very few women in parliaments and they are young: They broke a double glass ceiling.

Of the 600 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean, more than 26 percent are young, aged 15-29. This is a unique opportunity for the region’s development and for its present and future governance. Even though the average regional rate of women taking up positions in parliament is 25 percent, higher than the global average, a closer look shows that women still lag behind.

Our recent survey of 25 parliaments in Latin America and the Caribbean shows a very low representation of youth in the region’s parliaments – especially those of African or indigenous descent. Only 2.7 percent of male parliamentarians in the region and 1.3 percent of women MPs were under 30 years old—even though more than one fourth of the region’s population is young.

When we look at the age of MPs below under 40, 15 percent are men and not even 6.5 percent are women.

UNDP’s regional Human Development Reports have shown that young people have enormous potential as agents of change. But despite Latin America’s remarkable progress in reducing poverty and inequality – and its strides toward strong democracies with free and transparent elections – gender, income, ethnic origin, or dwelling conditions are all decisive barriers to young citizens’ rights and civic engagement.

One in every four young people aged 15-29 in the region are poor or extremely poor. And only 35 percent of them have access to education. More worrying still: Some 20 million young Latin Americans aged 15-18 neither work nor study. That’s nearly one in every five, 54 percent of them female and 46 percent male.

And the region’s youth have been taking to the streets, playing a central role in recent protests in countries like Brazil, Chile, Peru and Mexico. Such demonstrations urge us to understand the demands of young people, and to address lingering structural problems in our societies, especially inequality.

The increasing frequency of such mobilisations tells us that young people want to actively participate in their society’s development. The first Ibero-American Youth Survey – which we launched last year with the Ibero-American Youth Organization (OIJ) and other partners — shows that young people in Latin America, Portugal and Spain expect their participation to increase over the next five years.

Institutions should provide formal spaces for this, or protests will become the only effective way for young people to make their voices heard. And the region will waste an opportunity to enhance the quality of its democratic governance.

We are working towards this goal. UNDP and partners brought together 22 young MPs from 13 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2013 to put together the region’s first young legislators’ network to boost young people’s political participation and inclusion.  We have been partnering with OIJ and other U.N. sister agencies and governmental youth secretaries to push this agenda.

Moreover, our youth online platform JuventudconVoz (youth voices), with the OIJ and the Spanish Cooperation agency, is also helping boost young Latin Americans political participation and leadership skills.

Protests sparked by young Latin Americans will likely continue in several countries. Beyond the street level, in the digital age of flourishing social media activism, these protests also provide opportunities to rethink democratic governance in the 21st century.

Jessica Faieta is UNDP’s Director a.i. and Deputy Director for Latin America and the Caribbean @JessicaFaieta / www.latinamerica.undp.org @UNDPLAC

Experts recommend stricter laws and wider awareness building to stem incidents of child abuse. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Oct 9 2013 (IPS)

Stricter laws could curb the rising trend of child abuse in Sri Lanka, experts say. However, recommendations like witness protection, special courts and procedures to hear abuse cases and more legal assistance to victims are unlikely to be included in a new draft Child Protection Policy that is to be presented to parliament before the end of the year.

Although detailed data are not available, estimates suggest between three and five incidents of grave child abuse are reported daily in this island nation of 20 million.

“The reported number of cases has been rising in recent years,” confirmed Ediriweera Gunasekera, a spokesman for Sri Lanka’s National Child Protection Authority – the main government body responsible for formulating policy on child abuse prevention and monitoring abuse incidence and victim assistance.

“Certainly there is more reporting of cases that is taking place now,” he told IPS.

According to figures tabled in parliament, the Sri Lankan police recorded 1,759 reported cases of child rape, including incest, in 2012, up from 1,463 in 2011.

And in the first six months of this year, according to police statistics, 805 cases of child rape were reported.

In 1995, the penal code was amended to require that sexual acts with minors under the age of consent, 16, be tried under the offence of statutory rape, or under Article 365 of the penal code, which defines unnatural sexual acts and grave abuse.

But delays in legal proceedings, lack of witness protection and lack of assistance to victims are discouraging families and victims from reporting cases or seeking help, says a recent study by the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

“This study indicates, as does literature over the last two decades, that the procedures for investigation and prosecution of child abuse, witness protection, and support for the victim are grossly inadequate,” the report says.

Of the more than 1,450 cases reported in 2011, not a single conviction was reported by end of 2011, and a backlog of 8,000 cases dates back six years. Officials at the UNICEF country office said the justice system remains overwhelmed with backlogged cases and is in need of a complete overhaul.

“The entire system needs to be assessed and rebuilt, through all the stages, with efficiency as a key priority,” UNICEF said in an emailed statement to IPS.

Harini Amarasuriya, a lecturer at the Open University of Sri Lanka and co-author of the report, said the Sri Lankan legal system was focused on prosecution and lacked support services like assistance to the victim and witness protection.

She also recommended that the country reform its laws to introduce special procedures to deal with cases of child abuse.

“Unfortunately, there is no indication that these issues are being given priority,” she said.

While officials at the Ministry of Justice and the National Child Protection Authority confirmed that a new national child protection policy was currently being drafted, provisions for witness protection and special procedures to deal with child rape cases were not among the new recommendations, they told IPS.

UNICEF officials, however, said that efforts were underway to clear the backlog of outstanding cases. The U.N. agency, along with various government offices, launched a programme last year to train police officers and officials at the attorney general’s department to efficiently handle child abuse cases.

The police department has also opened special district-level bureaus with trained personnel dedicated to handle child abuse and rape cases. In 2012, two special courts were also established, including one in Colombo and another in northern Jaffna, to hear child abuse cases.

Amarasuriya said that while increased awareness-raising had resulted in more cases being reported to police, more work was needed to bring about behavioural changes.

UNICEF said: There is a need for much more awareness and discussion on the issue,” adding that “behaviour change reduces incidents of abuse”.

Girls are more likely to fall victim to abuse than boys, Amarasuriya noted. Estimates suggest around 70 percent of reported cases involve girls.

“The social stigma is directed more towards girls who have been abused rather than boys,” she added. Girls who have been abused are more likely to be ostracised by their communities, particularly in the future, when they attempt to find a marriage partner.

UNICEF reported that abuse incidence was high in rural areas, like the North Central Anuradhapura District and the Central Rathnapura District. Officials also said that while the number of cases reported to the police had increased, there was still a significant amount of underreporting.

Research has also shown that child abuse is a contributory factor to rape, sexual abuse and violence against women.

“Men’s experience of emotional abuse and neglect as children was associated with non-partner rape perpetration in two countries, China and Sri Lanka,” says a recent study by the U.N. Development Programme titled Why Do Some Men Use Violence Against Women and How Can We Prevent It?

The report found that almost 18 percent of the Sri Lankan female respondents said they had been subjected to rape, while 32 percent said they had been subjected to physical abuse, rape or both. Twenty-seven percent of the Sri Lanka men interviewed for the study said they had subjected their partners to physical abuse, rape or both.

At least half of these men had been abused in their childhood, the survey found.

“Child abuse was a common phenomenon across the region, with 50 percent of Sri Lanka-national men reporting experiences of childhood emotional abuse and neglect (i.e. being publicly humiliated or insulted, parents being too drunk or drugged to care for child, etc),” the report that interviewed 13,000 participants across six countries in Asia and Pacific found.

By Garikai Chaunza
Harare, Sep 24 2013 (IPS)

Despite all the evidence of climate change, Zimbabwe has no policy on climate change. Garikai Chaunza reports from Harare that the country is finally working on a climate change policy.

[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/ipslatamradio07/Climate_change_file.mp3[/podcast]

Ensuring that women, youth and other marginalised groups are employed is a challenge in combating poverty. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Walter García and Lucy Westcott
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

In the aftermath of the global economic crisis and with three years to go until the 2015 deadline of the Millennium Development Goals, global leaders are struggling to formulate a post-2015 agenda that can address the widespread dilemmas of employment and inclusive growth.

At a meeting attended by global leaders, ambassadors and civil society to discuss the post-2015 agenda last Friday, panellists agreed that better and more job opportunities are high priorities that must be included in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Created in 2000 at the Millennium Summit, the MDGs include eradicating extreme poverty, achieving universal primary education and improving maternal health.

At the meeting, speakers critiqued a report on jobs and growth issued by the high-level panel for post-2015, co-chaired by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, Liberian President Ellen Sirleaf and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Civil society leaders found the report too conservative, as it failed to properly address structural issues and income inequality.

For people under the age of 35, the desire for employment opportunities is particularly high. According to data from the International Labour Organisation (ILO), unemployment increased from 170 million people in 2007 to 200 million people in 2012, 75 million of them young people.

To give experts a better understanding of global workers’ views on employment and growth, people were consulted through World We Want, an online platform.

The information they shared was “well-rounded and insightful”, Selim Jahan, director of poverty practice at UNDP, told IPS, and revealed civil society’s seemingly inherent, if surprising, understanding of the risks and issues at hand regarding jobs and growth.

“These are no economists we are talking about. These are not policymakers. But people talked about macroeconomic policies and…different measures to deal with inequality, about measures to deal with education and skill training,” he said.

Their ideas and comments reveal the myriad and complex issues people face in securing and keeping a job. One World We Want user, an executive assistant from Brazil, believed a more open dialogue about HIV/AIDS to be vital in job development.

“[There should be] government incentive for companies [and] tax deduction to hire HIV employees. We still suffer [from] prejudice. We still need to keep this disease as a secret to maintain the job,” the user, who remained anonymous to protect his or her identity, said.

For another user from India, renewable energy was an integral part of future development.

Challenges to job creation

Strong population growth presents a huge challenge for future job creation. With the world labour force growing by 40 million people a year, according to the report, 470 million new jobs will have to be created from 2016-2030 to keep up with the demand for work.

Engaging women, youth and other marginalised groups in employment is another difficulty, with a huge gender disparity in some regions. In the Middle East and North Africa, the gaps are the biggest, with male employment at around 60 percent and female employment hovering around or below the 20 percent mark.

While bringing more women into employment could require a shift in cultural norms, the low numbers of employed women in the MENA region also has to do with the way data is collected, Martha Chen, international coordinator at Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising (WIEGO), told IPS.

“In the MENA region, it may also be the case that there are a lot of women doing home-based work and other forms of [paid] employment that do not get captured in the official statistics,” Chen added. “So the gap may not be as big as we think, but the problem may be that women’s work is not being fully captured.”

“It’s a mindset of those who do the interviewing and those who design the questionnaires,” she pointed out. “It’s a mindset about what…work [is], and the fact that women can be doing work in the home.”

“I think there [are] probably a lot of women in their homes doing something for the market, not just for subsistence,” Chen noted.

Youth are not the only ones who will be vying for future jobs. An aging population means that older people will also be looking for work.

“Job training, education, jobs, these are all issues important to older people. We don’t just stop living when we reach age 60,” said James Collins, U.N. representative of the International Council on Social Welfare and chair of the Committee on Aging in New York.

“As governments raise the retirement age, it’s very important that at the same time, they improve access to employment for older people who want to work,” Collins added.

Indigenous activists Ángel Durán from Bolivia and Bernardette Angus from Australia share their experiences in conservation at the WIN conference in Darwin. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
DARWIN, Australia , May 28 2013 (IPS)

“Are you a park ranger?” IPS asked. “No, I am one of the owners of the territory,” Ángel Durán responded in a firm voice. The Bolivian indigenous leader is in this northern Australian city along with 1,200 other native delegates from over 50 countries for the World Indigenous Network (WIN) conference.

Durán, who was born in and lives on a collectively-owned native territory, is attending the conference in representation of eight native groups from Bolivia’s Amazon region that total more than 20,000 people.

Although he is not on the programme as an official speaker and can only communicate in Spanish, this is not stopping him from sharing his knowledge and experiences with other indigenous leaders walking from one auditorium to another at WIN headquarters in Darwin, the capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory.

The meeting, supported by the Australian government, runs May 26-29, with presentations of successful projects for the preservation of ecosystems and biodiversity, the sustainable use of protected natural areas, and the development and food security of indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America and other countries like Canada or Australia itself.

On Monday, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples James Anaya stressed the importance of governments recognising international instruments that protect the basic rights of native people.

Melissa George from Australia told IPS that the conference was a major contribution by the Australian government and a form of recognition that indigenous people were the first to use their knowledge to protect the territory.

George, who belongs to the Wulgurukaba aboriginal tribe, added however that there was still much to be done.

The activist has dedicated 20 years – nearly half her life – to developing projects for administering natural resources in aboriginal territories. She is now co-chair of the WIN National Advisory Group.

The international network of indigenous and local community land and sea managers recently became an official part of the United Nations after the government of Australia handed over its management to the Equator Initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The initiative brings together the United Nations, governments, civil society, businesses and grassroots organisations to advance local sustainable development solutions and support the work of indigenous people around the world by means of capacity-building.

Eileen de Ravin, manager of the Equator Initiative, told IPS that this concerted effort opens up enormous possibilities for people from a South American country like Bolivia to learn directly what is happening in Canada or Australia.

“Our goal is to influence the governments to get them to respect and listen to these valuable experiences and solutions,” de Ravin said.

The Equator Initiative awards a prize every two years, recognising 25 outstanding local sustainable development projects. In the past decade, 152 indigenous community organisations, of 2,500 that have been nominated, have won the prize.

One of the presentations at the WIN conference was on the conservation of protected areas by indigenous and local communities in Canada, Australia, Sweden and Brazil by means of indigenous forest rangers, park rangers or environmental agents.

“The name doesn’t matter, the objective is the same: to make use of traditional knowledge to protect nature and culture from the different threats,” Brazilian activist Osvaldo Barassi with the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) told IPS.

ACT’s annual indigenous park ranger training programme provides conservation and land monitoring capacity-building to native communities, including the use of tools like GPS tracking technology.

Since 2005, the Brazilian organisation has trained 190 people from 30 native ethnic groups in forest management and conservation, which has enabled the communities to develop projects to monitor illegal logging in order to protect the local flora and fauna.

But in spite of the contribution made by the indigenous forest rangers trained by ACT, they receive no payment from the government for their work.

That is in contrast to Australia’s indigenous land stewardship programme, which has created Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) in more than 50 locales on traditional aboriginal lands over the last 15 years, covering a total of 43 million hectares.

Bernardette Angus, a park ranger from Western Australia, told IPS that it is indigenous people who have been caring for the plants and animals and protecting the land and the sea since a long time ago, and who are teaching young people to continue doing so when the current generation is gone.

In Bolivia, the federation of indigenous peoples from north of La Paz, led by Durán, are seeking to go one step further in their conservation efforts, and have asked the government of Evo Morales – the country’s first-ever native president – to legally recognise the “guardians” of community-owned indigenous land to enable them to levy penalties on those who invade their land and make illegal use of their natural resources.

Durán, who belongs to the Leko de Apolo indigenous community, said no government plan aimed at protecting biodiversity could leave out the communities. “Not even scientific knowledge can compare to the ancestral know-how of the local people. We take care (of nature) because it is our way of life,” he told IPS.

But while Barassi recognised the importance of indigenous knowledge, he warned that it was not always a guarantee in and of itself of the successful management of natural resources. For that, capacity-building is key, the ACT activist stated.

Participants at the conference agreed on the need to join forces to maximise results in the face of threats from illegal activities, large-scale private investment projects, or the effects of climate change.

“I never imagined that the forests could disappear, but it is happening,” said Joao Evangelista, a Brazilian park ranger who was unable to travel to Darwin, but sent a videotaped message presented by Barassi to an audience keen on cutting the distances between them.

“That’s why capacity-building is important; it’s a form of liberation for us, and of preparing ourselves to confront outside threats,” he said.

Forest in Sierra de Manantlán biosphere reserve in western Mexico.Credit: Comisión Nacional de Áreas Protegidas

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 25 2013 (IPS)

Issues related to the ownership of forest carbon and to prior consultation mechanisms threaten to derail plans for the Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation of Forests (REDD+) in some countries of Latin America, according to experts.

The problems are hindering the design of Mexico’s plan in the framework of the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD). In Panama, they have prompted the country’s indigenous peoples to withdraw from the programme.

“The previous government let slip the opportunity of concluding the process for fear of social activism, especially on the part of indigenous people and campesino communities,” Gustavo Sánchez, head of the Mexican Network of Campesino Forestry Organisations (Red MOCAF), told IPS.

The administration of Enrique Peña Nieto, whose six-year term began in December, has not said “whether or not it will adopt the current draft” of the national plan, he said.

“When it comes to the plan, Mexico is the second most advanced country in the Mesoamerican region (southern Mexico and Central America), because Costa Rica is already engaged in consultations, after reaching an agreement between native peoples and the government,” Sánchez said.

REDD+ is a climate change mitigation action plan that currently finances national programmes in 16 countries of the developing South in a quest to combat deforestation, reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and promote access by participating countries to technical and financial support.

The initiative was launched in 2008 by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) and the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), with the goal of promoting conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.

In Latin America the participating countries are Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama and Paraguay, while associate members that have not so far received financing are Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Peru. A total of 46 countries in the developing South are participating.

Mexico’s forested area covers 65 million hectares in the territories of some 2,300 communities, of which 600 manage forestry enterprises, according to the Mexican Civil Council for Sustainable Forestry (CCMSS).

This country of nearly 117 million people emits 748 million tonnes a year of CO2, one of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. Close to 16 percent arises from livestock farming, deforestation and other soil uses.

The authorities estimate that 150,000 hectares of forest are lost every year, but environmental organisations put deforestation at over 500,000 hectares a year.

In February, Panamanian indigenous groups withdrew from the pilot programme in their country, saying that the process was disrespecting their right to free, prior and informed consent and their collective right to traditional lands, as well as violating the 2007 U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

“The state has marginalised us. The first thing the programme must guarantee is safeguards for indigenous people. Continuing in the programme makes no sense,” said Héctor Huertas of the National Union of Indigenous Lawyers of Panama (UNAIPA), which represents the National Coordinating Body of Indigenous Peoples in Panama (COONAPIP).

Huertas told IPS that COONAPIP, a confederation of the seven native peoples in this Central American country, will be bringing a lawsuit in an administrative court against the Panamanian National Environmental Authority in a bid to halt REDD+.

Panama, a country of 3.5 million people, is home to some 417,000 indigenous people, according to the 2010 census, living on 16,634 square kilometres, equivalent to 29 percent of the national territory. Indigenous lands are regarded under the constitution as collectively-owned property that cannot be sold.

The crisis of the plan in Panama has fed suspicion in dozens of NGOs and academic institutes around the world that REDD+ does not represent a viable solution for environmental problems.

But it may serve as a lesson for the countries involved in designing the REDD+ programmes.

The study “Legal analysis of cross-cutting issues for REDD+ implementation: Lessons learned from Mexico, Viet Nam and Zambia”, says that “Mexico’s laws do not specify who owns carbon, but we can presume that forest owners and rights holders will be the direct beneficiaries.

“The clarification of land tenure rights is a crucial component of forest-based approaches to combating climate change and defining related carbon rights,” says the study, published May 2 by UN-REDD.

Another report, “Putting the Pieces Together for Good Governance of REDD+: An Analysis of 32 REDD+ Country Readiness Proposals”, published in March, concludes that few countries involved in the initiative “consider specific design options or challenges related to REDD+ benefit sharing, conflict resolution, or revenue management systems.”

However, the report makes the positive point that “most include plans to address these issues as readiness activities move forward.”

The publication, by Lauren Goers Williams of the U.S.-based World Resources Institute, says: “Relatively few readiness proposals identify specific next steps to address land tenure challenges or establish mechanisms to coordinate with local institutions during REDD+ planning and implementation.”

Although six REDD+ pilot projects, known as early actions, are under way in Mexico, it is unlikely that the national strategy will be completed this year.

“It is worrying to see the progress made with the early actions, because there is no national core concept, which should have come first,” Sánchez complained. ”Less importance is being given to tenure and rights, and more to measuring, reporting and verifying carbon. More progress is being made on the technical side, but there is no criterion for sustainability.”

NGOs involved in the process will ask the National Forestry Commission for clarity with respect to negotiation of the national strategy, for the settling of critical issues.

In the case of Panama, Huertas said that indigenous people “were demanding that indigenous experts be included on the programme, and that consultations be channelled through COONAPIP. Now we want a suspension of REDD+ based on the precautionary principle, because fundamental rights are being violated.”

The precautionary principle states that when potential adverse effects are not fully understood, the activities in question should not proceed.

The withdrawal of the native communities is being discussed at the 12th session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, being held in New York May 20-31.

UN-REDD is currently carrying out an external evaluation of the Panama national programme.

The UN-REDD study says: “To ensure the successful and equitable distribution of REDD+ benefits, legislation on REDD+ should incorporate clear and harmonised legal procedures and rules, allowing for open participation among actors at subnational and national levels.”

From the video “One photo a day in the worst year of my life”. Credit: Courtesy of B92 Fund Serbia

By Claudia Ciobanu
BELGRADE, Apr 26 2013 (IPS)

Up to a quarter of women in Europe have experienced domestic violence at some point in their lives, according to the Council of Europe. But despite the widespread nature of the phenomenon, more often than not we ignore it. A short video launched last month in Serbia managed to break this silence.

At first glance, the clip is just another photo-a-day video popularised on YouTube: photos of a smiling young woman follow one another, offering glimpses of different hairstyles and makeup choices.

But after a while the time-lapse video breaks the pattern. The woman’s eyes start looking sad, scared, and her face is covered in increasingly severe bruises and cuts. In the last image, she holds up a sign that issues a desperate call for help.

Before anyone even knew who the woman was or whether the video was genuine or fiction, it became a hit in Serbia and abroad, reaching two million views in just a few days.

It turned out that the film was in fact part of a campaign by the B92 Fund, a foundation associated with the leading private TV channel in Serbia, to raise awareness about domestic violence in this southeast European country.

In Serbia, over 60 women died as a result of domestic violence between the start of 2012 and today, according to the Autonomous Women’s Centre in Belgrade. And women’s groups claim that every second woman has suffered from verbal or physical abuse at some point in time.

“It is important to talk about this problem so that our society on the whole comprehends that it is not normal to beat women, so that women themselves are encouraged to report violence,” explains Veran Matic, the president of the B92 Fund. “Solidarity, getting people to react, and exerting pressure on authorities to take action on domestic violence are also our goals.”

Matic’s foundation has built five shelters for battered women in six years of work on domestic violence, and plans to open two more this year.

Together with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the B92 Fund also works on lobbying authorities to better implement legislation providing protection from perpetrators of violence and assistance for victims.

B92 tries to harness the popularity and resources of the television station to meet social needs that are not properly fulfilled by state authorities.

For Danijela Pesic from the Autonomous Women’s Centre, which has worked on violence against women for the past two decades, improving the enforcement of legislation already in place is the most important aspect, as it would offer systematic solutions for victims.

She said that shelters, while important, are merely a short-term emergency response.

The other key to combating domestic violence is changing the culture, says Pesic. “The main cause of domestic violence is patriarchal values,” she says. “It is not poverty, lack of education or alcoholism – we are seeing the same rates of abuse in villages and cities, and across educational and wealth levels.

“Men have to stop believing they can be violent, and for this to happen we need to change our perception of gender roles, starting as early as kindergarten.”

Despite noticing some positive changes in Serbia over the past few years – importantly, women are feeling increasingly empowered – Pesic fears that the lack of systematic state support for actors working in the area of domestic violence might jeopardise progress.

Financing is patchy, often coming in the shape of project-based donations from the West, which inevitably run out without being replaced. As a consequence, for example, call centres for victims are forced to close down after only a few years, just as women are starting to rely on them.

Serbia is not yet a member of the European Union. And as a Balkan country, it has a reputation of being prone to machismo.

Yet the approach to domestic violence in this country is not untypical of the situation across many European countries: optimal legislation is adopted to meet EU standards, but state authorities fail to implement it properly; financing for non-governmental groups working on domestic violence is insufficient; and patriarchal values persist.

A 2012 report by the Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE) network shows that only a third of European countries meet Council of Europe recommendations when it comes to a national free of charge helpline for victims of domestic violence.

In terms of shelter availability, the situation is worse: only five of 46 countries studied offer the necessary number of places, with Central and Eastern European countries performing worse than their Western counterparts.

Many post-socialist countries have started taking measures for preventing domestic violence and assisting victims more intensively only over the past decade. In Estonia, for instance, all of the country’s ten shelters opened in the last five years, financed by a combination of governmental and non-profit sources.

But many women’s groups across the region express doubts over whether the centres and other forms of assistance for victims will be able to continue operating in the future. The already precarious sustainability of the financing is being put under severe strain by the economic crisis.

A 2010 report by Oxfam and the European Women’s Lobby, “Women’s Poverty and Social Exclusion in the European Union at a Time of Recession: An Invisible Crisis?”, quotes NGOs across Central and Eastern Europe declaring that an increasing number of women have been calling helplines and requesting access to shelters since the crisis began.

This information (not yet quantified at the European level) is in line with the general view that economic turmoil leads to an increase in frequency and intensity of domestic abuse.

The same groups are also reporting negative impacts of austerity measures implemented across Europe in response to the crisis: from the closing of shelters in Romania and complaints by Slovakian NGOs that they have been hurt by the withdrawal of foreign donors to Estonian groups arguing they cannot plan for the long term because of a lack of support from local authorities.

EU funds, primarily in the form of the Daphne Programme, which offers financing to many of the women’s rights initiatives across the region, are also under question. The EU’s seven-year budget is getting renewed at the moment and the austerity wave in Europe has already led to an announcement of a reduction of its overall size.

While the European Commission told IPS that it proposed that women’s rights and gender equality programmes receive a similar amount of funding as before (the intended amount is approximately 800 million euros for the next seven years), some fear the fund will be significantly trimmed during further negotiations.

“While the recession and austerity measures are having a detrimental effect on the prevalence of violence against women, they are also having a negative effect on women’s ability to escape the violence,” comments Pierrette Pape from the European Women’s Lobby.

“Women’s economic independence is undermined while public services face funding cuts and cannot therefore provide adequate quality services,” Pape adds. “NGO-led services to support women victims of violence are also threatened by the tendering and marketisation of services, which leaves behind and in isolation many women and girls affected by male violence.”

By Helen Clark
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 25 2013 (IPS)

On Tuesday, leaders of five large emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, known as the BRICS – will gather in Durban, South Africa to discuss harnessing their formidable resources on behalf of faster development progress in Africa and elsewhere.

UNDP Administrator Helen Clark. Credit: UNDP (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The summit’s intent is to promote global policy reforms, and to draw on their own national experiences and comparative advantages to help solve global problems.

The gathering is important: it is another sign that the world as we knew it is quickly changing.

High on the BRICS agenda is a commitment to kick-start the stalled Doha round of world trade talks and to push for fairer rules governing commerce in agriculture and other critical areas. The BRICS bloc will also be exploring ways to boost growth and overall development progress in Africa through expanded trade, investment, technology transfer, and financial support.

In one especially bold initiative under consideration, the five countries will examine proposals to create their own BRICS development bank.

The readiness of the BRICS countries to offer their own new international development initiatives and policy ideas is a clear manifestation of the changing global development landscape examined in UNDP’s newly released 2013 Human Development Report, “The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World”. 

This dramatic change in global dynamics, however, goes well beyond the BRICS. More than forty developing countries are estimated to have made unusually rapid human development strides in recent decades, according to the Report. Together, they represent most of the world’s population and a growing proportion of its trade and economic output.

The progress of these fast mover countries measured in human development terms has accelerated markedly in the past decade. These geographically, culturally, and politically varied countries share a keen sense of pragmatism and a commitment to people, as seen through investments in education, health care, and social protection, and their engagement with the global economy. Neither rigid command economies nor laissez-faire free marketeers, they are guided by what works in their own national circumstances.

The BRICS countries themselves, while not alone, are key movers behind the rise of the South. As the 2013 global Human Development Report documents, they are contributing to development elsewhere in the South through trade, investment, and bilateral assistance. There are now many opportunities to harness the collective experiences of the rising South for the benefit of those countries not developing as fast.

The 2013 Report proposes convening a new “South Commission”, drawing on the pioneering example of the South Commission led in the late 1980s by Julius Nyerere, then president of Tanzania, and Manmohan Singh, now prime minister of India.

Through such a commission, leaders of the South could put forward their own recommendations for more inclusive and effective global governance in the 21st century.

As the BRICS summit demonstrates, the nations of the South are not standing still, waiting for reforms to happen in global governance. They are putting increasing energy and resources into newer instruments of political and economic co-operation, including regional institutions from Southeast Asia, southern Africa, and South America, to the Gulf States, the Caribbean, and West Africa’s ECOWAS group.

They have good reason to do so. If better coordinated, through what the 2013 Report terms “coherent pluralism,” with a clear consensus on shared goals, this evolving ecosystem of bilateral, regional, and international groupings can help advance sustainable human development in decades to come.

Multilateral action remains crucial for problems requiring global solutions – climate change is perhaps the most urgent example.

Yet the system of global governance devised in the mid-20th century is increasingly distanced from 21st century realities. China, for example, is the world’s second biggest economy, and holds more than 3 trillion dollars in foreign exchange reserves – more than all of Europe combined. Yet it has a smaller voting share in the World Bank than do France or the United Kingdom. Africa and Latin America also have issues of under-representation in important world fora.

The rise of the South does not imply an eclipse of the North. Human development is not a zero-sum game. People everywhere benefit from a healthier, better educated, more prosperous, and more stable world. A better-balanced North-South partnership can help achieve those goals.

A greater voice for the South also means greater responsibility, with shared accountability for solving problems and sustaining progress. A more engaged, successful South, meanwhile, helps the North, through its economic dynamism and collaboration on global challenges. As the 2013 Human Development Report says, the South still needs the North, but, increasingly, the North also needs the South.

Excerpt:

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 14 2013 (IPS)

The world’s 132 developing nations, largely part of the global South, are ascending at a pace “unprecedented in its speed and scale”, according to the latest Human Development Report (HDR) released Thursday by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP).

Khalid Malik. Photo Courtesy of UNDP

And “never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically, and so fast,” says Khalid Malik, lead author of the study and director of the HDR Office.

“Without doubt, the South’s three largest economies – China, India and Brazil – are driving forces in this phenomenon, due both to their sheer size and the recent speed of their overall human development progress,” he tells IPS.

By 2020, the combined economic output of the three leading developing countries alone will surpass the aggregate production of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the United States, says the 203-page study.

And “much of this expansion is being driven by new trade and technology partnerships within the South itself,” according to the HDR.

China has already overtaken Japan as the world’s second biggest economy while lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

India is re-shaping its future with new entrepreneurial creativity and social policy innovation, while Brazil is lifting its living standards through expanding international relationships and anti-poverty programmes that are being emulated worldwide, says the HDR.

Still, out of 187 countries, five of the top achievers in the Human Development Index are all from the North: Norway, Australia, the United States, the Netherlands and Germany.

The bottom five are from the developing world: Burkina Faso, Chad, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Niger.Rising living standards and education levels lead to greater expectations from, and demands on, governments.

Malik pointed out that the 2013 HDR identifies more than 40 developing countries – on all continents – that have performed much better than would have been predicted in HDI terms over the past two decades, with this progress accelerating notably in most since 2000, he added.

The study says the South is “developing at a pace unprecedented in human history, with hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty, and billions more poised to join a new global middle class.”

Asked if this phenomenon is largely confined to just the three leading countries while most developing nations are still lagging far behind in alleviating or eradicating poverty, Malik singled out the 40 countries categorised as being among the “human development high achievers”.

The 40 countries include Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Rwanda, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Viet Nam and Uganda.

Malik said the HDR looks in greater detail at 18 of the 40 countries, and their paths to human development improvement. 

He pointed out that the 2013 HDR also looks at the potentially highly positive impact of this phenomenon on today’s 47 least developed countries (described as the poorest of the poor), which include new markets, new sources of investment, better access to appropriate technologies, and, most important, many useful policy lessons.

“And while a number of low-income countries will miss their own national goals of halving extreme poverty by 2015, it is important to emphasise that the world as a whole has already met this target ahead of time, largely due to massive poverty eradication in many of the leading South nations since 1990,” he added.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: The rise of the global South includes countries such as Mexico, South Korea and Chile. But how do you justify their categorisation as part of the South when Mexico left the group of 77 developing nations to join the industrial world back in 1994, South Korea in 1996 and Chile in 2010? And do you still consider them part of the global South?

A: The terms “South” and “North” are used in the report to distinguish between the long-established advanced industrial nations (the latter) and more recently emerging economies.

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, described as the rich man’s club)) does indeed include Mexico, South Korea, Chile and Turkey as well – all countries which belong nonetheless to the ‘South’ in that broad sense.

The geographical origins and connotations of the terms are of course inexact: Australia and New Zealand are rather counter-factually assigned to the ‘North’ for this purpose.

Q: The HDR takes a critical look at “global governance” – which includes multi-party democracy, human rights, transparency and accountability – as a political benchmark for the rise of the global South. If so, how do you account for the fact that China, considered by the West to be a non-democratic regime with the absence of rule of law and a free press, emerging as the world’s second biggest economy outranking Japan? Shouldn’t multi-party democracy be an integral part of economic progress in the South?

A: The 2013 report identifies more than 40 developing countries, China included, that have made remarkable human development gains in recent decades, with progress accelerating in the past 10 years. These countries represent a variety of national histories and evolving political systems. Most of these countries, though not all, would be characterised today as multi-party democracies.

The report argues strongly in favour of the importance of giving people a greater voice and opportunities for meaningful participation in civic life, which has long been central to the human development philosophy.

The report says further that rising living standards and education levels lead to greater expectations from, and demands on, governments, in terms of accountability, responsiveness, and effective delivery of social services.

The report also looks at the increasing importance of civil society in driving human development change in countries spotlighted in its ‘Rise of the South’ analysis.

That some East Asian and Latin American “developmental states” were not democracies in different stages of their development has prompted a misconception that the most effective developmental states are typically autocratic.

But evidence of the purported relationship between authoritarianism and development is scant. Democratic countries such the United States and post-World War II Japan were highly successful developmental states.

Since the 1950s, the Scandinavian countries have also acted as developmental states, where political legitimacy is derived from social services and full employment rather than from rapid growth. In Brazil, Mexico, Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, human development progress has accelerated since the consolidation of democratically elected civilian rule over the past two decades.

China’s political culture is fast evolving as living standards continue to rise, with an increasingly well-informed citizenry demanding greater government accountability. And India, a prime force in the Rise of the South, has been the world’s largest representative democracy for more than six decades.

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By Lusha Chen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 8 2013 (IPS)

On the sidelines of the 57th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Huairou Commission (HC), on March 4th, organised a panel discussion on women’s access to justice. 

Sponsored by UNDP and coordinated by HC, women from over 70 communities in seven countries across Africa for over a year engaged in a participatory action research on local obstacles to women’s access to justice and new bottom-up models to remove judicial bottlenecks.

These 70 groups are dealing with issues ranging from domestic violence to HIV/AIDS, care for handicapped children and social development. Through their research, they revealed contradictions and gaps in legal frameworks that prohibit women’s access to justice — findings which they have built upon in their collective responses, including the training of community paralegals and watchdog groups.

The results of their research will further influence future policy-making within UNDP.

Shorai Chitongo, representing Ray of Hope Zimbabwe, an organisation dealing primarily with domestic violence, was among the panelists that participated in the research, along with local headman Gilbert Tendai Mungate, who talked about their collaboration. The panel was chaired by Randi Davis, Officer in Charge of the UNDP Gender Unit.

UN CSW Side Event from IPS Inter Press Service on Vimeo.

U.N. delegates listen to a high-level heads of agencies panel at the 57th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). Credit: Lusha Chen/IPS

By Marzieh Goudarzi
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 6 2013 (IPS)

U.N. agency heads gathered Tuesday to reassert their unified commitment to ending the epidemic of violence against women and girls, and bringing justice and healing to survivors.

Grim statistics underscore the urgency of this issue: 70 percent of women worldwide report experiencing physical and/or sexual violence, 50 percent of reported sexual assaults are committed against girls under 16 years of age, and 603 million women live in countries where domestic violence has not been criminalised.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon articulated another fact: “Too many women and girls face intimidation and physical and sexual abuse often from those who should care for and respect them most – fathers, husbands, brothers, teachers, colleagues, and supervisors.”

Tuesday’s forum transpired as a part of the 57th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), whose primary theme is the elimination of violence against women and girls.

It opened with remarks from the secretary-general and continued with a panel of high-level U.N. agency representatives, including Michelle Bachelet, executive director of U.N. Women, and Irina Bokova, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

Bachelet stressed the importance of the diverse contributions of U.N. agencies to the efforts of the CSW.

“Whether we’re talking about UNESCO through education, UNDP (U.N. Development Programme) through government cooperation, UNFPA (U.N. Population Fund) through the promotion of sexual and reproductive health and rights, or UNICEF (U.N. Children’s Fund) through protecting the rights of children, this work is making a difference on the ground,” she said.

UN Heads of Agencies Forum on Violence Against Women and Girls from IPS Inter Press Service on Vimeo.

Also represented were the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), World Health Organisation (WHO), International Labor Organisation (ILO), U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and U.N. Joint Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS).

Perhaps the strongest message of this forum was its unified and indisputable affirmation of violence against women and girls as a priority on the international human rights agenda.

The long struggle for recognition of violence against women as a human rights issue first achieved serious global attention at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, quickly followed by the General Assembly Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women.

Commenting on the development of the issue at the U.N., Bokova told IPS that today, “there is a lot more awareness, commitment, and concrete action… But of course we are not there at all – it’s just the beginning.”

UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Geeta Rao Gupta added, “I can tell you that over this past decade, the amount of attention that this issue has received internationally would not have happened if the U.N. had not taken a leadership position.”

“I think the major difference is that it has become a public issue. (Violence against women) is not tolerated in the way it was before,” Rebeca Grynspan, associate sdministrator of UNDP, told IPS.

“Having acknowledged that, I think that we have not had the accelerated progress that we expected,” she said. “Many times we are pedaling to stay in the same place and not go backward. That’s why I really welcome the fact that this issue has come again to the table of the CSW.”

A recent milestone was the 2010 establishment of U.N. Women, which last year provided capacity-building for stronger legislation and provision of services to survivors of violence in 57 countries.

U.N. Women manages the secretary-general’s campaign, United to End Violence Against Women, and works with U.N. Habitat and UNICEF on the Global Safe Cities Initiative, striving to make urban spaces violence-free for women and girls.

Speaking on behalf of UNESCO, Bokova stated, “Raising awareness and changing the environment through education is crucial. We have to go deep to the root of the violence,” explaining the need to instill within youth the idea that violence is not a “normal” part of life.

UNESCO has created international guidelines on sexuality education, HIV education, gender equality in education, and guidelines for teachers on stopping violence in schools.

Research shows that violence is a major threat to girls’ education, causing poor attendance and forcing many to drop out of school – another reason why the issue is high among UNESCO’s priorities.

Grynspan argued that violence against women is also a dangerous obstacle to global productivity, currently preventing seven in 10 women from achieving their greatest potential contribution to society and the economy by making them more likely to be absent from or quit school and work; violence also costs society in terms of health and legal services for victims, she explained.

Grynspan cited the 2010-2011 Human Development Report, which showed 49 percent loss in human development due to gender inequality. “There is one thing that will bring productivity up and cost down,” she said, “and that is ending violence against women.”

Director-General Margaret Chan spoke via video on the WHO’s commitment to combating this violence and discussed the wide range of health repercussions women face, including injuries to organs/tissues, unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions, premature birth, maternal mortality, psychological trauma, and increased risk of sexually-transmitted diseases, such as HIV.

Deputy Executive Director Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen of UNFPA and Regional Director of UNAIDS Sheila Tlou reiterated the extremely detrimental effects of violence against women on the battle against AIDS, which has come too far to be stopped now.

Across the panel, representatives recognised the wide range of causes and perpetuators of the violence against women.

They made references to cultural practices of early, forced marriages of girls and female genital mutilation; they pointed to cultural norms that shame women as victims, discourage seeking help, and normalise violence in domestic, educational, and work settings; they discussed the vulnerability of women in conflict and post-conflict societies, where rape often becomes a weapon.

Recognising the vast majority of women both on the panel and in the audience, the representatives also called for greater engagement of men and boys and male ownership of the issues.

As Grynspan noted, with her fellow panelists nodding in agreement, “We are still, by and large, talking to ourselves.”

Repairing the roof of a house damaged by Hurricane Sandy. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Dec 28 2012 (IPS)

“Adaptation to climate change is urgent and must be part of development,” said Bárbara Pesce-Monteiro, the United Nations resident coordinator in Cuba, assessing the damage done by hurricane Sandy in the eastern region of the country.

She said the damage was very serious, especially in Santiago de Cuba, a city of almost half a million people and a services hub for other towns. In order to support the country at such a difficult time, the United Nations system in Cuba designed an action plan that will serve as a framework for assistance from the international community.

The plan, to be put into effect over the next six to 18 months, will benefit three million people in the most affected provinces: Santiago de Cuba, Holguín and Guantánamo. The main areas of concern are early recovery, housing, water and sanitation, health and education.

Sandy, regarded as the most devastating hurricane to strike the eastern part of the island in the last 50 years, claimed 11 lives in late October and caused considerable losses in housing, educational and health facilities, agriculture and food crops, as well as major interruptions in electricity and water supply, now largely overcome.

United Nations agencies initially mobilised 1.5 million dollars in emergency funding, supplemented by an appropriation of 1.6 million dollars from the Central Emergency Response Fund of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The action plan entails seeking 30.6 million dollars to deal with the urgent needs of the population that suffered the brunt of the hurricane’s impacts, along with a strategy aimed at improving living conditions for those affected.

The authorities immediately embarked on recovery work, “but the international community wants to support the country in this task,” Pesce-Monteiro said in an interview with IPS. She explained that this humanitarian aid did not require a specific request from Cuba, as it is part of the regular U.N. mechanisms.

The devastation caused by Sandy in the early hours of Oct. 25 recalled the danger from earthquakes to which the eastern region, especially Santiago de Cuba, is exposed. “It’s an issue we have been talking over with the government for several months now,” said Pesce-Monteiro.

She said this concern is shared throughout the Caribbean region. “After the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, we realised we were all vulnerable. In fact, the United Nations has supported and will continue to support earthquake detection centres in eastern Cuba. This vulnerability needs to be taken into account during reconstruction efforts,” she said.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has helped strengthen the capacity of local governments to reduce disaster risks in several provinces. Sixty-three risk management centres have been created at the municipal and provincial levels, as well as 209 early warning stations in the most vulnerable communities.

Pesce-Monteiro said these installations “have produced excellent results.” The United Nations is working with the other Caribbean nations to share the experiences, test their usefulness and see how they can be adapted to other countries in the region.

“There is also cooperation with the Environment Agency (under the Cuban Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment) in their studies on vulnerability” and other topics, she said.

Adaptation and climate change

The U.N. resident coordinator in Cuba was emphatic when she said that adaptation to climate change is an urgent need.

“The United Nations has been saying for years that there is no time to waste. Adaptation must be part of development,” she said.

In her view, this issue should be a seamless part of every country’s development model, whether the country is rich or poor. “All development plans must take vulnerabilities into account, in order to ensure adaptation. Ideally, they would also limit emissions (of greenhouse gases),” she said.

Pesce-Monteiro also said that it is one thing to be able to face and respond to a disaster, but quite another to build a sustainable society that is capable of preparing for and adapting to climate phenomena.

“In this field, too, Cuba has experience that can be of value to other nations,” she said.

Pesce-Monteiro was sure that the trail of disaster left throughout the Caribbean, as well as in the United States and Canada, in the wake of Sandy, has provided experiences worth assimilating. “But here we are still in the phase of responding to the damage; we want to process the lessons learned in January, and I know the Cuban state will do the same,” she said.

She added that this reflection should go far beyond Cuba itself. “Climate change is affecting all of us, so we hope that this will be another opportunity to raise awareness in all sectors about an issue that must be addressed seriously at the global level,” she said.

“We have already experienced a succession of extreme events of a very serious nature close to home, which compels us to reflect deeply and analyse the type of development we want for the future,” Pesce-Monteiro said.

“I think society is crying out for us to make the appropriate commitments so that we can move forward,” she said.

She highlighted the importance of the social forum held in June during the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Rio de Janeiro.

“It was a broad, participative forum, with strong citizen commitment. Governments are going to have to feel pressure from each one of us, and to understand that we really want a sustainable planet,” she said.

Afghan women are determined that their gains from the past 20 years will not be lost. Credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid

By Julia Kallas
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 24 2012 (IPS)

Violence against women is internationally recognised as a threat to democracy, a burden on national economies, and a serious human rights violation.

Yet in Afghanistan today, 87 percent of women face physical, sexual or psychological violence or are forced into marriage, according to recent data from Human Rights Watch.

“Afghan women have a very rich track record which is never acknowledged, never published, never spoken about,” Sharmista Dasbarwa of UNDP told IPS. It is time to talk about “the resilience, the silent courage of the village women of Afghanistan who have gone through hell for so many years and (still) dream and hope for a better and peaceful Afghanistan.”

Dasbarwa spoke to IPS correspondent Julia Kallas about the struggle to secure gender equality in the war-torn country, and why it is indispensable to lasting peace. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Advancing women’s empowerment is an essential priority for the transition in Afghanistan, as it contributes directly to stability. How can women play a bigger role?

A: Although Afghanistan has got about 27 percent of women in the parliament, there are still some very deep biases against women. They want to achieve what every woman in the world wants, which is to have access to opportunities, education, training, political participation, economic activities. It is very difficult for an Afghan woman to achieve this.

Having said that, at the same time, the resilience and the character of Afghan women is very big. I feel that the establishment of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in 2002, and the activities that they are doing in influencing different legal instruments to insure a better integration of women in the field, is very important.

At the moment, women are very eager to play an active role in the transition. Things are improving with the High Peace Council and different structures that the government of Afghanistan has established. There is a considerable scope to involve women in a very active way.

Q: How can you ensure that compromises made in the ongoing peace-building process do not lead to a rollback of women’s rights?

A: There is no official peace agreement in Afghanistan like there was in Sudan or Timor Leste. I wish I could answer your question in a very positive way, but the situation at the moment is very unstable.

Although there is a lot of political representation of Afghan women, nobody knows what will be their role during the transition and the peace-building process. So it is very difficult to say if there will be compromises. I hope not, but there is a possibility.

But Afghan women have developed a kind of determination, resilience and hope to ensure that if there are any compromises, their gains from the past 20 years are not lost and no compromises will be made in order to step them down to second-class citizens again.

At work I deal with women from the villages, from the rural communities, from the academic institutions, from the members of parliament, from the ministries. And they all have displayed a lot of determination which is a very rare thing. I worked in a number of countries and I have not seen this kind of resilience anywhere in the world.

Q: How does the new gender equality project focus on preventing violence against women in Afghanistan?

A: We are providing support for the elimination of violence in three different ways.

Firstly, to provide policy support to the legal department of the Ministry of Women’s affairs by ensuring that any legislation drafted which has a direct impact on the life of Afghan women is reviewed by the Legal Department of Women’s Affairs, passed through the government and translated into action.

Secondly, we aim to install more legal help centres. In the first phase we established 24 legal help centers in four provinces. The purpose of the legal help centres is to reach women living in rural areas who do not have access to the formal justice system and police authorities, and to ensure that they have free legal advice and protection.

Thirdly is the advocacy campaign, which we have been doing involving different stakeholders and media. It will involve round table television discussions and debates. The focus will be to raise awareness on women’s rights and their access to legal protection.

The 2009 law on elimination of violence against women has got a commission established in national and subnational level. We propose in the next phase of the project to provide technical support to the commission so that this law becomes more active. A report from 2011 showed that the number of cases registered was 2,999 and the number of cases prosecuted was only 27 percent, so we want to improve the enforcement of the law.

Q: On Sunday, we celebrate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. What are the lessons that other countries can learn from the women’s programme in Afghanistan?

A: The level and depth of violence that Afghanistan women face is something very rare in other countries. Yes, there is violence in other parts of the world but I have not come across this kind of sustained nature of violence and weakness in the voices of women to come out and seek help.

I have worked in a number of countries in Africa, and I come from India, but I have not seen this kind of helplessness, powerlessness, and lack of voice. But this is one side of the picture.

Despite having this weak position, Afghan women are very determined. The lesson that women from all over the world should learn from our programmes is that the very small support and incentive that we are doing have changed the quality of life of these women.

Our programme needs to be replicated in other countries, especially countries emerging from conflict. Afghan women are also fighting to ensure that when peace happens and peace-building negotiations are over, there is sustainable peace right down at the grassroots level.

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On Wednesday, we kick off a three-day meeting in Mexico City to discuss how to boost the involvement of young people in politics and expand their role in consolidating democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Heraldo Muñoz. UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

More than 30 youth organisations, young political leaders and governmental counterparts will participate.

Electoral democracy has spread and consolidated in our region since the early 1990s. But the quality of our democracies is a concern.

Citizens are frustrated by wide disparities in wealth and power and there is weak popular participation in public affairs – especially among young generations. Moreover, public and private corruption, citizen insecurity and weak public institutions are major threats.

Youth involvement in politics is crucial to improve democracies – and not only in Latin America. Almost half the world’s population is under 25 and more than one third is aged 12-24. This fact, along with social and economic inequality among youth expressed in recent social movements like the Arab Spring, Spain’s 15M, Mexico’s YoSoy132 movement and the student protests in Chile, reaffirm the need to address the young generation’s demands and recognise young people’s critical role in promoting social change.

Of the 600 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean, more than 26 percent are aged 15-29. This is a unique opportunity for the region’s development and for its present and future governance.

The U.N. Development Program’s (UNDP) Human Development Reports have shown that young people have enormous potential as agents of change. But despite Latin America’s remarkable progress in reducing poverty and inequality, and its strides toward strong democracies with free and transparent elections, structural problems perpetuate unequal rights and opportunities among citizens, including in job opportunities and access to public goods and services.

All of this directly affects young people.

Income, gender, ethnic origin, or dwelling conditions are decisive barriers to young citizens’ rights. One in every four young people aged 15-29 in the region are poor or extremely poor. And only 35 percent have access to education. About half complete basic education, but only 18 percent attend college, and access to quality education is unequal.

More worrying still: Some 20 million young Latin Americans aged 15-18 neither work nor study. That’s nearly one in every five, 54 percent of them female and 46 percent male.

Many young people are exposed to tremendous risk and violence. The region comprises less than nine percent of the world’s population but accounts for 27 percent of its homicides, UNDP has found. As a result, public perceptions of the young are distorted. Those from low-income communities in particular are seen as potentially violent, morally weak and frequent substance abusers.

A recent UNESCO study has found that young men and women in Latin America see themselves as largely underrepresented and disenfranchised from traditional political mechanisms. Only 5-10 percent claim to take part of some kind of citizen engagement – normally focused on sports and religious-related activities. At the same time, boosting young people’s political participation is one of the main concerns and demands of youth organisations.

Since effective youth participation strengthens and renews democracy, over the next three days in Mexico we will discuss what governments, civil society, and the U.N. are doing to boost political inclusion of young people in the region.

We will also discuss the promise of technology and social networks, including electronic platforms linked to UNDP, whose Virtual School has trained numerous young men and women in the region, notably those of African or indigenous descent, on political inclusion.

The region needs to promote youth political participation. Generations of Latin Americans now have the privilege of living in democratic societies. Now it’s up to us all to help them get involved and shape their own future.

*Heraldo Muñoz, a former Chilean ambassador and president of the U.N. Security Council, serves as assistant secretary-general and U.N. Development Program director for Latin America and the Caribbean.

When the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) unveils its annual flagship Human Development Report (HDR) in mid-October, the primary focus will be on a growing new phenomenon on the economic horizon: the rise of the global South and the significant progress in South-South cooperation over the last decade.

The developing world maintained an average annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate of 4.8 percent during the last 10 years, and now accounts for around 45 percent of global GDP.

And in 2010, developing and emerging economies recorded an average growth of 7.3 percent, “which was significantly greater than that of economies in the North,” says UNDP Administrator Helen Clark.

These trends, she told a recent meeting of the High-Level Committee on South-South Cooperation, “contributed to progress on achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in many countries.”

Undoubtedly, the dynamism of the South will continue to be reflected in strong development outcomes, predicted Clark, a former prime minister of New Zealand.

Rob Vos, director of Development Policy and Analysis at the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), told IPS that South-South cooperation is becoming increasingly important, and “one should expect this to increase further in times ahead of us”.

He pointed out that China has already become a major financier in Latin America.

The Chinese export-import bank and the state development bank together are already providing more long-term financing to the region than the World Bank and other multilateral development banks, he added.

“While still much less than traditional development cooperation, South-South development financing and technical cooperation with Africa is also of increasing importance,” Vos said.

Perhaps even more important, he pointed out, is the growing South-South trade and investment, which is helping some regions to mitigate some of the adverse effects from the economic slowdown in developed countries.

The South-South trend is also moving from bilateral to multilateral relationships.

Last May, the Nairobi-based U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) launched a South-South Exchange Mechanism connecting people to innovations and best practices, including an online initiative to improve the sharing of resources and expertise among sustainable development projects in the global South.

Developing countries, says UNEP, have now overtaken developed nations in terms of large-scale renewable energy investments.

The UNDP, meanwhile, has been signing new partnerships with several new emerging economies of the South on sharing knowledge and innovations across the global South.

According to Clark, UNDP has built a partnership with the International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth in Brasilia to facilitate efforts to make Latin American experiences of cash transfers and social protections known to other regions.

She said UNDP has also established the Seoul Policy Center for Global Development Partnerships in South Korea; participated in the establishment of the International Poverty Reduction Centre in Beijing, China; and helped establish the International Centre for Private Sector in Development in Istanbul, with the cooperation of the Turkish government.

Meanwhile, the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has set up an International Centre for South-South Cooperation in science, technology, and innovation in Malaysia while the Geneva-based International Labour Organisation (ILO) has established the Inter-American Centre for Knowledge Development in Vocational Training in Latin America and the Caribbean.

At the same time, the Vienna-based U.N. Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) has established several South-South cooperation centres in China, India, Brazil and other middle-income countries to facilitate industrial development.

Clark said that in 2010, UNDP organised the Africa-China Poverty Reduction and Development Conference in Ethiopia to discuss breakthrough approaches emerging from the South in reducing poverty, accelerating broad-based growth, and advancing progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Africa.

“China’s experience in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and how that was achieved is of considerable interest,” said Clark.

She singled out UNDP’s Special Unit for South-South Cooperation for helping establish service platforms to document, showcase and exchange Southern development solutions.

“In its role as a U.N. system-wide facilitator and coordinator of South-South cooperation, the Special Unit continues to facilitate the sharing of experiences and good practices in South-South cooperation among U.N. agencies,” she added.

Asked where all this will lead to, Vos told IPS that it is “changing economic geography, that’s for sure”.

For Africa, however, most of trade and investment with the “global South”, but China in particular, appears to be perpetuating some old patterns, he said.

African exports mainly consist of raw materials and its imports of manufactured products, he added, pointing out that direct investments from China are largely in extractive industries as well.

“Hence, new geography but otherwise more of the same? Well, it does not need to be,” Vos said.

He said much support from China, India and Brazil to Africa takes the form of infrastructure finance and technical cooperation for agriculture, medicine and education.

“The trick for African nations will be to take such support to its advantage and promote the further diversification of their economies, adapt knowledge and new technologies to local needs, and improve health and education systems.”

That way, he said, “the new geography will become a boon, not a bane.”