An estimated 36 percent of Papua New Guinea’s eight million people are currently living on less than 1.25 dollars a day. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Neena Bhandari
SYDNEY, May 25 2015 (IPS)

As Papua New Guinea celebrates 40 years of independence, 2015 marks a defining year for the largest Pacific Island nation, set to record 15 percent GDP growth this year.

However, unless the government tightens up its policies, the country will likely fail to achieve any of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) despite making significant progress in the past few years.

"We believe that if we continue to invest in the programmes that we have today, we will achieve [the] results that the international community has laid down for everybody." -- Peter O’Neill, Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea
“Even with 14 years of successive double digit growth, the challenge for PNG is to translate high levels of resource revenue into well-being for all citizens. The latest estimate of the population is now over eight million and approximately 36 percent of the people are living on less than 1.25 dollars a day,” United Nations Resident Coordinator in Papua New Guinea Roy Trivedy told IPS.

Mineral resources, including copper, gold, oil, nickel, cobalt and liquid natural gas, constitute 70 percent of all PNG exports; and mine and oil production revenues since independence have amounted to 60 billion dollars, according to the Human Development Report 2013.

Still, PNG currently ranks 156^th out of 187 countries in the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI).

U.N. agencies have worked across different sectors to support PNG in the development of education and health, poverty reduction, and assistance with disaster risk reduction and social protection. Many of the reforms implemented by the current government over the past three years are beginning to take root.

For example, the Tuition Fee Free (TFF) education policy, benefitting students at the elementary and secondary level, is gaining acceptance throughout the country, with two million children currently enrolled in schools.

The government is also investing in higher education and vocational and tertiary education. But the country faces the challenges of tackling high student-to-teacher ratios, building and refurbishing educational infrastructure, improving quality of primary education services and scaling up the provision of secondary and tertiary education.

The government has also committed to free primary health care for all citizens, but U.N. agencies working in PNG say more needs to be done to reduce the infant mortality rate from the current 75 deaths per 1,000 live births; reduce the number of under-five children dying of preventable diseases; and reduce the maternal mortality rate, which has remained at 733 deaths per 100,000 live births over the past decade.

In addition, early childhood health is a major issue, with 48 percent of children aged five or younger suffering from malnutrition.

Infrastructure development will also be crucial to realising the benefits of the country’s mineral, energy, agricultural and tourism assets. The government is spending considerable resources to modernise and better equip the police, judiciary and corrective services critical for tackling inequality and discrimination, especially against women.

PNG will have an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to uplifting the lives of its people as the international community moves into a new phase of its development agenda: the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Papua New Guinea is the co-facilitator with Denmark of the Global Summit on SDGs scheduled to take place later this year.

Following a decade-and-a-half of development guided by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the new global blueprint for poverty eradication is expected to be centred on sustainability, including combating climate change, protecting the environment, preserving biodiversity and conserving oceans, seas and marine resources: issues that are highly relevant for Pacific Island countries threatened by rising sea levels.

While the 22 Pacific island countries and territories contribute just 0.03 percent to global emissions, their collective population of 10 million people will likely suffer some of the worst impacts of climate change.

In addition to loss of human life as a result of natural disasters, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) estimates that climate change could cost the region over 12 percent of its annual gross domestic product (GDP) by the turn of the century.

Against this backdrop, IPS correspondent Neena Bhandari sat down with Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister Peter O’Neill, to discuss the U.N.’s role in PNG’s development agenda. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Has the United Nations contributed to Papua New Guinea’s economic development?

A: We have many United Nations organisations in Papua New Guinea and I would like to thank them for their contribution to the country’s development agenda. We are very happy with the work that they are doing, especially UNDP [the United Nations Development Programme], which is engaged with our department of planning [Department of National Planning and Monitoring] in setting up various programmes all around the country, including Bougainville.

Q: It seems PNG is not ‘on track’ to meet any of the Millennium Development Goals, scoring either ‘off track’ or ‘mixed’ in the latest results surveys. What is being done to fix the problem?

A: In fact, we have made significant progress in meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Two or three years ago, we would have completely missed the MDG targets. But right now on issues related to infant mortality and literacy, the progress is much better because of the education and health programmes that we are rolling out. These programmes are contributing significantly to meeting the MDG targets.

Q: What are your aspirations for the Sustainable Development Goals? What strategies would you adopt to achieve the SDGs?

A: We think that our policies today are starting to yield the positive outcomes that we want: to make sure our literacy rates are beyond 80 to 90 percent; our infant mortality rates drop down to levels that are comparable to our neighbouring countries; and our life expectancy increases. We believe that if we continue to invest in the programmes that we have today, we will achieve those results that the international community has laid down for everybody.

Q: The island nation has been the focus of Chinese investment and Australian aid. The Australia-PNG bilateral aid programme is worth approximately 577 million dollars in the current financial year. Which has been more beneficial for the country’s development?

A: Both are beneficial. The Chinese investment is not dissimilar to many of the other investments they make around the region. They make similar investments in Australia, similar investments in Indonesia and all throughout the world. But I think in terms of support in social programmes, the more beneficial investment is through the aid programme that the Australian Government continues to provide.

Now they are aligning their programmes to our priorities, which has never happened before. The aid programme is now looking towards the education problems that we have, the health, good governance and the law and order problems that we have. Those are the programmes that our government is regularly focusing on and the aid programme is partnering in achieving the outcomes that we want.

Q: In Papua New Guinea, there have been positive steps toward integrating West Papuan refugees and also lifting reservations to the 1951 Refugee Convention. What measures are being taken to rehabilitate ‘climate refugees’, for example, people residing on Carteret Islands, who are in danger of being submerged due to the rise in sea levels?

A: Climate change is global and it is not something that is unique to PNG, but we are trying to resettle many of those refugees on the mainland. Most of them have families and we are trying to get them integrated into communities that they are comfortable with. As in the case of West Papuan refugees down at Western Province, many of them are already in PNG for many, many years and we are taking steps so they can become citizens and have access to all the services that the government provides for its citizens.

Q: Will climate change be a major problem for PNG and other countries in the Pacific?

A: Yes, we are facing similar problems like some of the smaller Pacific Island countries. We have thousands of low-lying islands and as the sea level rises, these people will have to continue to move. The first step for developed countries like Australia and the United States should be to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol and then go with the rest of the international community. Climate change is a global issue where we all need to work together in reducing emissions and lowering the global warming challenge that we face.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Excerpt:

Leobardo Gómez tries to eke out a living playing the harmonica on the streets of Mexico City, because injuries caused by a workplace accident have kept him from returning to construction work. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jul 28 2014 (IPS)

Construction worker Leobardo Gómez has been out of work for nine months since he slipped and fell to the street on a construction site in the Mexican capital in October.

“I broke two ribs and I still can’t work,” the 44-year-old, who came to Mexico City from the southern state of Puebla, told IPS. “The doctor told me I have to rest, and my social security coverage has run out. My body is still in pain.”

Gómez, who has worked from a very young age, said that while he is recovering, he goes around to cafés and restaurants playing the ten songs he knows on the harmonica, for spare change.

For people like Gómez, who fall through the cracks, Latin America and the Caribbean should push to achieve universal access to social services and policies to boost formal employment in order to make faster progress towards human development, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and experts recommend, while pointing to the improvement in human development indicators made in recent years.

In its 2014 Human Development Report “Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience”, published Jul. 24, the UNDP notes that Latin America is the developing region with the highest level of human development.

But it also warns that progress has slowed down in the last five years in comparison with the 2000-2008 period, and that vulnerabilities threaten to revert the progress made.

“Inequality is the main problem,” Emilia Reyes, an expert on inequality issues, told IPS. “Equality has an inherent link to the structure of the state, which has depended on the elites for so long, with the idea that there is an invisible hand that has actually never existed, and without any recognition that people have value.”

Reyes, in charge of policies and public budgets with a gender focus in the non-governmental organisation Gender Equity: Citizenship, Work and Family, said “It’s time for a structural reading of development that takes into account the social and environmental impacts of the concentration of wealth.

“In Latin America we don’t have a focus on sustainable development,” she added.

The Human Development Index scores range from 0 (the lowest) to 1 (the highest). The Index is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education levels and incomes. The HDI of Latin America as a whole increased from 0.73 in 2010 to 0.74 in 2013. Chile is in top place, with an HDI of 0.82, followed by Cuba and Argentina (0.81), with Haiti, Nicaragua and Honduras bringing up the rear.

School attendance and dropout rates remained basically the same between 2010 and 2013. But per capita income did grow: from 12,926 to 13,767 dollars.

The UNDP warns that Latin America’s progress in human development slowed down 25 percent since 2008. It also stresses that, despite experiencing the largest fall in inequality, this region remains the most unequal in terms of income.

Inequality declined in Latin America and the Caribbean, in part due to the expansion in education and public transfers to the poor, says the report.

The study states that inequality declined in 14 nations in the region between 1990 and 2012, while it grew in only four. In two others, there was no clear trend.

In 14 Latin American and Caribbean countries, nearly seven percent of the population experiences multidimensional poverty, while an additional 9.5 percent is at risk of falling into this kind of poverty, marked by multiple deprivations in education, health and living standards.

Liliana Rendón, a professor in the economy department of the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, said “progress and growth in the indicators should be treated cautiously, because it is only reflected in a small part of the population, which experienced an increase in wellbeing.”

Rendón pointed out that the rise in human development occurred concomitantly with growing income inequality in several countries. “The poor do not only suffer from an income deficit; poverty also includes shortcomings in healthcare, education and other problems. Income must translate into wellbeing, taking social, environmental and policy aspects into consideration,” she said.

Despite the strong growth in productivity, real wages in the world have remained stagnant. But in the region, they rose 15 percent between 2000 and 2011.

Vulnerable employment also declined in the region, from nearly 36 percent in 2010 to 31.5 percent in 2012, while the proportion of the workforce living on less than 1.25 dollars a day was also reduced in that period.

The UNDP recommends universal provision of basic social services, stronger social protection policies, and full employment, as a means to promote and secure progress in human development.

These elements would also reduce vulnerabilities, whose triggers include financial shocks, food price fluctuations, natural disasters and violent crime.

One of the novelties in the report is the inclusion of the Gender Inequality Index, where Latin America and the Caribbean is in first place among developing regions.

Argentina, Barbados and Uruguay are among the 16 countries in the world where female HDI values are equal to or higher than those for males.

“The state cannot generate economic, social and cultural development for just 49 percent of the population, males, because women face insurmountable barriers in access to those spheres. That means reducing discrimination, expanding opportunities and recognising obstacles to social protection,” Reyes said.

The UNDP also recommends the creation of a Latin American Monetary Fund to complement global funds and to build up reserves, help stabilise exchange rates, provide short-term funds to members and offer oversight.

The region already has a Latin American Reserve Fund (FLAR), created in 1976 and made up of Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela, which have provided total capital of 2.37 billion dollars.

“Inequality hinders development, so public policies should focus on achieving a more equal society,” Rendón said. “Public policies should focus on more and better spending in the fight against poverty, with better redistributive effects.”

In her view, “This can be achieved with sustained economic growth that allows universal investment in health and education, and by guaranteeing the quality of such services.”

By Roberto Azevêdo
GENEVA, Apr 22 2014 (IPS)

Although some people don’t see the connection, the global trading system is aimed at creating some of the essential conditions needed to improve children’s lives and their prospects in the future.

We can identify three flash points where trade and children’s interests intersect, and where perhaps we can do a bit more to maximise our impact. One relates to developed countries, and two to developing nations.

The first point is this: the crisis in recent years has hit many western economies hard — and one of the most worrying effects has been very high levels of youth unemployment.

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

Levels have topped 50 percent in some countries. The effects of this are very significant – and are much more damaging than simply the loss of productive capacity in the economy.

Surveys of young people highlight the corrosive effect that unemployment can have on their confidence, motivation, and view of the future – raising the spectre of a “lost generation”.

Trade can be part of the solution, because one of the key differences that trade makes is through job creation.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) reached a major multilateral trade deal in Bali last December which could make a big difference here, as economists predict that it could create 21 million jobs.

Of course the relationship of cause and effect is complex. The WTO conducted a major study on this issue with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and others in 2012. The evidence shows that trade can play a powerful role – but to be effective, trade reforms have to be embedded in supportive policies.

Countries where trade openness has failed to stimulate growth commonly have unstable macroeconomic policies, inadequate property rights, insufficient public investment in overcoming supply-side constraints, or other socio-political limitations.

So for the positive effects of trade to be realised in tackling youth unemployment, we need to recognise the inter-linkages to other areas of policy.

Export-orientated jobs typically pay higher wages to their workers. In Western Europe those working in export-focused companies collect a 10-20 percent premium over the average wage. And in sub-Saharan Africa that figure is even higher, at 34 percent.

Of course there are challenges here too in ensuring that low-skilled workers are not left behind.

My second point is about the persistent tragedy of child poverty.

By supporting economic growth and poverty alleviation, trade can be an important engine for change, and therefore can make a significant difference to children’s prospects.

The leaders of the Young Lives survey conducted by Oxford University over 15 years in India, Ethiopia, Peru and Vietnam found that growth provides financial space for governments and families to invest in children and create improved infrastructure and opportunity.

The fact that the Millennium Development Goal to halve the rate of extreme poverty by 2015 was met well ahead of time was illustrative of this.

Take China, where the pursuit of an export-led growth model has led it to become the world’s second largest economy and now the world’s biggest trading nation. At the same time it has reduced the poverty level from 60 to 12 percent between 1990 and 2010.

Other economies have followed a similar trajectory, using the trading system to rapidly expand economic growth and slash rates of extreme poverty.

Look at Vietnam or the recent graduates from least developed country status: Samoa, Cape Verde and the Maldives. They show again the difference that trade and increased investment can make in achieving more inclusive socio-economic development.

However the rate of poverty reduction as a whole is not always matched in the area of child poverty. Again, the Young Lives survey argues that while economic growth is important, what matters more for children is the nature or quality of that growth.

We have to harness growth more effectively and convert it into social change that benefits poor children and their families. This is an urgent challenge for policy-makers at the international level to provide the right frameworks and mechanisms to support quality growth, and at the domestic level to ensure that no-one falls behind, particularly children.

So the debate that is currently underway to design the successors to the Millennium Development Goals will be crucial here, not least as it will dictate the agenda until 2030.

My final point is that lifting children out of poverty is essential, but it is not enough.

We need to look at children’s lives in a more holistic way.

Robert F. Kennedy warned of the narrowness of economic measurements. He said: “The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play… It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

Of course this is what the Human Development Index is all about – the need to place people at the centre of policy-making.

Trade is not just about dollars and cents. We need to look at the wider environment.

I believe that trade can help to create the conditions in which children can lead better lives. And at the most fundamental level, we can do this through supporting the family – by reducing the potential for conflict, helping to create a stable environment and predictable conditions, and supporting higher income levels.

This, in turn, can support better education and healthcare, while improved connections through trade also support wider access to medicine.

Amartya Sen, one of the creators of the Human Development Index, argues that true development comes through freedom.

And I believe that by encouraging openness, cooperation and democracy, trade supports this as well.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

Students and teachers from a physical education school in Michoacán take part in protests in Mexico City. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Sep 12 2013 (IPS)

On his first day of fourth grade, Efraín found there were no desks or benches in the classroom in his Mexico City school. His parents had to help the teacher haul in furniture from other rooms so the children wouldn’t have to start the new school year sitting on the floor.

That day, Aug. 19, Efraín’s mother found out about the suspension of the swimming programme that served 15,000 public school students in the capital and had functioned successfully for 10 years.

She also learned of the start of teacher protests, which culminated in a national teachers’ strike on Wednesday Sept. 11.

“Being in the swim programme was a privilege for your children,” a public ministry official told the parents who demanded an explanation.

The parents didn’t know it, but the disappearance – by presidential decree – of the general directorate of physical education was merely the start of a series of changes in public education, planned by the conservative government of Enrique Peña Nieto.

The reforms have triggered an insurrection by teachers in roughly two-thirds of Mexico’s 31 states.

The problem is not a shortage of funds for education. The educational system, which serves some 26 million primary school students and 4.3 million secondary students, receives 17.5 percent of the federal budget.

But 93 percent of that goes to salaries of teachers and other staff according to “Education at a Glance 2013” by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the so-called “rich countries’ club”.

The report says that is the highest proportion among OECD countries, which include Mexico.

Efraín’s school is in the Benito Juárez borough in the capital – the municipality with the highest level of human development in the country, according to the United Nations Human Development (UNDP) index.

That means he is better off in terms of school conditions than children in the rest of the country.

To get to the bilingual school he heads, Raymundo Carrera has a four-hour walk every Sunday and crosses the Presa Miguel Alemán lake by motorised canoe in the region of Tuxtepec in the impoverished southern state of Oaxaca, which has a high concentration of indigenous people.

The 50-year-old, who has been a teacher for 26 years, lives in a hut with a tin roof and a dirt floor.

“That’s what the community gives you, and you get used to it. We also join in the local harvests and fiestas,” Carrera told IPS as he took part in the protest camp that teachers have set in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square.

Oaxaca is Mexico’s second-poorest state, according to the UNDP Human Development Report 2010.

Teachers from Oaxaca make up the biggest delegation among the 15,000 teachers protesting in Mexico City since Aug. 19 against a series of laws restricting their labour rights. Their roadblocks have exacerbated the chaos of downtown traffic for nearly a month. The teachers have also occupied public buildings, blocked the Mexico City international airport for several hours, and seized toll booths on highways.

On Wednesday, protesters clashed with anti-riot police as they tried to approach the presidential residence.

The laws were approved by Congress last week and signed into law by the president on Tuesday.

But news on the issue was overshadowed by the scandal of the arrest of Elba Esther Gordillo, the lifelong leader of the teachers’ union and one of the country’s most powerful political leaders.

Gordillo is in prison, charged with embezzlement and organised crime.

The protesting teachers form part of a dissident faction of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación – the national teachers union – which has 1.2 million members among primary and middle school teachers.

But after the laws were passed, the protesters were joined by other unions, and the movement grew in strength until declaring Wednesday’s national strike.

The laws, which are focused on primary and secondary education, introduce mandatory periodic teacher evaluations. In addition, teachers will be recruited through open tests, starting in 2014. There are also changes to the systems of promotions, wages, benefits, and working conditions in different states.

But critics say the evaluation system is vague. They also complain that their concerns were not taken into account by the legislators, and that the reforms do not take into consideration the specific challenges of teaching children from disadvantaged backgrounds, as well as indigenous children, many of whom do not speak Spanish.

Mexico’s native population is variously estimated to make up between 12 and 30 percent of the country’s 112 million people (the smaller, official, estimate is based on the number of people who actually speak an indigenous language).

Furthermore, the protesters argue that the reform paves the way for the privatisation of the education system in Mexico.

The trade unionists are calling for an autonomous national institute to carry out evaluations. An institute was created in 2002, but it is not independent.

“This is a labour reform, not an educational one, and it did not arise from a negotiated consensus,” Raymundo Vera, a teacher from the Oaxaca committee, told IPS.

Promoters of the reform, spearheaded by business leaders, have complained about the high proportion of education expenditure that goes towards salaries.

However, the OECD study also reveals that Mexico has the highest student/teacher ratios – more than 25 pupils per teacher in early childhood education, compared to the OECD average of 14.3. And the ratio is even higher at the primary school level (28 students per teacher) and highest (nearly 30 students per teacher) at the secondary level.

“I do want to be evaluated, but who will guarantee that they’re going to do it properly, and not like they have up to now, with standardised tests that do not take into consideration the conditions at each school?” asked Carrera.

Teacher evaluations, which were introduced in 1989, were held up by the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) as an indication that quality was improving.

But few advances have actually been made on that front.

The “2012 Panorama educativo de México” (Mexican Educational Outlook), by the National Institute for Evaluation of Education (INEE), found that half of the students in the first three years of secondary school were unable to solve mathematical problems involving two or more operations.

The same study, which measures advances made between 2006 and 2010, shows that primary students in urban public schools improved in Spanish, while the proportion of indigenous students who under-performed in Spanish had risen to nearly 50 percent.

A primary school teacher earns between 2,000 and 8,000 pesos (160 to 620 dollars) a month. “Much less than these personages,” Vera said, referring to lawmakers who earn at least 20 times more.

“The people complaining about our protest marches do not and will never understand our living conditions,” he said.

In Mexico, only 56 percent of young people between the ages of 15 and 19 are enrolled in school – the lowest rate in the OECD.

INEE statistics from the “Panorama educativo de México”, presented in April, show that 4.8 million children and adolescents in Mexico do not go to school.