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)

Putting the spotlight on culture. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
FLORENCE, Oct 4 2014 (IPS)

International experts working in the creative sector are calling for governments to recognise the integral role that culture plays in development and to ensure that culture is a part of the post-2015 United Nations development goals, to be discussed next year.

At UNESCO’s Third World Forum on Culture and Cultural Industries, which took place Oct. 2-4 in Florence, Italy, representatives from a range of countries discussed the contributions that culture can make to a “sustainable future” through stimulating employment, economic growth and innovation.

The United Nations cultural agency pointed out that the global trade in cultural goods and services has doubled over the past decade and is now valued at more than 620 billion dollars, although there is some disagreement on this figure.

But, apart from the financial aspects, culture also contributes to social inclusion and justice, according to UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova, who inaugurated the forum at Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio.“Countries must invest in culture with the same determination they bring to investing in energy resources, in new technologies … In a difficult economic environment, we must look for activities that reinforce social cohesion, and culture offers solutions in this regard” – UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova

“I believe countries must invest in culture with the same determination they bring to investing in energy resources, in new technologies,” she said. “In a difficult economic environment, we must look for activities that reinforce social cohesion, and culture offers solutions in this regard.”

Bokova told IPS that the forum wanted to show that culture contributes to the “attainment” of the various development goals, which include ending extreme poverty, achieving universal primary education and gender equality, and ensuring environmental sustainability.

Many governments, however, are not investing enough in the cultural or creative sectors even when these industries have proven their worth. Some states prefer to build sports stadiums that are rarely used rather than to support the arts, said Lloyd Stanbury, a Jamaican lawyer in the music business who participated in the forum.

“In the case of Jamaica, we’ve shown that we can compete and win globally at the highest levels in culture,” he told IPS. “Reggae and Rastafari have put Jamaica on the world map and the debate is happening right now about what the government can do to invest more in culture.”

Stanbury said that arts education should have the same status as traditional curricula. “Students are sometimes told, ‘oh, you can’t do maths? Go and draw something’ but their drawings aren’t considered valuable,” he said.

In some developing countries, the arts are seen as a peripheral sector, not a “real” industry and that must change, he argued.

In addition, Stanbury said in his presentation to the forum, in many developing countries, “segments of the music and entertainment community do not enjoy harmonious relationships with government and government institutions, particularly where there is evidence of government corruption that artists speak out against in the creation and presentations of their work.”

For many governments, meanwhile, investing in culture naturally comes a long way behind providing proper health, sanitation and electricity services and developing transportation infrastructure. Yet, culture can help in poverty alleviation, job creation and peace building, experts said.

Peter N. Ives, Mayor pro tem of the U.S. city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, detailed how the city had invested in the arts, through allocating one percent of hotel-bed taxes (or lodger taxes) for cultural activities, among other measures.

“Santa Fe now has more cultural assets per capita than any other city in the United States,” he said, adding that “inclusion” of all groups was a key element of the policy, in which “everyone brings their creative gifts to the table”.

The city has an Arts Commission, appointed by the mayor, that “recommends programmes and policies to develop and promote artistic excellence in the community” and it has followed a multi-cultural route.

The result is that Santa Fe has increasingly drawn writers and visual artists, as well as tourists, because of its growing number of museums, performances and outdoor sculptures – also one of the reasons behind its designation as a UNESCO Creative City.

Such “success stories” may seem far-fetched for many poor or middle-income countries, faced with a variety of crises including conflict. But experts at the conference described grassroots schemes where intra-community violence, for instance, decreased when community members were actively encouraged to produce art about their lives.

Other representatives examined how creating film and literary festivals had contributed to a sense of national pride and cohesion. In the Caribbean and in parts of Africa and Asia, for example, the growth of festivals and cultural prizes has given a general boost to the arts in some countries, reflecting what wealthy countries have known for some time.

The forum, jointly organized by UNESCO, the Italian government, the Tuscany region and the Municipality of Florence, also examined how culture can be preserved in war-affected regions, with a focus on recent UNESCO cultural heritage preservation projects (funded by Italy) in Afghanistan, Mali and other states.

Denmark and Belgium, meanwhile, provided a look at how overseas development aid to cultural activities can promote employment, training and youth involvement in society, especially within a human rights context.

“We’re living in a very hostile environment for development cooperation and also for culture and development, but I’m launching an appeal for more cooperation in this area,” said Frédéric Jacquemin, director of Africalia, a Belgian organisation that sees culture as “a motor for sustainable human development”.

Participants in the forum produced a ‘Florence Declaration’ calling for the “full integration of culture into sustainable development policies and strategies at the international, regional and local levels.”

The Declaration said that this should be based on standards that “recognise fundamental principles of human rights, freedom of expression, cultural diversity, gender equality, environmental sustainability, and openness and balance to other cultures and expressions of the world.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

With the United Nations’ post-2015 development agenda currently under discussion, civil society actors in Europe are calling for a firmer stance on human rights and gender equality, including control of assets by women.

“The SDGs are a unique opportunity for us. The eradication of extreme poverty is within our grasp. But we still face very major challenges. Business as usual is not an option,” Seamus Jeffreson, Director of Concord, the European platform for non-governmental development organisations, told at a meeting in Brussels with the European Parliament Committee on Development on September 3.

An Open Working Group has been set up by the United Nations to come up with a set of new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to replace the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education by the target date of 2015.“We need to address women's control over assets. The majority of farmers in the world are women but they do not own the land. There is legislation that prevents women from inheriting property" – Seamus Jeffreson, Director, Concord

Development organisations in Europe say a rights-based approach need to be strengthened in the proposed new SDGs or there is a risk these could be traded off in negotiations with major powers that are less committed to human rights.

“We do not see the spirit of a human rights-based approach infusing the other goals. It should underpin the SDGs. The connection is not made that people have rights to resources. We cannot have a development agenda without people’s rights being respected,” Jeffreson said.

Jeffreson’s complaint was echoed by Thomas Mayr-Harting, European Union Ambassador to the United Nations. “From our point of view, a rights-based approach and governance and rule of law need to be better represented in the SDGs.”

While Concord welcomes a specific goal on gender equality within the SDGs, “more details are needed for this to be a goal and not just a slogan,” Jeffreson told IPS. “We need to address women’s control over assets. The majority of farmers in the world are women but they do not own the land. There is legislation that prevents women from inheriting property.”

The European Union will produce a common position before inter-governmental negotiations start. Further input will come from a High-level Panel set up in July 2012 by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to advise on the global development framework beyond 2015.

“We now look to Ban Ki-moon to play a core role in bringing this process together,” said Mayr-Harting, adding that Sam Kutesa, Ugandan foreign minister, who will chair the UN General Assembly from mid-September, will play also an important role.

Ajay Kumar Bramdeo, ambassador of the African Union to the European Union, who also attended the meeting in Brussels, said that more than 90 percent of the priorities in the common African position have been included in the proposed new set of development goals, including its position on climate change.

“The negative impact of climate change is already being felt in countries in Africa. The European Union has been an important historical, political, economic and social partner for Africa and would also feel the impact of climate change on Africa,” he added.

Kumar Bramdeo emphasised the need to mobilise financing from the developed countries through the Green Climate Fund of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), transfer new clean technologies, and enhance disaster risk management and climate adaptation initiatives.

Ole Lund Hansen, representing the UN Global Compact at the meeting, stressed that the SDGs would not be achieved without the active participation of the world’s business sector. “Some figures say we need 2.5 billion dollars per year in additional investments to achieve the SDGs. We clearly need to tap into the vast resources of the private sector.”

The proposed new SDGs, which will make amends for the shortcomings of the MDGs, will be an integral part of the United Nations’ post-2015 development agenda which, among others, seeks to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger from the face of the earth by 2030.

There are currently 17 new goals on the drafting board, including proposals to end poverty, eliminate hunger, attain healthy lives, provide quality education, attain gender equality and reduce inequalities.

The list also includes the sustainable use of water and sanitation, energy for all, productive employment, industrialisation, protection of terrestrial ecosystems and strengthening the global partnership for sustainable development.

The final set of goals is to be approved by world leaders in September 2015.

(Edited by Phil Harris)