Coastal communities in the Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific Islands are already threatened by climate change with rising seas and stronger storm surges. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia, Jan 1 2016 (IPS)

Women leaders in the Pacific Islands have acclaimed the agreement on reducing global warming achieved at the United Nations (COP21) Climate Change conference in Paris as an unprecedented moment of world solidarity on an issue which has been marked to date by division between the developing and industrialized world. But for Pacific small island developing states, which name climate change as the single greatest threat to their survival, it will only be a success if inspirational words are followed by real action.

“It’s a huge step forward and I don’t think it would have been possible without the voices of indigenous Pacific Islanders banding together and demanding action and justice…. I am very optimistic about the future,” Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, climate activist and poet from the Republic of the Marshall Islands, who attended the historic meeting, told IPS.

Intense negotiations and compromise between the interests of 195 countries, plus the European Union, which make up the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the climate change convention, marked its 21st meeting in Paris last month.

Dame Meg Taylor, Secretary General of the regional Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (PIFS), said that “while not all the issues identified by Pacific Island countries were included in the final outcome and agreement, there were substantive advances with recognition of the importance of pursuing efforts to limit temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the inclusion of loss and damage as a separate element in the agreement and simplified and scaled up access to climate change finance.”

Claire Anterea of the Kiribati Climate Action Network in the small Central Pacific atoll nation of around 110,000 people added that the outcome was “good, but not perfect,” highlighting that the new temperature goal and call to boost climate finance were particularly important.

The World Meteorological Organisation predicted this year will be the hottest on record with average global temperatures expected to reach 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial age. Meanwhile Pacific Island countries are bracing for further rising temperatures, sea levels, ocean acidification and coral bleaching this century. Maximum sea level rise in many island states could reach more than 0.6 metres, reports the Pacific Climate Change Science Program.

Due to rising seas in the Marshall Islands “a simple high tide results in waves flooding and crashing through sea walls built of cement and rocks and completely destroying homes. The salt from the flooding also destroys our crops and food,” Jetnil-Kijiner said..

In the best case scenario, Kiribati and Papua New Guinea could experience a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius, but under high emissions this might soar to 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2090.

Global warming could result in yields of sweet potato, a common staple crop, declining by more than 50 per cent in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands by 2050, estimates the Asian Development Bank. The burden of crop losses will fall on the shoulders of Pacific Islands’ women who are primarily responsible in communities for growing fresh produce, producing food and fetching water.

Pacific Islanders led a campaign in Paris this year to recognize a new temperature rise threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is critical, they argued, to stem future climate shocks and mitigate forced displacement as islands become increasingly uninhabitable due to loss of food, water and land.

And in a sign of shifting views in the industrialized world, Pacific Islanders were joined in their campaigning on this issue by numerous developed and developing nations in a ‘Coalition of High Ambition’ which emerged during the second week of COP21. Solidarity was demonstrated by, amongst others, Mexico, Brazil, Norway, Germany, the European Union and United States.

The final Paris agreement which seeks to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius and ‘pursue efforts’ to further reduce it by another 0.5 degree was a win for the coalition.

“1.5 degrees Celsius wasn’t even on the table before the conference began, so hearing it first announced that it even made it into the text made me cry with relief. That being said, the vague wording definitely has me worried and I know it’ll take a continued push from all of us to actually reach 1.5,” Jetnil-Kijiner said.

This will not decrease the immense challenges the region already faces in adapting to extreme weather, which cannot be met by small island economies without access to international climate finance. This year island leaders called for the international community to honour its pledge to raise 100 billion dollars per year by 2020 to fund adaptation in developing countries, an objective first conceived in Copenhagen in 2009. Assessments since then of how much has been raised vary, but the World Bank claimed in April there was a serious shortfall of 70 billion dollars.

Taylor believes “there is a positive outlook for climate financing post-2020 with Article 9 of the Paris Agreement identifying that, for Small Island Developing States, financing needs to be public and grant-based resources for adaptation.” There has been debate about whether finance mechanisms, such as the Green Climate Fund (GCF), should issue free grants or concessional loans.

Anterea emphasised that, to be effective, funding “needs to reach grassroots people through a simple processing method.”

Recognition of loss and damage caused by extreme weather and natural disasters in the final pact was also a milestone, the PIFS Secretary General added, even though it does not provide for vulnerable nations to claim liability or compensation from big polluters.

“The legal right of countries to test the liabilities of other Parties using other avenues has not been diminished by this decision,” she said.

But the greatest hope is being invested in the binding commitment by nations to set emission reduction targets and be subject to a process of long term monitoring and review, a move which would accelerate the global transition toward renewable energy and make the burning of fossil fuels, the greatest driver of greenhouse gas emissions, increasingly unviable.

“We need the five-year review as a crucial step to keeping countries’ governments accountable to our targets and goals,” Jetnil-Kijiner emphasised. If nations are not emboldened to better their goals every time, the planet may continue toward a devastating temperature increase of 2.7 degrees Celsius or more, experts conclude.

The most pressing question, after the euphoria of the global accord demonstrated in Paris has died down, is how will these lofty promises be implemented? Pacific Islanders are depending on it.

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A Quechua leader at a meeting on rural women in Bolivia. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS.

By Jenny Cartagena Torrico
COCHABAMBA, Bolivia, Jul 26 2012 (IPS)

A growing number of Bolivia’s indigenous women are participating in politics, ready to break the barriers of gender and ethnicity.

Though spread across great distances and representing various realities,  many of these women share a similar history. Most started out leading civil society organisations and then went on to run for local public office, often overcoming resistance within their own families.

“The major obstacles (to accessing a government position) are domestic duties and economic issues,” Lucinda Villca, a councilwoman from Santiago de Andamarca, a municipality in the western district of Oruro, told IPS.

Villca is one of four councilwomen who shared their experiences with IPS during a national meeting of women leaders from rural local governments held recently in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba.

“We go out on the fields early in the morning to help our husbands, tending the crops or taking the cattle out to pasture. We come home at night and we have to fix supper and make some time to weave so we can earn extra money for the house,” Villca explains.

“With these obligations, there’s no time for anything else,” said this Aymara mother of nine who used to be one of the native leaders of her quinoa and llama farming ayllu (community).

“I now have a greater responsibility. As a member of the indigenous council my mission was to work for my community. In this new post I have to work for the future of my municipality,” she explained, describing an experience she shares with other indigenous leaders elected to local governments.

“I used to be a housewife. I’m a Guarani, and like many women in the countryside, I have no regular job. I was working for a women’s organisation when I was asked to run for office,” Marina Cuñaendi, a 55-year-old councilwoman from Urubichá, said.

Urubichá is one of Bolivia’s poorest areas, despite being located in Santa Cruz, the country’s most prosperous district. According to the last census, 85.5 percent of its 6,000 inhabitants – mostly Guarani people – live in extreme poverty.

Before being nominated in 2010, Cuñaendi never thought of holding public office. She planted rice and corn and, in her “free time,” weaved to support her seven children, along with her husband.

In Urubichá, she said, women have no time to organise and are marginalised from political life. She admitted that she had to consult her husband and children, who were “happy” to support her and encouraged her.

In San Julián, another municipality of Santa Cruz, Yolanda Cuellar, a Guarani, had to overcome a third barrier, that of being “too young,” in the eyes of her community to hold a municipal position.

She turned 21 a month after being elected councilwoman in April 2010, on the ticket of Without Fear Movement, the opposing the party of Movement to Socialism, which governs the municipality and the country.

“They didn’t trust me because I was young, and a woman to boot. In our municipality, sexism is very strong. Now there are four of us women in the council,” this accountant and mother of two said.

Cuellar has her husband’s support. “He understands me and tells me not to quit because people voted for me; he tells me to fight for what I want and not give up just because somebody doesn’t want me there,” she said.

But these women’s lack of political experience and the constant discrimination by male peers have not made the work in the council easier. Being a councilwoman is also very different from being an indigenous leader.

“There’s a lot of bureaucracy which slows down any project, but the worst is the lack of support. Our ideas are ignored and we feel alone. It’s like nobody is interested in doing anything for young people and women,” Cuellar said.

San Julián’s economy is also primarily agricultural, and, because one of the country’s leading highways runs through it, it is complemented with commerce and services activities.

However, 57.9 percent of its more than 70,000 inhabitants live in extreme poverty.

Under the 2009 constitution and other applicable laws, women must occupy at least 50 percent of all elected government positions. To ensure that percentage, candidate lists must be drawn up by alternating between women and men.

At present, 43 percent of the mayors and councilpersons in Bolivia’s 327 local governments are women, and 96 percent of them are holding public office for the first time.

Lidia Alejandro, a 50-year-old Aymara councilwoman from Llallagua, a municipality in the mining district of Potosí, in western Bolivia, also identified inexperience as a factor that puts them at a disadvantage compared to their male counterparts.

“I became a councilwoman without knowing a thing about how municipal affairs are run. I’m a teacher, but holding office is very different. I couldn’t even speak up at a meeting or give statements to the press,” Alejandro said.

“I had to learn as I went along,” she admitted. Training workshops also helped her overcome this limitation.

But training takes time, she said, and that causes problems with husbands as they reproach women leaders for neglecting their homes.

Alejandro is troubled at the failure to attain the goal of bringing the women of her municipality out of poverty due to a lack of specialists who can design projects to meet their needs.

Bolivian legislation requires that part of the annual budget at every government level be allocated to spending on projects that target the needs of women and other vulnerable groups. But most of these budget allocations are not spent and the funds are either returned or transferred to other areas.

“Women have come to us to complain. ‘How is it that we have four councilwomen and they’re not doing anything for us?’ they say. We’ve tried to join forces, but the truth is that we all have our political loyalties,” Cuellar said.

Bolivia has seen great progress in terms of women’s participation in politics, furthered by the Constitution and a number of different laws, Natasha Loayza, a specialist with the U.N. Women’s office in Bolivia, told IPS.

“The challenge is to translate this legislation into action, into real and concrete participation,” she said.

The U.N. Women’s office’s ‘Semilla’ (seed) programme, a three-year pilot initiative now in its final year, helps women in rural districts  exercise their economic and political rights.

Loayza said that one of the programme’s goals was to motivate more women to participate in politics by showing them the meaningful involvement of women who are already participating.

“Women can now access (public office), but it’s very hard. It’s a colossal task. The women who have achieved positions of responsibility in public bodies can bear witness to the problems they face every day to make their presence felt, and not just occupy decision-making positions on paper,” Loayza said.

“We’re still at a point where women have to work hard to really participate,” she concluded.

The programme is being implemented by the ministry of equal opportunities in 18 rural districts and so far it has benefited 4,000 women, with nine million dollars in financing from the United Nations.

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

By Charlton Doki
JUBA, Jul 9 2012 (IPS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Others disagree.

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

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

Though the reality still remains far different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The right of women to participate in political life is guaranteed by several international conventions, but transforming an abstract right into a reality requires hard work on the ground, says a new study released here.

Published jointly by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) for International Affairs, the 118-page report points out that although 40 to 50 percent of members of political parties globally are women, only about 10 percent hold positions of leadership.

And “with less than 20 percent of the world’s parliamentary seats occupied by women,” says UNDP Administrator Helen Clark, “it is clear that political parties need to do more – and should be assisted in those efforts – to support women’s political empowerment.”

Titled “Empowering Women for Stronger Political Parties”, the study aims to provide a good practices guide to promote women’s political participation, and includes 20 case studies covering countries such as Burkina Faso, El Salvador, Indonesia, Morocco, Spain, Timor-Leste, UK and the United States.

“If we want to promote democracy and empower women politically, we must engage, not bypass, political parties,” UNDP Gender Team Director Winnie Byanyima told IPS.

Unless women lead political parties, they will not lead governments, said Byanyima, a former Ugandan parliamentarian and diplomat.

Globally, the proportion of women ministers in governments is lower, averaging about 16 percent. And the proportion of women heads of state and government is lower still, and has declined in recent years, standing at less than five percent in 2011.

“The low numbers continue in the face of three decades of lobbying and efforts by the international community to eliminate discrimination and empower women,” the study notes.

And this despite the fact the United Nations recognised the central role of women in development by including the empowerment of women as one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) back in 2000.

“Yet no region in the world is on track to achieve the target of 30 percent women in decision-making positions,” the study says.

Although some notable exceptions and good practices in this area are discernible, several bottlenecks remain to women’s full and equal participation as contestants, the study asserts.

According to the latest statistics released by the Inter- Parliamentary Union (IPU) and U.N. Women Thursday, the number of women as heads of state or government stands at 18 out of 193 countries.

The UNDP/NDI guidebook singles out some of the strategies to be followed during elections, such as training and mentoring women candidates and ensuring women’s visibility in campaigns.

The NDI says it has worked with more than 720 political parties and organisations in over 80 countries to create more open political environments in which men and women can actively participate in the democratic process.

“We hope this guide will contribute to this effort,” says NDI President Ken Wollack.

In the pre-election phase, recruiting and nominating candidates is probably the most crucial process for ensuring that women participate in politics. But the gender gap widens significantly as candidates for political office move from being eligible to becoming aspirants, to finally being nominated by the party, the study points out.

“It is important for parties to incorporate rules that guarantee women’s representation,” it says.

When this commitment is unwritten and informal, “it is much more difficult to devise strategies for women to break into the inner circle of power, and harder to hold the party accountable when the commitment is not realized.”

And if a party’s internal organisation is weak and the rules for recruitment are not clear, “decisions tend to be made by a limited number of elites, usually men.”

As examples of affirmative action, the study cites several examples.

One political party in Canada has a candidate recruitment committee to ensure diversity in candidate selection. In Costa Rica, one of the political parties alternates men and women candidates on electoral lists.

In El Salvador, a multi-sectoral association offers training in communications and organising skills that help women become more effective in their political work both inside and outside of parliament.

In South Africa, women party members pushed for changes to the parliamentary calendar to accommodate parliamentarians with families, and also pushed for debates to finish earlier in the evening to accommodate parliamentarians with families, and for childcare facilities to be put in place.

In India, the national executive committee of the Bhatariya Janata Party (BJP) amended its constitution in 2008 to reserve 33 percent of the party’s leadership positions for women and make the chief of the national women’s branch a member of the party’s central election committee.

In Germany, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) adopted a 33 percent quota for party officials in 1996. And if the quota is not met, the internal elections must be repeated.

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