In spite of the rising number of women entering the labour force in Bangladesh, gender disparities persist. Credit: Obaidul Arif/IPS

By Baher Kamal
ROME/NEW DELHI, Sep 22 2017 (IPS)

Investing in youth and the population dividend, women’s health, sustainable development objectives, and the key role of parliamentarians to promote transparency, accountability and good governance to achieve the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development topped the agenda of a two-day conference of Asian and African lawmakers in New Delhi last week.

Of course, these are not easy challenges. But according to the discussions of a representative group of around 50 legislators and experts from the two most populous continents, parliamentarians – as representatives of the stakeholders themselves – must be the “fourth pillar” to promote the 2030 Agenda, along with government, private enterprises, and civil society."If our countries can work together, our distinctive attributes can make a meaningful contribution to achieving sustainable development.” --Teruhiko Mashiko, Vice-Chair of the Japan Parliamentarians Federation for Population

“It is not just simply a question of adopting particular legislation and budgetary measures,” said Teruhiko Mashiko, Vice-Chair of the Japan Parliamentarians Federation for Population (JPFP), in his keynote speech.

“Equally vital will be possession of an overarching vision and the conduct of oversight to ensure that the work is being implemented properly. Promoting the global partnerships that have been discussed to date will also be crucial. That is precisely the role that parliamentarians in every country are to fulfill. It is furthermore a role to be fulfilled by parliamentarians both within regions, and between regions.

“Given the law and tax system reforms that will be needed if we are to achieve the SDGs, parliamentarians will have an extremely big role to play,” Mashiko stressed.

Jointly organised by the Japan-based Asian Population and Development Association (APDA) — which is the Secretariat of the JPFP — and the Indian Association of Parliamentarians on Population and Development (IAPPD), the conference approached what has been considered as the key challenge: the linkage between population issues, in particular youth, and the global sustainable development agenda, also known as the SDGs.

Youth

No wonder — while youth in the African continent of 1.2 billion inhabitants face extremely high rates of unemployment, in Asia and the Pacific, nearly 40 million youth – 12 per cent of the youth labour force – were unemployed in 2015. That year, for example, the youth unemployment rate was estimated at around 12.9 per cent in South-East Asia and the Pacific, 11.7 per cent in East Asia and 10.7 per cent in South Asia.

However, despite these apparently moderate youth unemployment rates, young people remain nearly four times more likely to be unemployed than their adult counterparts, and as much as 5.4 times in South-East Asia (over four times in Southern Asia).

This region also faces a big gender gap. In South Asia, low female participation (19.9 per cent) is estimated to be nearly 40 percentage points lower than among youth males (53 per cent). And this gender gap in labour force participation rates has been widening over the last decade in South Asia.

“Building societies where every person can live with dignity － this is the essential principle of our parliamentarians’ activities,” Mashiko said.

“One of the principles of the SDGs is that ‘no-one is left behind’. From that perspective, ensuring equality of opportunity to young people, despite their differences in birth and wealth, has a definite meaning. So to that end, ensuring education and employment opportunities ought to be treated as priority issues.”

Population Growth

Growing populations across the world are the biggest hurdle in the path of equitable development, said India’s Union Minister of Minority Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, adding that in order to achieve the SDGs, it is of “utmost importance” for all the countries to take care of their populations.

He stressed that there is a need for large-scale awareness on population issues, and that increasing population has created problems around the entire world regarding sustainable development, employment opportunities and health services.

Ena Singh, the India Representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), said that his country, India, has registered a rapid decline in fertility rates since its Independence and that currently the average fertility rate is 2.2 children, with the challenge now to bring down the total fertility rate to 2.1.

For her part, Marie Rose Nguini Effa, MP from Cameroon and President of the Africa Parliamentary Forum on Population Development, emphasised the Forum’s readiness to work with APDA to promote investment in youth, “which is critical to Africa’s development and the 2030 agenda for sustainable development.”

The Inter-Linkage

New Delhi’s meeting is the latest of a series of dedicated Parliamentarian conferences focusing on the inter-linkages between population issues and the 2030 Agenda, examining ways in which both developed and developing countries as equal partners serve to be the driving force to address population issues and achieve sustainable development.

According to the meetings of Parliamentarians organisers, the fundamental underlying concept is that addressing population issues is imperative to attain universal health coverage (UHC), turning the youth bulge into a demographic dividend, achieving food security, promoting regional stability, and building economically viable societies where no one is left behind.

Bigger than the Whole African Population

“India is the world’s largest democracy and home to 1.3 billion people, which is bigger than the whole African population. Being a highly diverse country with a multitude of cultures, languages and ethnicities, India now enjoys one of the fastest economic growth rates,” according to the organisers.

The country’s serious investment in young people is the driving force behind such growth; the pool of well-educated, skilled young people is making the country an IT capital, they said, adding that the Indian economy also has a great influence on the African continent, especially East Africa, due to long-standing historical, cultural and commercial connections between them.

“Furthermore, with its longstanding history of democracy, the power and role of the Parliament of India is well-established and fully exercised, and its democratic system has contributed to promoting unity of diversity and national development.”

Given that addressing population issues calls for an approach to help people to make free and informed RH choices, parliamentarians as representatives of the people have a crucial role to play in this regard as well, they conclude.

The Arab, Asian Youth Bulge

Lawmakers from the Asia and Arab region had gathered last July at a meeting in Amman under the theme “From Youth Bulge to Demographic Dividend: Toward Regional Development and Achievement of the SDGs.”.

Organised by the Asian Population and Development Association and the Secretariat of the Japan Parliamentarians Federation for Population, the Asian and Arab Parliamentarians meeting and Study Visit on Population and Development convened on 18-20 July in the Jordanian capital to analyse these challenges and how to address them.

Since its establishment, APDA has been holding an annual Asian Parliamentarians’ Meeting on Population and Development to promote understanding and increase awareness of population and development issues among Japanese, Asian, and Pacific parliamentarians.

APDA sends Japanese and Asian parliamentarians overseas to observe projects conducted by the United Nations Population Fund, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Japanese Government.

Similarly, parliamentarians from selected countries are invited to Japan to visit facilities in areas such as population and development, health and medical care.

Through exchanges between lawmakers from Japan and other countries, the programme aims to strengthen cooperation and promote parliamentarians’ engagement in the field of population and development.

“Japan is embracing its aging society, where individuals in every age group are finding uses for their particular skills and attributes, and is planning to build a vibrant society which makes the maximum use of what its older citizens can offer and helping to achieve sustainable development, which is what humanity should be striving for,” Mashiko concluded.

“This may possibly apply equally everywhere throughout the world. Given their population structure and social systems, the situation in the countries from Africa, the Arab world and Asia represented at this conference will be very, very different. However, the very presence of such differences means that if our countries can work together, our distinctive attributes can make a meaningful contribution to achieving sustainable development.”

*With inputs by an IPS correspondent in India.

Delegates of Asian and Arab Parliamentarians in Amman, Jordan. Credit: Safa Khasawneh

By Safa Khasawneh
AMMAN, Jordan, Jul 21 2017 (IPS)

Held for the first time in the Arab world, an annual meeting of Asian and Arab Parliamentarians examined how regional conflicts hinder the development of effective policies to achieve sustainable development, particularly as they generate large numbers of refugees, internally displaced persons and migrants.

To reach a comprehensive solution, legislators called for examining the roots and background of conflicts in the region."Governments should create societies where people can realize their dreams and achieve their goals." --Acting Chair of JPFP Ichiro Aisawa

The meeting kicked off Tuesday, July 18 in the Jordanian capital Amman with a focus on challenges faced by youth, including high unemployment rates and poor access to healthcare, as well as women’s empowerment and other sustainable development issues.

Around 50 legislators and experts from Asian, Arab and European countries attended the meeting, organized annually by the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA) which serves as the Secretariat of Japan’s Parliamentarians Federation for Population (JPFP).

This year’s meeting was held under the theme “From Youth Bulge to Demographic Dividend: Toward Regional Development and Achievement of the SDGs” and hosted by the Jordan Senate and Forum of Arab Parliamentarians on Population and Development (FAPPD).

On behalf of the conference organizers, Acting Chair of JPFP Ichiro Aisawa addressed the gathering, devoting his remarks to the need to address challenges facing youth in the region, which he described as the birthplace of two of the world’s three major monotheistic religions and which has contributed richly to humankind’s cultural heritage.

Aisawa, who is also Director of APDA, called on parliamentarians to work together to realize sustainable development for the good of all.

In his opening statement, Jordan’s Acting Senate President Marouf Bakhit reiterated his country’s commitment to promoting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adding that issues of population and development are at the “forefront” of legislation approved by Arab parliaments and that holding this event is a “positive indicator and a step in the right direction.”

Bakhit stressed that population and development problems in Arab countries are caused mainly by conflicts, wars and forced migration.

Tackling the situation in the region, Vice Chair of JPFP Teruhiko Mashiko said in his keynote “the only solution is to prepare basic conditions for development based on knowledge and understanding of social sciences and integrating youth into the economic system.”

The first session touched on regional challenges, young refugees and means of fostering social stability. Jordan’s MP Dr. Reda Khawaldeh told IPS that building peaceful and stable societies is a responsibility that must be shouldered by the state, religious leaders, media and other civil society organizations.

Picking up on the main theme of Amman meeting – a youth bulge in the region, which describes the increasing proportion of youth relative to other age groups – Aisawa told IPS that frustration is one of the reasons that led angry Arab youth (most of whom were highly educated but with no jobs) to protest in the streets and topple their leaders.

These young men had lost their hopes and dreams of having a decent life, he said, stressing at the same time that this phenomenon is not limited to Arab countries, but could happen anywhere.

“To address this key dilemma, governments should create societies where people can realize their dreams and achieve their goals. Politicians must also advocate policies based on democracy where the rule of law prevails and people identify themselves as constructive stakeholders who participate in building their country rather than be the source of disruption and chaos,” Aisawa said.

The second session discussed the demographic dividend and creating decent jobs for youth. Sharing his experience in this regard, Philippines MP Tomasito Villarin said his country has adopted five local initiatives to give youth quality education essential for enhancing their productivity in the labor market and providing them with decent jobs.

Villarin told IPS that to achieve SDGs, his country must also address other grave challenges, including massive poverty in rural areas and an armed conflict south of Manila.

Focusing on women’s empowerment in the region as a driving force for sustainable development, Jordan’s MP Dr. Sawsan Majali warned that gender inequality is still a major challenge, especially for women with disabilities.

The second day was dedicated to a study visit to a number of sites in the ancient city of Salt, some 30 km northwest of the capital, where participants had the opportunity to explore and share good practices of development projects provided by the Salt Development Corporation (SDC), aimed at supporting community services and raising public awareness.

SDC Director Khaldoun Khreisat said financial and technical support came from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), whose officials saw Salt as a similar model to the Japanese city of Hagi.

During the three-day meeting, close consultations were held on other issues, including the key role parliamentarians play in achieving the SDGs, promoting accountability and good governance.

In his closing address, Vice Chair of JPFP Hiroyuki Nagahama stressed that politicians are accountable for the outcome of their policies and they have the responsibility and power to build a society where everybody can live in dignity.

At the end of meeting, Algerian MP Abdelmajid Tagguiche proposed the establishment of a committee to follow up and implement recommendations and outcomes of the conference.

As the curtain came down on July 20, a draft statement was issued calling for examining causes of conflicts in the region to achieve the SDGs, create decent jobs for youth and provide societies with health care and gender equality.

APDA was established on Feb. 1, 1982 and since that time it has engaged in activities working towards social development, economic progress, and the enhancement of welfare and peace in the world through studying and researching population and development issues in Asia and elsewhere.

A panel discussion on Africa-Asia partnerships featuring AFDB Group President Akinwumi Adesina, Benin President Patrice Talon, Vice President of Cote d'Ivoire Daniel Kablan Duncan and Hellen Hai of Made in Africa Initiative. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

By Friday Phiri
AHMEDABAD, India, May 29 2017 (IPS)

There are nearly 420 million young Africans between the ages of 15 and 35 today. And it is estimated that within ten years, Africa will be home to one-fifth of all young people worldwide.

These millions of young people could be a source of ingenuity and engines of productivity that could ignite a new age of inclusive prosperity.“If we don’t change the labour composition of agriculture in Africa, in the next twenty years, there will be no farmers.” --AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina

But there are no guarantees. Although the continent has shown consistent economic growth in the last decade, it has failed in creating the number of quality jobs needed to absorb the 10-12 million young people entering the labour market each year.

And this, according to AfDB Vice President for Agriculture, Human and Social Development, Jennifer Blanke, is a time bomb waiting to explode.

“While the youth population is Africa’s asset, it can also easily become a liability, and this is the whole question about demographic dividends,” observes Blanke. “Let us be clear, it is only the existence of opportunity and the young person’s belief that they can access that opportunity that prevents pessimism and political unrest…inaction is not an option, young people without opportunity, and more importantly without belief in their leaders’ ability to provide opportunity are a certain source of civil unrest and we are seeing it every day.”

‘Transforming Agriculture for wealth creation in Africa’ was therefore the major theme of the 52^nd AfDB Annual Meetings held in Ahmedabad, India from 22-26 May 2017.

Experts here agreed that transforming Africa’s agriculture requires a business approach that would incentivize youth who still see farming as way of life for the poor. As a result of this scenario, the average age of farmers in Africa is 60, and Akinwumi Adesina, AfDB Group President, fears that “If we don’t change the labour composition of agriculture in Africa, in the next twenty years, there will be no farmers.”

To get youth involved, Adesina believes, “We need to change the mindset about agriculture—agriculture is not a social sector, agriculture is not a way of life, it is a business.”

But the how question is crucial, and he points to finance among other incentives. “There are opportunities for youth but certain things have to be put in place to realize them, such as financing…our young people are doing amazing things with ICT—they are providing weather index insurance, extension services and a host of other things.”

For its part, the Bank has provided a roadmap for the growth of agriculture in Africa with a plan to inject nearly 2.4 billion dollars every year for 10 years to build roads, irrigation infrastructure and storage facilities to attract high-value investors.

With this kind of investment, AfDB wants to transform Agriculture into a money-making business for those involved, highlighting that Africa should position itself to benefit from the growth of agricultural food markets which are set to grow to a trillion-dollar business portfolio by 2030.

The figure is huge and appetising. But certain steps have to be taken, and one of those steps is closing the infrastructure gap.

According to Thomas Silberhorn, Germany Parliamentary State Secretary, “It is important to close the infrastructure gap on the African continent, not just somehow, but in the spirit of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, by building sustainable infrastructure especially in the energy sector,” he said, adding that it was for this reason that his government was advocating for more support to the African Renewable Initiative of the African Union whose secretariat is hosted at the African Development Bank.

While ICT is usually seen as a sure way of getting youth involved, there is another door to young people’s hearts which agricultural policy makers and implementers have not paid attention to—the film industry.  In Africa, the movie industry is dominated by young people and is emerging as an important contributor to gross domestic product and employment in countries like Nigeria.

However, the entertainment industry–especially the film industry—too often offers unflattering narratives of agriculture and the rural life, showing that real economic opportunities are only found in big cities. Such negative portrayal perpetuates the perception that agriculture is simply a way of surviving for the poor.

To tap into the power and influence of the movie industry, and change these perceptions by projecting agriculture as a profitable and viable economic sector, AfDB brought together Nollywood (Nigerian) and Bollywood (Indian) film makers to this year’s annual meetings to chart the way forward on how to market agriculture as a lucrative business through movies.

Nigerian filmmakers Omoni Oboli and Omotola Jalade Ekeinde represented Nollywood while Rajendrakumar Mohan Raney, a director and producer, and Rekha Rana, Indian and international award-winning actress, represented Bollywood.

Oboli and Omotola pledged to do everything in their power to tell the African agricultural transformation story and change the negative perceptions, especially among young people.

“We have learnt a lot about agriculture and are ready to change the state of affairs through filmmaking,” said Oboli during the Indian Cultural Night and AfDB Impact Awards ceremony where she was a guest presenter alongside BBC’s Lerato Mbele.

As Adesina noted, with 65 percent of the world’s uncultivated land, “What Africa does with agriculture is not only important for Africa: it will shape the future of food in the world.”

NEPAD CEO Ibrahim Assane Mayaki fields questions from reporters at the Second Africa Rural Development Forum in Yaounde, Cameroon. Credit: Charles Mkoka/IPS

By Charles Mkoka
YAOUNDE, Cameroon, Sep 10 2016 (IPS)

The two-day Second Africa Rural Development Forum concluded Friday with renewed calls to economically empower young people, many of whom are leaving the resource-rich continent and migrating to places like Europe under very risky circumstances.

Opening the conference, the director of programmes implementation and communication at the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), Estherine Fotabong, reminded delegates that Africa’s high economic growth rates have not translated into high levels of employment and reductions in poverty for youth and those living in rural areas.Africa’s fight against poverty, hunger and unemployment will be won or lost in rural areas.

Fotabong observed that Africa’s fight against poverty, hunger and unemployment will be won or lost in rural areas, adding that is what frames the rural transformation strategy and agenda for the entire continent.

“This is the experience of all newly wealthy nations, as the most effective means of expanding the domestic market of their own population whose incomes and purchasing power is growing. Without a growing domestic market, in terms of ever-growing numbers of rural and urban people whose income is growing, then it is difficult to escape structural poverty through an outward looking economy,” Fotabong told a jam-packed conference at the Hilton Hotel in Yaoundé, Cameroon.

She added that Africa has deviated from standard processes of structural transformation in that it is experiencing urbanisation without manufacturing jobs.

Urbanisation should typically be a consequence of economic growth, not a lack of it. Unemployment and poverty are structural not temporary — and this is not mostly self-correcting. There is need for “big push policy interventions,” she stressed.

NEPAD’s Chief Executive Officer Ibrahim Assane Mayaki agreed. “Attaining Africa’s Agenda 2063 aspirations and goals to a large extent depends on the transformation of rural areas,” Mayaki told the audience drawn from across the continent.

Immediately after the opening ceremony, a high-level panel discussion moderated by Mayaki zoomed in on challenges regarding demographic growth, pressure on natural resources, employment creation and economic diversification in designing and implementing new development strategies for job creation in rural areas.

Cameroonian Secretary General of Livestock in the Ministry of Livestock, Fisheries and Animal Industries Jaji Manu Taiga said the government has pumped close to 100 million dollars into his ministry to revitalise the rural sector. Capacity is also being developed among youth in the fisheries sector.

“I am urging Cameroonians that are in the diaspora who wire transfers and invest their money in hotels and apartments to come back and re-think about investing in agriculture and rural development,” Taiga added.

Taiga’s words were corroborated by Ananga Messina Clémentine, Cameroonian minister in charge of rural development. Clémentine forecasted wealth creation generated from agri-business in an ambitious plan where over 5,000 youth are currently being trained in enterprise development. She said there is a ready market in the case of agro-commodities as Cameroon is surrounded by petroleum-producing countries.

“It is time we make agriculture attractive, train and sensitize all demographic groups despite gender so that they know it is profitable. They need to know issues related to market analysis, choices of where to sell their products and building entrepreneurship spirit,” she said.

Clémentine added that in order to make agro products and commodities competitive on the market, there was a need for improved value addition and use of information technology in search of diverse market accessibility. She also stressed that post-harvest losses, currently up to 40 percent, must be brought down to manageable levels, especially in crops such as cassava and cereals. She urged African women to be actively engaged in all those activities, as a part of employment of different jobs within the value chain.

Responding to a comment from the plenary on the effects of climate change on agriculture, Clémentine said that studies have shown that at least 300 hectares of forest are destroyed annually in the Congo basin as a result of bush furrowing, a cultivate and abandon form of farming. She suggested adoption of modern agriculture methods that are less damaging to the environment and to mainstream climate change in African interventions.

Philomena Chege, Deputy Director in the Ministry of Agriculture in Kenya, suggested that the time is up to also consider shifting from subsistence farming to mechanization to ensure high productivity and time management on the part of youth.

“There is preference for males over women when it comes to ownership of land which results in young women being marginalized. But also there are issues of startup capital for the youth as well which makes embarking on such initiatives a challenge in most cases,” she said on the sidelines of the meeting.

Koffi Amegbeto, UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Senior Policy Officer from the Regional Office for Africa, told IPS that the kind of interventions his office is implementing include support for the formulation and implementation of policies, strategies and programmes that generate decent rural employment, especially for rural youth and women.

“Effective support has been provided to more than twenty countries in the biennium 2014-2015. In particular, FAO is assisting governments in the development of effective public private partnerships fostering youth inclusion in agriculture and in the design of youth-friendly and climate smart methodologies for technical and vocational education and training (e.g. Junior Farmer Field and Life Schools (JFFLS) methodology),” Amegbeto told IPS.

Thanks to the Africa Solidarity Trust Fund, he added, FAO launched multi-country programmes on youth employment in East and West Africa, while a third programme is geared towards supporting the NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency’s Rural Futures Programme. The programme aims to promote decent rural youth employment and entrepreneurship in agriculture and agri-business in four countries: Benin, Cameroon, Malawi and Niger.

Secondly, FAO provides policy advice, capacity development and technical support to extend the application of international labour standards in rural areas.

“The main areas of focus have been child labour prevention in agriculture, and occupational safety and health. Four countries (Cambodia, Niger, Malawi, and Tanzania) were supported with programmes to prevent child labour in agriculture with important results in terms of increased awareness and strengthened institutional capacities to prevent child labour,” he said.

Third, FAO provides support to improve information systems and knowledge on decent rural employment at national, regional and global levels.

FAO’s work in the period 2014-2015 included putting in motion the Youth Employment in Agriculture Programme (YEAP) in Nigeria, accompanying the Ministry of Youth, Employment and the Promotion of Civic Values in Senegal in developing a national Rural Youth Employment Policy, conducting a youth-focused value chain assessment of the small ruminant value chain in Ethiopia, and entrepreneurship skills training for vulnerable youth in Mali and Zambia.

Mulunesh Ena is part of an existing project supported by icipe, working with five other women in her community near Arba Minch to raise silkworms. She then sells the cocoons to a large cooperative in Arba Minch where she earns 70-100 Ethiopian birr per KG (approximately $3-5 US). On the racks in front of her, silkworms are eating castor leaves. Credit: Brendan Bannon, The MasterCard Foundation/IPS

By Munyaradzi Makoni
ADDIS ABABA, May 16 2016 (IPS)

Beekeeping and silkworm farming have long been critical cogs of Ethiopian life, providing food, jobs and much needed income.

According to some scholarly research, beekeeping is an ancient tradition dating back to Ethiopia’s early history – between 3500 and 3000 B.C.

Collecting and selling honey and other bee products produced in homes and home gardens is common throughout the country.

Meanwhile, silk production or sericulture is a growing industry in Ethiopia and it offers a solution for the government’s quest for ways to expand the textile industry.  But both practices have never been fully exploited to directly benefit young people.

Alemayehu Konde Koira, Youth Livelihoods Program, senior manager with The MasterCard Foundation, views it as a huge opportunity.

“With relevant and adequate support, honey and silk production and engagement across their respective value chain could be key sectors of opportunity for young people,” he said.

The result has been combining expertise on insects with funding to empower youth in Ethiopia.

The International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology known as icipe with over 20 years of experience in implementing beekeeping and silk farming enterprises in Ethiopia’s Tigray, Oromia and Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples regions has been matched with the MasterCard Foundation’s commitment of more than 31 million dollars in financial inclusion towards youth employment and education initiatives in Ethiopia since 2010.

Earlier this year, the two organisations announced a 10.35-million-dollar (about 220 million Ethiopian birr) five-year Young Entrepreneurs in Honey and Silk farming initiative aimed at creating employment opportunities for young people through beekeeping and silkworm farming.

The project leaders said they will mainly focus on peri-urban and rural youth who face a variety of constraints to ensuring sustainable livelihoods and decent incomes. Women will also be employed by the project.

“The opportunity exists for harnessing the not often exploited potential of honey and silk-based value-added products through income-generating enterprises owned and run by Ethiopian youth,” icipe Director General Segenet Kelemu told IPS.

She said this will enable youths to establish and grow their own businesses.

Kelemu said honey and silk production business activities have the potential to provide a wide range of economic contributions, mainly income generation from marketing honey and its by-products (beeswax, royal jelly, pollen, propolis, bee colonies, and bee venom) and the creation of non-gender-biased employment opportunities.

“Ethiopian honey production is characterised by the widespread use of traditional technology resulting in relatively low honey supply and poor quality of honey harvested when compared to the potential honey yields and quality gains associated with modern beehives,” she said.

According to Kelemu, modern beehives yield around 20kg of high quality honey as compared to 6-8 kg of yields from traditional beehives.

“Silkworm rearing, on the other hand, is a new agrobusiness technology in Ethiopia and on various occasions has been targeted as a tool for employment creation and poverty reduction,” she said.

The Ministry of Women, Youth and Children Affairs and other government departments will select the youth between 18 and 24 years of age who have completed a grade 10 education from the East and West Gojjam of Ethiopia’s Amhara region and Gamo Gofa in the Southern Nations.

“It’s a project that applies research and technology for the benefit of young people and communities,” Koira told IPS.

He said young entrepreneurs will receive starter kits and equipment that include modern beehives, honey processors, silkworm rearing trays and silk yarn spinning wheels to get their businesses started.

Koira said the project design combines technical skills in production, processing and marketing across the honey and silk value chains, as well as life skills, including entrepreneurship, leadership, interpersonal and communication, business development, and access to financial education and services.

Importantly, the project will create links to local, regional and international markets, he said, adding young entrepreneurs will make the best uses of innovative technologies and acquire tools and resources to develop their own enterprises.

Koira anticipates the project will create employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for 12,500 young people in beekeeping and silk farming in Ethiopia for youths out of school and earning an income of less than two dollars day.

He said it’s expected that an additional 25,000 people involved in the value chain will benefit from the project.

Beekeeping has the potential to generate positive externalities such as ecosystem services through pollination by bees for several food crops within the project region, which will increase the yields of agricultural production thus enhancing food security for the local farming community, added Kelemu.

“This project has the potential to benefit 80,000 households indirectly from pollination services,” she said.

On the other hand, Kelemu said, the bee and silk enterprises established by the youth are expected to generate income and hence support the household food security.

“This will be instrumental, especially in overcoming food insecurity when economic factors are a fundamental cause of food insecurity,” she said.

By N Chandra Mohan
NEW DELHI, Dec 3 2015 (IPS)

The crash in oil prices is not the only challenge confronting the Gulf States in West Asia. Economic disorder and lack of opportunity are contributing to instability in the region, stated Bahrain’s minister for industry, commerce and tourism, Zayed Al Zayani, while kicking off the recent IISS Bahrain Bay Forum. He emphasized the need for “unprecedented” economic reform across the Gulf in the wake of the lower oil revenues. These policies include the generation of millions of jobs for the youth in these economies that continue to depend heavily on expatriate labour from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Philippines.

N Chandra Mohan

The Gulf States face the prospect of a demographic dividend of a youth bulge in the population rapidly turning into a curse, thanks to high and rising rates of unemployment for those between 15 to 24 years of age. The highest rates are in Saudi Arabia (28.7 per cent), Bahrain (27.9 per cent), Oman (20.5 per cent) and Kuwait (19.6 per cent). India, too, has double digit rates of joblessness among the young like many of these economies. There was a suggestion at the Bahrain Bay Forum that such high rates of youth unemployment are a proximate factor behind the surge in militant terrorism, exemplified by the rise of the Daesh or ISIS.

The prospect of lower oil revenues certainly will constrain the Gulf States to diversify their economies away from dependence on this commodity. Countries like Bahrain seek to focus on education and training, communications and infrastructure and promoting a start-up ecosystem for fostering entrepreneurship. The level of ambition is also high as they intend to generate high skill jobs and build a knowledge- based economy. The technology sector in the Gulf States is likely expected to grow by 10 per cent per annum over the next five years while the spending on technology in the Middle East as a whole is expected to touch $200 billion.

However, the transition to this brave new world requires bridging the skills gap. The labour market in this region depends heavily on low skilled and low wage earning migrant labour. More than 80 per cent of the workforce in private sector employment in Bahrain is comprised of expatriates. It goes up to 96 per cent and 98 per cent in Kuwait and Qatar respectively. In sharp contrast, the nationals are disproportionately represented in the bloated public sector. So, one form of dualism in the labour market is that the private sector is dominated wholly by expatriates while the public sector is largely for the locals in the Gulf.

Another source of dualism is that women are not adequately represented in the labour market due to pervasive gender discrimination in these conservative economies. Although women’s enrolment in higher educational institutions is rapidly rising of late — a case in point are courses in financial services in Bahrain which attract a lot of women — female labour force participation rates are well below 30 per cent as against the global average of 50 per cent. Jobless among young females is as high as 55 per cent in Saudi Arabia which is three-times higher than that of young males, according to the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

Gulf’s labour market thus is “locked in a low skills, low wages and low productivity equilibrium” argued Frank Hagemann, deputy regional director of ILO, at one of the sessions at the Bay Forum. This dualism is reflected in a substantial wage gap between the private and public sector. At the lower end, the living and working conditions of migrants is sub-standard and highly exploitative in nature. Dependency-driven employee-employers relations are rife. The big challenge for the Gulf States is to kick-start the transition from this state of affairs to one driven by higher skills, higher wages and productivity.

What is the impact of abundant supplies of low skilled, low productivity expatriate population queried Ausamah Al Absi, chief executive, Labour Market Regulatory Authority in Bahrain? If an entrepreneur were to make an investment in a state-of-the-art printing press in Germany, he has to employ high technology and productivity tools as the cost of manpower is high. But in Bahrain, he can go for lower technology supported by a low skilled workforce. Pursuing a capital-intensive option in a low wage economy is not on. For such demand-side reasons, this entrepreneur will naturally be rendered uncompetitive in this economy, felt Al Absi.

Low oil prices complicate the efforts of the Gulf States to address these distortions without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If revenues continue to decline, a worry is that it reduces the fiscal space to pay nationals in the public sector. At the same time, there is a compulsion to reduce subsidies on water, electricity and school fees that will disproportionately hit the expatriate workforce. The Gulf economies thus will make it more and more difficult for the expatriates to work in these economies over the near-term Controls on migration appear inevitable, regardless of the heavy dependence on such labour at present.

The transition to a higher skills, wages and productivity equilibrium is far from easy. It entails changes over a generation. For instance, in Saudi Arabia, 40 per cent of the graduates come from humanities or Islamic studies while only 4 per cent are engineers. Stepping up the numbers of engineers takes more time. Yet there is a temptation to look for quick fixes like inviting tech giants in the US to set up cloud computing courses in the Gulf States! At the Bay Forum, Bahrain announced a $100 million venture capital based fund to that will work as the first cloud technology accelerator in the region. Can such moves kick-start hi-tech start-ups? Intermediate steps are perhaps more necessary like vocational and on-the-job training. Only 17 per cent of firms in the Gulf States provide on-the-job training as against the global average of 35 per cent. The best bet for these countries is greater gender empowerment in the labour market than expat-bashing policies to reduce sources of instability.

(End)

Excerpt:

Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla and UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin discussed how Indonesia could harness its demographic dividend on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum on East Asia in Jakarta on Apr. 20. Credit: Courtesy of UNFPA Indonesia.

By Sandra Siagian
JAKARATA, May 2 2015 (IPS)

In a populous archipelago nation like Indonesia, where 250 million live spread across some 17,500 islands, speaking over 300 languages, the question of development is a tricky one.

A lower-middle-income country with a poverty rate of 11.4 percent – with a further 65 million people living just below the poverty line – the government is forced to make tough choices between where to invest limited funds: education or health, job creation or infrastructure development?

A demographic dividend arises when a high ratio of working people relative to population size frees up resources for private and public investment in human and physical capital.
These issues are further complicated by the fact that over 62 percent of the population – about 153 million people – lives in rural areas, largely cut off from easy access to hospitals, schools and job markets outside of the agricultural sector. About 27 percent of this population, roughly 66.1 million people, are women of reproductive age.

In addition, Indonesia currently has the highest rate of working-age people that it has ever had, both in absolute numbers – with 157 million potential workers – and as a proportion of the total population – accounting for 66 percent of all Indonesians.

While this puts a huge strain on the government to provide jobs, it also offers the country a chance to reap the benefits of its demographic dividend, defined by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as a period in which the rising number of working people relative to population size frees up resources for private and public investment in human and physical capital.

This, in turn, allows the country to achieve far higher rates of income per capita, thus boosting the national economy.

At the recently concluded World Economic Forum on East Asia, which ran from Apr. 19-21 in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, experts from around the world urged the country to capitalise on its demographic dividend by investing heavily in its own people.

Among the nearly 700 participants in the conference was the executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), former Nigerian Health Minister Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, who stressed throughout his three-day visit that “people need to be at the centre of development.”

While this may seem a simple recipe, it bears repeating in Indonesia, where half of the population falls into the ‘youth’ category (15-24 years), a demographic that also has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country.

With Indonesia’s population set to increase by 19 percent, to about 293 million people by 2030, according to the UNFPA, the country would be well advised to heed the words of population experts.

In the midst of his whirlwind visit to Jakarta, Osotimehin sat down with IPS to discuss how Indonesia can harness the potential of its people, and to share some strategies on how the young democracy can optimise on changing population dynamics.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Where is Indonesia in terms of its demographic dividend?

A: Indonesia needs to take advantage of its demographic window of opportunity, which is expected to peak between 2020 and 2030. I think that there is the consciousness in Indonesia that this [demographic dividend] is an important national planning process, which they must invest in.

I believe that Indonesia has both the analytics and the political commitment, but I believe that going forward, we will have to encourage Indonesia to investment [strategically] for the demographic dividend to succeed.

Q: What kinds of investments need to be made?

A: Investments in health, youth education and employment need to be scaled up considerably. I think that social systems need strengthening – we need to address the issue of early marriage and make sure that girls are allowed to go to school, stay in school and reach maturity. We want to make sure that girls and women can make choices for themselves going forward, that is a key point.

Every young person must be taught about themselves and their bodies, and every woman needs to have access to voluntary family planning and sexual reproductive health services so that they are empowered to make choices. Having comprehensive sexuality education would ensure that we could reduce things like HIV infections, sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies.

I think that within the educational framework we also want a situation where the curriculum is diversified so that we can encourage vocational training and entrepreneurship training. We need to be able to inspire small and medium-sized enterprises, which usually form the basis of a thriving economy.

Q: Why is it particularly important for Indonesia to focus on young people?

A: It’s important for Indonesia to invest in young people for many reasons. It gives a sense of belonging [for] a young person and it ensures that they can participate in national development. Young people will be part of the demographic transition and fertility reduction needs to include them. So really, they have to be part of the process.

Once you realise the potential of young people and they enter employment they are then able to save and earn, which in turn will help the economy grow.

Q: Is Indonesia moving in the right direction?

I think Indonesia has always had some of the necessary policies in place; they just need to be revitalised. New investments and political leadership have to come into it.

In the past, Indonesia was the leader in family planning after they implemented a national family planning programme in the 1970s. But it fell off the radar after Indonesia’s democratic transition in the 2000s, when family planning services were decentralised.

I think this new government is committed to bringing it back and I hear from discussions with various government leaders that this is something that they are paying close attention to.

Indonesia should also consider working with the private sector to help create decent jobs. Making sure that everybody, from the youth to the elderly, has social protection that provides basic [services] will be most important.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Excerpt:

A youth smokes diamba (marijuana) at a gang base in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/IPS

By Josh Butler
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 6 2015 (IPS)

Global youth unemployment may be “six or seven times” what the International Labor Organisation’s (ILO) latest figures state, due to what a youth advocacy group calls a flawed system of assessment.

The ILO recently released its 2015 World Employment and Social Outlook (WESO) report, and presented the findings to the United Nations Friday.“In unequal societies, democracies are more likely to be corrupted, workers are more likely to be exploited and abused, and the safety net for the poor or vulnerable is weakened." -- Dr. Marjorie Wood

One of the report’s major findings is the worldwide unemployment rate among 15 to 24-year-olds of 13 percent, or 74 million youths, is set to rise.

William Reese, CEO of the International Youth Foundation, thinks that figure is significantly underestimated.

“I’m not surprised by that number, because it is probably much higher than they state. We’ve seen reports of over 70 million young people unemployed, but the real number is probably six or seven times that,” Reese said.

He said a flawed system of assessing unemployment led to employment figures far below the reality.

“Those statistics are typically assessing people who are looking for jobs, so if you’re not looking for work, you’re technically not unemployed. People in poor countries are often underemployed or underpaid,” Reese told IPS.

“Unemployment statistics don’t take that into consideration. People in poor countries do work; if they didn’t, they would die. But in poorer countries, data is even worse.”

The WESO report warns the effects of the 2008 global economic crisis are still heavily impacting nations worldwide, especially developing economies.

The report outlines a widening income and wealth inequality, as well as sluggish economic growth, but while overall global unemployment is steady, youth unemployment is tipped to increase in coming years.

“Youth, especially young women, continue to be disproportionately affected by unemployment,” the report states, saying the 2014 youth unemployment rate was almost three times higher than the overall unemployment rate.

The ILO predicts overall unemployment rates “to decline gradually in developed economies” while at the same time “many countries are projected to see a substantial increase in youth unemployment.”

Ekkehard Ernst, chief of the ILO’s Job Friendly Macroeconomic Policies Team, told IPS slow economic growth was to blame for expected spikes in youth jobless rates.

“Growth is too slow to make a difference in job creation,” Ernst said. “Economies take much longer to recover after a financial crisis than a normal recession. It makes a difference to growth acceleration.”

Global growth has risen slowly for the last two years, from 2.2 percent in 2012 to 2.3 percent in 2013 and 2.5 percent in 2014, but is still well below the pre-crisis levels of around four percent.

Reese said a mismatch of skills was also to blame for rising youth unemployment. He said more young people were gaining tertiary qualifications than ever before – backed up by ILO data saying tertiary education rates have increased in 26 of 30 countries surveyed – but that young people were not gaining qualifications relevant to a changing labor market.

“There are job openings, but companies can’t find people with the right skills. Schools are not asking what the business community needs today. They are teaching what businesses might have wanted five years ago,” Reese said.

“There are more college-educated unemployed in some parts of the world, than high school-educated unemployed. Sometimes, kids today don’t come in with the disposition to work hard or be a team player.”

The ILO reports youth unemployment was especially problematic in Europe, with rates of up to 52 percent in Greece and Spain. The ILO predicts between 2014 and 2019, youth unemployment will rise by up to eight percent in parts of Europe, South America and Africa.

Reese said education facilities needed to be more tuned-in to what the modern job force requires, and to encourage students to think and learn about what is expected from them in the labor market.

“We want young people to get and keep a job. When a middle-class flourishes, democracies flourish,” he said. “All levels of education need to be smarter, and teach academic skills through internships and apprenticeships, to help young people learn things about work that they can’t get in a classroom.”

In 2014, global unemployment stood at 201million people, 1.2 million higher than 2013. That number is expected to rise to 212 million by 2019.

“We’re seeing a huge number of unemployed. The global unemployment rate is around six percent and that won’t shrink any time soon,” Ernst said.

Ernst said, however, that rising unemployment was not necessarily a sign of a poor economic climate. He said rising unemployment in many Asian countries, especially in economies such as China and India, was a sign of a modernising economy, as workers move from stable yet low-paying jobs in rural areas to seek higher paying jobs in urban centres.

“This type of unemployment is a rebalancing of the economy. Asian countries will see an increase in unemployment as they develop, which is a normal process of development,” Ernst said.

“New technology requires jobs be shuffled from one industry to another. China is so big, if they have a higher unemployment rate then that will affect world unemployment figures.

“People are moving from low-income agricultural jobs, to middle-income jobs in manufacturing, and then onto higher incomes in the service industry.”

Rising unemployment and sluggish economic growth is predicted to further widen income and wealth inequality worldwide; the richest 10 percent of the world will hold 30 to 40 percent of total income, while the poorest 10 percent will earn as little as two percent.

Dr. Marjorie Wood, senior global economy associate for the Institute for Policy Studies and managing editor of website Inequality.org, said a suite of socially regressive measures rolled out across the United States and the world had contributed greatly to the deepening income inequality.

“It’s important to look at how workers have been disempowered since the 1970s. Union strength was high at that time, and robust taxes on the wealthy and corporations funded public investments to allow opportunity and mobility for ordinary people,” Wood told IPS.

“We’ve seen a reversal of those, into a system what was much more unequal, with wealth concentrated at the top.”

She said a deepening income inequality would have profound impacts on all facets of life, from democracy and politics to social affairs.

“In unequal societies, democracies are more likely to be corrupted, workers are more likely to be exploited and abused, and the safety net for the poor or vulnerable is weakened,” she said.

The ILO report states social unrest and possible violence is linked to rising inequality and youth unemployment. Social unrest is said to have “shot up” during the financial crisis, and worldwide, currently sits at 10 percent higher than before the crisis.

However, Wood said she was encouraged by a growing call for a federally mandated minimum living wage in the U.S., and worldwide calls for a fairer distribution of income.

“People are not satisfied with rising inequality today, just as they weren’t satisfied 100 years ago in the USA’s first ‘gilded age.’ They addressed it then by fighting back, with a robust labour movement, and I think we will do it again,” she said.

“We’re seeing worker justice movements in many places, where people collectively organise to make change. That is where true political change comes from.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Erle Rahaman-Noronha cutting produce on his farm. Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

By Mark Olalde
FREEPORT, Trinidad and Tobago, May 22 2014 (IPS)

Erle Rahaman-Noronha is not a revolutionary, not in any radical sense at least. He is not even that exciting. In truth, Rahaman-Noronha is merely a man with a shovel, a small farm, and a big dream. But that dream is poised to conquer the Caribbean.

Rahaman-Noronha wants to see ‘permaculture’ – short for permanent agriculture – take root and spreads across the Caribbean, and he is doing his part by teaching anyone who will listen about its benefits.

Joining him is a fluid group of permaculturalists working from their home islands and sharing the same goal: to harness permaculture as a solution to climate change, food and water insecurity, and rising costs of living.

“You can start in your backyard, so there’s no cost. You can implement certain parts of it in your apartment...If you have a porch with some sunlight, you can plant something there and start thinking about permaculture.” -- Erle Rahaman-Noronha, Kenyan-born permaculturalist.
“Here, this is the Bible,” Rahaman-Noronha tells IPS, laying a book on the table. Behind him, orange trees rustle in the wind, the sharp smell of Trinidadian cooking wafts out an open window, and white-faced capuchin monkeys screech in the distance. The cover reads, ‘Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual’, and the contents offer surprisingly simple solutions to modern problems through economically and environmentally sustainable living.

Author of the manual, Australian Bill Mollison, first used the term nearly four decades ago and since then the idea has spread to Europe and the U.S. Now, the developing Caribbean is beginning to embrace the philosophy of permaculture, especially since 2008’s global recession.

Born in Kenya, Rahaman-Noronha – whose work was recently highlighted in a TEDx talk – fulfilled a keen interest in the environment by studying applied biochemstry and zoology in Canada.

“I’ve always had a strong passion for the outdoors and conservation, but just doing conservation doesn’t make money,” he says with a chuckle. “Permaculture allows me to live on a site, produce food on a site, produce an income, as well as practice conservation.”

Wa Samaki is Rahaman-Noronha’s permaculture farm, and it has been his workplace, classroom, grocery store, and home since he relocated to Trinidad in 1998. Meaning “of the fish” in Swahili, Wa Samaki covers 30 acres in Freeport in central Trinidad.

Although he uses no fertilisers, herbicides, or pesticides, Rahaman-Noronha is able to make a living off the farm’s fruit, flower, lumber, and fish sales. His newest addition is a large aquaponics system, a closed loop food production system in which fish tanks and potted plants circulate water and sustain one another.

With his partner John Stollmeyer, Rahaman-Noronha works to spread awareness of permaculture across the Caribbean, home to nearly 40 million people who are particularly susceptible to climate change.

The pair consults Trinidadian businesses, teaches permaculture design courses (PDCs), and holds workshops everywhere from Puerto Rico to St. Lucia. “How are we going to create sustainable human culture?” Stollmeyer asks. “Discovering permaculture for me was a wake up call.”

Where environmentalism meets savvy economics

Berber van Beek studying the geology of Curaçao. Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

The need for conservation is in no small part a result of climate change, especially when the Hurricane Belt covers nearly all of the Caribbean.

Trinidad and Tobago continues to compound the issue as both a major exporter and consumer of fossil fuels. The country produced more than 119,000 barrels of oil per day in 2012 and 1.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that same year, all the while boasting the second highest rate of CO₂ emissions per capita in the world, more than twice that of the United States.

United Nations data dating back to 2005, the last time such statistics were compiled, indicates that industrialised agriculture accounts for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Latin America and the Caribbean.

In this environment, Rahaman-Noronha’s goal is to become an incubator of conservation start-ups that cannot secure necessary bank loans. Currently, he houses beekeepers and a wildlife rescue center on the farm for minimal rent, and he hopes that list will grow.

One such entrepreneurial mind that passed through Wa Samaki was Berber van Beek, a native of Curaçao who recently moved home after years of wandering the world. Before returning to the Caribbean, she practiced permaculture across Europe and Australia, but when van Beek wanted to develop her skills in a tropical climate, she came to Rahaman-Noronha.

“He gave me a lot of freedom on his farm to make and create a design,” van Beek says, describing a garden of banana trees she planted at Wa Samaki.

Erle Rahaman-Noronha’s closed-loop aquaponics food system. Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

In Curaçao, van Beek uses permaculture as more than simply a food source. She realises its social potential and is working to start after-school programmes for at-risk youth who can learn useful gardening skills and the responsibility and respect for nature that come with caring for their own gardens.

In addition, she is soon opening her first large-scale organic gardening class, closely resembling a PDC.

Such initiatives are urgently needed in Curaçao, which is facing a stagnant economy and is currently nursing a youth unemployment rate of 37 percent.

According to van Beek, shifting global climates and markets have major effects on her own island in which nearly everything must be imported. “If you go to the supermarket, look where your food is coming from. Is it coming from Venezuela or is it coming from the U.S. or is it coming from Europe?” she says. “People could be more aware of what to buy and what not to buy.”

The problem, experts say, is regional. According to the Food Export Association of the Midwest USA – a group of nonprofits focusing on agricultural issues – around 80 percent of food consumed in the Caribbean is imported.

The beauty and purpose of permaculture is that it is a system of solutions that can be practiced at any level to combat environmental issues.

“You can start in your backyard, so there’s no cost. You can implement certain parts of it in your apartment if you really need to,” Rahaman-Noronha explains. “If you have a porch with some sunlight, you can plant something there and start thinking about permaculture.”

Naturally, van Beek took his message to heart, keeping a perfectly groomed permaculture garden in her own tiny backyard, using dead leaves as fertiliser and recycled rain and shower-water to sustain the plants.

“Seeing is believing,” she says. It’s her own quiet mantra, spoken when she describes her approach to spreading permaculture, and vocalised when she needs the energy to keep pressing on and to convince others that this is the right path.

Rahaman-Noronha, too, has worked to convert non-believers. From schools who tour the wildlife center and his farm to the several thousand people who watched his TEDx talk online, he is adamant that he has traded in misconceptions for progress.

“I think [the reason] I don’t get challenged…is that I’m not just preaching permaculture,” he says. “I’m actually practicing it.”

(END)

The Talent Tappers performing in Mombasa as a crowd gathers to watch their act. Many struggling artists are hopeful that the industry will change for the better. Photo: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Mar 5 2014 (IPS)

Lupita Nyong’o’s Oscar victory for her supporting performance in the critically acclaimed film “12 Years a Slave” has raised hopes of a much-needed boost to Kenya’s fledgling entertainment industry.

Nyongo’s global success, cemented by her Academy Award win on Mar. 2, has proved that, “Just like medicine or teaching, entertainment can be a serious career choice particularly for the many unemployed and talented youths in the country,” says Nairobi-based market analyst Danson Mwangangi.

But that new attitude to the arts is only just developing.

From Nairobi to Hollywood“The main problem is that many people have not fully appreciated that entertainment is a job just like any other and they are not willing to pay to watch a performance” -- Kenyan actor Paschal Kilei

Many Kenyan theatre aficionados like local playwright Peter Nderi remember 31-year-old Nyong’o as Juliet in Shakespeare’s classic play performed at the Phoenix Players here in Nairobi. “She was only 14 years old but even then, she showed great promise as an actor,” Nderi tells IPS.

But Nyong’o’s success, he says, has not been overnight. Hollywood’s newest it-girl paid her dues working as part of production crews for various films, including “The Constant Gardener”, “where she ran errands, including fetching the cast coffee,” says Nderi.

He also points to Nyong’o’s 2007 feature-length documentary “In My Genes”, which explores the challenges people with albanism face as a minority group in Kenya and which Nyong’o wrote, directed and produced.

She later starred in the MTV Africa sex-ed drama series “Shuga”, produced in partnership with the U.S. government’s anti-AIDS initiative PEPFAR and MTV’s Staying Alive Foundation.

Born in Mexico to Kenyan parents, Nyong’o was raised in Kenya where she honed her acting skills on the local theatre  circuit before attending Yale School of Drama, one of the United States’ most renowned acting programmes.

The new frontier

For Kenya, which is seeing some 40 percent of its workforce unemployed – 70 percent of those being people below the age of 35 – victories like Nyong’o’s are a happy note in the effort to develop a vibrant entertainment sector that could lift the economy.

“It is the new frontier for job creation,” Mwangangi tells IPS, adding that the government, through the Kenya Film Commission, has set an objective to generate 10 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) from the entertainment industry, incuding all creative and cultural activities.

Recent World Bank statistics show 800,000 job seekers competing for just 50,000 jobs annually, making the governmet’s efforts appear a welcome initiative for many young poeple.

But the entertainment industry is not for the faint-hearted, local performers say, whose experiences highlight that the country still has a long way to come before it sees cultural activities as a valid profession.

“The main problem is that many people have not fully appreciated that entertainment is a job just like any other and they are not willing to pay to watch a performance,” says Paschal Kilei, a struggling actor with a talent group called ‘Talent Tappers’ in Mombasa County in Kenya’s Coast Province some 482 km from the capital Nairobi.

As a result, Kilei and his colleagues have been left to perform for free in the hope that, with time, people will begin to appreciate their work and pay to watch them perform.

The Talent Tappers do “magnate theatre”, in Kilei’s words, consisting of random performances in market places, bus stations, “Basically anywhere where there are a large number of people going about their business.”

And while their acts are well received, it hasn’t brought them any money yet.

Kilei is not alone. Asia Majimbo, another Mombasa-based actor, says that even for established performers the pay is not enough to fully depend on their craft.

“TV actors who earn about 250 dollars per episode are actually the envy of many,” says Majimbo. “In a month, about four episodes will air, or even less. And an actor may not even appear in all the episodes unless they are the main characters.”

Nderi highlights a lack of formal training as another factor impairing the industry.

“Many actors-slash-actresses in the country take on acting as a hobby, so they do not fully invest in it by trying to get some training in it, which affects the quality of their work.”

While not every Kenyan performer has access to a Yale drama eduction to set themselves apart like Nyong’o, Kenyan actors need not be discouraged, says Mwangangi.

The government’s keenness to boost the economy through enterntainment has already resulted in a mandate for the Kenya Film Commission to establish a film school in the country, he says, while Kenya’s 47 counties have all been encouraged to promote the entertainment industry as an avenue for job creation.

Steady growth

In building the industry, Kenya has a big brother on the continent to learn from, according to Mwangangi. “Nollywood, which is Nigeria’s film industry produces about 50 movies per week — much more than what Hollywood produces… second only to India’s Bollywood,” he says.

Both Nigeria and Kenya are particularly poised to reap the benefits from their expanding middle class, acording to the analyst, with Kenya’s middle-bracket income earners having doubled to 6.5 million in the last decade, according to the African Development Bank.

Although Kenya’s film industry still lags behind Nigeria’s, it has been growing steadily in the last seven years, according to Kenya’s Film Commission, which boasts an 85-percent growth in the number of film establishments and an increase of over 45 percent of people involved in the industry.

“The Samaritans”, a comedy series centered around the absurdities of a dysfunctional NGO in Kenya, is a recent example of a Kenyan production garnering international attention, with clips and reviews making its rounds on top news sites and social media.

Hussein Kurji, producer of “The Samaritans”, tells IPS that he was looking for something “innovative.” And he’s seeing his efforts pay off.

“The show has received over 150,000 hits in the last 14 days across Vimeo and YouTube and 90,000 hits for the show’s trailer on YouTube alone.”

Kurji and Nyong’o exemplify the ability for Kenyan entertainers to excel in spite of challenges posed by a still-nascent industry.

They also embody a creative spirit that Kenya hopes to tap to attract people to the fledgling sector, perhaps best summed up in Nyong’o’s parting words at the Oscars: “…No matter where you are from, your dreams are valid.”

A man and his daughter return to Bor town, Jonglei state after the fierce fighting in the state and across the country largely ended in January. Credit: Charlton Doki/IPS

By Charlton Doki
JUBA, Feb 27 2014 (IPS)

Gatmai Deng lost three family members in the violence that erupted in South Sudan on Dec. 15 and lasted until the end of January. And he blames their deaths on the government’s failure to use the country’s vast oil revenues to create a better life for its almost 11 million people.

When the country gained independence from Sudan in 2011, many hoped that their new government would provide them with the services that successive Sudanese governments had denied the South Sudanese, Gatmai tells IPS.

“But that government is no different from the Khartoum governments that marginalised South Sudanese citizens. Where are the hospitals? Where are the schools, where is the clean drinking water they promised us?” Gatmai asks.“It became easy to recruit those who felt excluded from the country’s wealth into hostile activities.” -- Dr. Leben Nelson Moro, professor of development studies at Juba University

South Sudan earns 98 percent of its revenue from oil exports. Between 2005 and 2012 – when the country stopped production because of a pipeline dispute with Sudan – South Sudan earned more than 10 billion dollars from oil exports, according to both government and World Bank officials.

When South Sudan resumed oil production in April 2013, the Ministry of Petroleum reported that it made 1.3 billion dollars in the first six months of production.

But despite this, most parts of the country are inaccessible by road. So far, South Sudan has slightly more than 110 kilometres of tarmac roads in the capital, Juba. There is only one 120-kilometre tarmac highway linking Juba to the border with neighbouring Uganda.

“I think the oil money is benefiting [President] Salva Kiir and his ministers,” Gatmai says from Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, where he sought refuge following the outbreak of violence in his country. The fighting left thousands dead and wounded, displacing 863,000 others.

According to an interim human rights report released by the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in South Sudan on Feb. 23, mass ethnic-based killings, gang rapes and torture were carried out by government troops and various opposition militia. Battles were fiercest in Jonglei, Upper Nile, Unity and Central Equatoria states.

But analysts agree with Gatmai that the economic conditions here, characterised by high unemployment amongst the youth, an almost non-existent private sector and an over-dependence on the government as the biggest sole employer, may have contributed to the current conflict.

Dr. Leben Nelson Moro, professor of development studies at Juba University tells IPS that oil has been more a curse than a blessing for South Sudan. Moro says once the violence started, “it became easy to recruit those who felt excluded from the country’s wealth into hostile activities.

“A lot of the oil revenues were taken by a few people in positions of authority. Services were not provided to large sections of the population. We don’t have roads [and] we don’t have other basic services such as health care,” Moro points out.

“The revenues were not used to generate employment for young people. This generated some grievance against the few people in government who seem to be benefiting from the country’s resources,” Moro says.

In practice, the government has no policy or strategy to increase the social economic integration of its youth.

A large majority of the population relies on the agriculture sector for survival and employment. However, the government is the single biggest employer in the country.

Badru Mulumba, editor of The New Times newspaper and a political commentator, tells IPS that it is this reliance on the government that led to the current conflict.

“In this case politicians who found themselves out of power wanted to get back to positions of power in order to sustain their influence back in their communities,” he says.

He explains that many ordinary, unemployed people looked towards their relatives in government  being in positions of power as their source of income and livelihood.

“If ordinary people had independent sources of income outside of the government, they wouldn’t have followed politicians who took up arms against those in power,” Mulumba explains.

According to the World Bank’s African Economic Outlook for 2012, youth unemployment in South Sudan remains quite high.

“Insufficient labour demand, lack of skilled labour supply, absence of a coherent government policy, and the lack of a sound legal and regulatory framework limit the absorption of youth by the labour market,” the document says.

There are no official figures on the rate of youth unemployment but figures from Oxfam International show that only 12 percent of women and 11 percent of men within the active population are formally employed.  

The reliance on livestock by the country’s largest ethnic groups may have also contributed to the instability here. Both the Dinka and Nuer ethnic groups, among others, use cattle to pay bride price, pay compensation and penalties under customary law and even exchange cattle for food.

“A large population of the country relies on a cattle economy, so people somehow accept this culture where you can raid cattle from the rival communities so you can accumulate more and become powerful,” Mulumba says.

Between July 2011 and December 2012 alone, more than 3,000 civilians died in inter-communal fighting connected with cattle raiding in South Sudan’s Jonglei, Lakes, Unity and Warap states.

Anne Lino Wuor, a legislator from the country’s restive Jonglei state believes that if leaders engaged young people and provided them with jobs, they would abandon cattle raiding.

“I do think that the only way to bring stability and peace to South Sudan is through development,” Wuor tells IPS.

Pinyjwok Akol Ajawin, director general for youth at the Culture, Youth and Sports Ministry, tells IPS that the country’s “youth got politically manipulated”.

“They are following their elders and their tribesman. That’s why we are trying to reach out to them [to] enlighten them. Let them know that they are the youth of one country, they belong to South Sudan and they must co-exist so that they see themselves as brothers with those they are trying to fight.”

A National Youth Crisis Management Committee, a community service initiative for the youth, has been created with support from the government.

“This is the only way to keep young South Sudanese busy and to discourage them from joining the ongoing conflict between government and anti-government forces,” Ajawin says.

Edmond Yakani, executive director of the Community Empowerment for Progress Organisation, believes otherwise.

“It is only thorough economic reforms that we shall bring stability to this country,” he tells IPS.

A worker bends over the rows of flowers in one of Rubeena Begum's polyhouses. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, India, Jul 9 2013 (IPS)

As a little girl, Rubeena Begum had big plans: she would become a doctor and secure a decent income working in one of the 30 hospitals in the Himalayan state of Kashmir in north India.

She had pictured sterile medical establishments and well-lit corridors that reeked of disinfectant, never dreaming that she would one day make a living in a much more organic environment.

Standing in front of a handsome collection of polythene-covered greenhouses, or polyhouses, Rubeena points proudly to the fragrant blossoms inside – Lilium, gladiolus, gerberas, carnations, lavender and Bulgarian roses – that have changed her life forever.

She does not cultivate these flowers for their aromatic and medicinal properties alone: they also fetch her a tidy sum at the local market, enough that she has been able to pay back a considerable portion of the loans she took to get this floriculture business off the ground.

Starting with just three polyhouses erected on half an acre of land in the Budgam district of Kashmir in 2006, Rubeena has doubled her business in six years, and now manages 12 growing units.

Banks that once baulked at the idea of providing a loan to this intrepid young woman – demanding countless documents as proof that she would be able to repay – now approach her with offers of even bigger loans to sustain her successful venture.

Rubeena tells IPS that she has become the veritable poster child for entrepreneurship in Kashmir, where half a million out of roughly ten million people are jobless.

Experts blame this dire situation on the armed conflict that has gnawed at every aspect of life in this scenic yet troubled state for over two decades.

Every year over 2,500 young people graduate from Kashmiri universities with Master’s degrees in hand – but those who are unable to bag the few available jobs in the government sector, or in the tourism, agriculture or handicrafts industries, end up searching desperately for work that simply does not exist.

Now, floriculture seems to be offering a way out of a cycle of poverty that many youth were beginning to fear they would never escape.

In full bloom

Rubeena had been on the lookout for employment opportunities when she happened to tune into a radio programme extolling the virtues of agricultural ventures, and of flower cultivation in particular.

“As a child I was always passionate about flowers – I would gather them and decorate my house with them,” she said. “I knew then that this was something I needed to take up.”

After receiving basic training from the Jammu and Kashmir Entrepreneur Development Institute (J&KEDI) on how to erect polyhouses, as well as advice from the floriculture department on the basic growing seasons and harvesting techniques, she set to work.

While reluctant to divulge details of her profits, she readily shared news of having recently expanded her operations by renting 57 acres of land for the cultivation of Bulgarian roses and lavender.

She transports many of her flowers and aromatic oils to collection centres in Kashmir, where they are picked up by distributors who drive them into major urban centres like Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad, where flowers for religious festivals, marriage ceremonies and temple offerings are in high demand.

She also sells extracts like rose oil (used in perfumery), rose water (used for cosmetic and medical products) and lavender oil (used in cosmetics and alternative medicines) at her shop in Srinagar’s Sheikh-ul-Alam International Airport.

The Jammu-based Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine (IIIM) also facilitates sales of her products by putting her in touch with buyers interested in the plants’ medicinal properties.

Experts tell IPS that a bunch of 10 high quality carnations or gerberas typically fetch between five and 15 dollars, while a kilogramme of rose oil brings in up to 7,000 dollars in the Indian market.

According to official estimates, Kashmir’s floriculture industry has the potential to generate 100 million dollars a year in revenue, since the blooms here are said to be of exceptionally high quality.

Whether this is due to the crisp, clean mountain air or the rich Himalayan soil does not seem to matter much to the youth who are flocking to the sector.

Shahnawaz Rasool Dar, a youth from downtown Srinagar, recently started cultivating flowers in the Baramulla district on four acres of land.

“I was working in a private company outside Kashmir but after realising the potential of floriculture in Kashmir, I rushed back here,” Dar told IPS at his farm where he cultivates gerberas, carnations and roses.

Dar’s Bismillah Flora Company is still in its infancy, fetching around 4,000 dollars a year, but he says he is confident that he can transform it into a major business operation.

Well educated and tech-savvy, Dar spends hours online researching the best scientific practices such as the ideal distance between rows of flowerbeds and optimal irrigation techniques; he also buys seeds from reputed companies.

According to Kashmir’s Floriculture Department, in the last year alone more than 1,100 youth started growing flowers for a living.

Popular regions for floriculture include the Budgam, Srinagar and Baramulla districts of the Kashmir Valley, a fertile basin of the river Jhelum, where the climate is ideal for nurturing the delicate flowers, according to Sunil Mistri, director of Kashmir’s Floriculture Department.

“The average farmer can earn an additional annual income of 3,000 dollars if he also grows flowers,” Mistri told IPS.

According to Javid Ahmad, a floriculture officer in Budgam, the number of flower-growing farmers reached 375 in the last year. Once registered with his department they are entitled to regular advice from experts and subsidised loans ranging from 3,300 to 16,600 dollars to encourage more people to venture into the field of floriculture.

As Javid was talking to IPS, two young men dropped into the office and expressed their desire to start a flower cultivation project using a small portion of their farmland.

Bashir Ahmad, who graduated from Kashmir University two years ago and has since tried – unsuccessfully – to secure a livelihood cultivating mushrooms, is desperate for an income.

Lured by the many success stories of floriculture entrepreneurs like Rubeena, Bashir is now “quite keen to take this up as a profession,” he told IPS.

Individual ventures have a multiplier effect on employment. For instance, Rubeena now hires 53 workers to tend to the flowers, paying day labourers about five dollars a day, and her regular employees between 70 and 100 dollars per month.

Anxious to capitalise on these developments, the government is laying plans to develop the sector on a national level. Mistri says the floriculture department will soon create cold storage facilities at various centers across Kashmir, to ensure that flowers stay fresh until buyers come for them.

"Indignados" in Málaga, Spain, protest cuts in health and education. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jul 8 2013 (IPS)

At the last summit of European heads of state held in Brussels at the end of June, the main theme was youth unemployment, which has now reached 23 percent of European youth (although it stands at 41 percent in Spain).

Last year, the International Labour Organisation issued a dramatic report on Global Employment Trends for Youth 2012 in which it spoke of a “lost generation”.

According to projections, the generation currently seeking to enter the market place will retire with a pension of just 480 euros – if it actually succeeds in entering the market – because of temporary jobs without social contributions.

After long discussions, Europe’s leaders decided to allocate six billion dollars to fight youth unemployment. After much shorter discussions, they decided to allocate up to 60 billion dollars to support Europe’s banks. This, on top of the striking subsidies already received: the European Central Bank alone has given 1,000 billion dollars to the banks at nominal cost.

All the efforts to create a European banking system under a central regulator are now on hold until the German elections in September. As a member of the German delegation at the June summit is reported to have said: ”We know well what we are supposed to do, to calm financial markets. But we are not elected by financial markets, we are elected by German citizens.” (IHT, Jun. 28, 2013).

And of course, no effort has been made to explain to Germany’s citizens why it is in their interest to show economic solidarity with the most fragile countries of Europe. Democracy, as it is understood today, is based on leaders who follow popular feelings, not on leaders who feel it their duty to push their electors towards a world of vision and challenges.

The summit was also obliged to accept the blackmail of British Prime Minister David Cameron: either you maintain the subsidies that then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher obtained in 1973, when you insisted that we join Europe (which makes Britain a net recipient of European money), or we will block the European budget.

This is because the anti-Europe electorate in Britain is growing and Cameron could not afford to appear weak. But Cameron was one of the strongest proponents of the subsidy for the banks, and no wonder: the financial system now accounts for 10 percent of Britain’s gross domestic product (GDP).

It is a very curious situation, in which Europe has not only spent several hundred billion dollars on its banks, it has even invited the International Monetary Fund (whose controlling member is the U.S.) to join the European institutions and manage the European crisis.

And, in an unprecedented sign of independence from the U.S., Europe has rejected American calls for reducing austerity and starting policies of growth as Washington and Tokyo have been doing, so far with proven success.

Nevertheless, what is common to the three most powerful players in the West (U.S., Europe and Japan) has been their inability – and unwillingness – to place banks under control and react to their string of crimes.

Central bankers from the entire world join in the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) based in Basel. Now its Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has come up with a proposal that would tighten the relationship between the capital of the banks and the volume of financial operations they can afford. The proposal establishes that banks must maintain high-quality capital, like stock or retained earnings, equal to seven percent of their loans and assets, and that the biggest banks may be required to hold more than nine percent.

This is not exactly a revolutionary proposal, and has been criticised as insufficient by many analysts and regulators. This is confirmed by the fact that the U.S. Federal Reserve estimates that between 90 and 95 percent of banks with assets of less than 10 billion dollars already respect such parameters. Well, even this bland proposal has been received with a howl of protest from many banks, claiming that they would have great difficulty in raising capital.

Under the old capitalist economy, no enterprise would run without capital adequate to its need. Today we have a new branch of the economy, which wants to play without capital, and expects the state to bail it out if anything goes wrong. So, let us just look briefly at how many times things went wrong without anybody ever going to jail:

On Apr. 28, 2002, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), won a lawsuit ordering 10 banks to pay 1.4 billion dollars in compensation and fines because of fraudulent activities. One year later, the SEC discovered that 13 out of 15 financial institutions randomly investigated were guilty of fraud. In 2010, Goldman Sachs agreed to a fine of 550 million dollars to avoid a trial for fraud.

In July last year, the U.S. Senate presented a 335-page report on the British bank HSBC. Over the years it helped drug dealers and criminals recycle illicit money. The fine was 1.9 billion dollars.

In November 2012, SAC Capital was fined 600 million dollars, and in the same month the second leading British bank, Standard Chartered, was fined 667 million dollars.

In February this year, Barclays Bank announced that it had set aside 1.165 billion euros to face fines for “illicit transactions”.

And in March this year, Citigroup accepted a fine of 730 million dollars for “selling investments based on junk to unsuspecting clients”.

We all know that the crisis in which we find ourselves (which, for the optimists, will end in 2020 and for the pessimists in 2025) originated in the U.S., caused by the 10 largest banks’ decision to sell derivatives based on junk and certified by the Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s rating agencies. U.S. taxpayers “donated” 750,000 million dollars to the banks, while the British did the same for HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays Bank and Northern Rock.

While this financial disaster was happening, the ‘Big Five’ (Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Bearn Sterns) paid their executives three billion dollars between 2003 and 2007, And, in 2008, they received 20 billion dollars in bonuses while their banks were losing 42 billion dollars.

All of this was certified by Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, which control 75 percent of the world market. Now Standard & Poor’s has been requested to pay 500 million dollars.

But what about the millions of people who have lost their jobs? The millions of young people who see no future in their lives? It’s the old story: if you steal bread, you go to jail, but if you steal millions, nothing will happen to you … and if you steal millions in a bank, even less reason to worry.

Meanwhile, back at the summit table, the priority for survival is to allocate taxpayers’ money to banks, even if all talk is about youth unemployment.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Emma Bonino
ROME, May 14 2013 (IPS)

The recent agreement for the normalisation of relations between Serbia and Kosovo has confirmed that the European Union (EU) is still acting as a “magnet”, attracting its external neighbours and transforming and integrating them. Thanks to its prospects for EU membership, the whole Balkan area has become more stable and secure. Unfortunately, this virtuous magnetism no longer exerts the same force of attraction on our own citizens.

Italian Foreign Affairs Minister Emma Bonino. Credit: Victor Sokolowicz/IPS

With every passing day, the founding fathers’ dream of peace and freedom seems to be turning into a nightmare for many.

The EU is increasingly being associated with austerity policies that lead to recession, unemployment and social despair. More worryingly, there are signs that the current crisis is not limited to the EU’s economic sphere but also impacts its most fundamental values.

Everywhere in Europe we see rising intolerance; growing support for xenophobic and populist parties; discrimination and a weakening of the rule of law; and entire populations of undocumented migrants, virtually without rights, punished for their status rather than their individual behaviour.

Our inclusive and open community is threatened by destructive actions pursued by nationalistic and demagogic groups. But they are not the only ones inflicting damage on the Union.

In some countries, including Italy, we see too many violations of the rule of law and of international and European treaties, an unreliable justice system, inhumane and degrading conditions in prisons, serious infringements of human rights and grave cases of lack of accountability. How can we preach respect for universal values abroad if we are among the countries most condemned by the European Court of human rights?

It is in our vital interest to react to all these alarming trends.

To defend the European construction, we need to rediscover its mission. Its founding fathers had to discard a whole world of prejudice and fear. They knew from their tragic experience that building fortresses and walls under the guise of ensuring peace and security was an illusion.

They chose integration, and rejected barriers. And they understood that all freedoms are closely linked: one cannot want free trade yet hinder the free movement of people.

Nationalist and demagogic groups are spreading fear and prejudice across Europe by exploiting the current malaise and social despair of all those without a job, and without faith in their future. As European Central Bank President Mario Draghi stressed: “It is of particular importance at this juncture to address the current high long-term and youth unemployment.” This is a fundamental mission of the new Italian government. The data flow is still depressing, urging us to adopt new measures in coordination with our partners and in full respect of our fiscal commitments.

However, I believe that the choice is not simply between fiscal tightening and reckless spending, nor can fear of and disaffection with Europe be tackled with economic measures or financial engineering alone. No solution is credible without a political dimension and without encompassing the whole European architecture.

We need a new score: a federal solution.

I have spent a lot of time, passion and energy supporting the creation of a federal Europe; not for ideological reasons but simply because I do not know any other system capable of allowing 500 million people – belonging to different nations, cultures, religions and speaking a multitude of languages – to live together in freedom and diversity in the 21st century.

Federalism does not mean that the central European government should become a Leviathan, as described by the frightening words of the Europhobes.

A couple of years ago, I proposed a “light federation”, an institutional model that would absorb no more than five percent of European gross domestic product (GDP) in order to finance specific government functions such as foreign and security policy, scientific research, trans-European networks and safety of commercial transactions, among others.

For instance, how can European governments provide adequate security, with fewer financial resources? Only a shared European defence system, with common, integrated armed forces, would enable us to get out of the corner into which tight budgetary constraints are confining us. European governments are reluctant to take decisive steps towards this goal. The consequences of that reluctance are fragmented initiatives, wasted resources and a growing irrelevance of European influence on the world stage.

The same applies to scientific research, a field where national programmes are often too small to be productive and compete successfully with the huge projects of the other global powers.

The 2014 European parliamentary elections will be a significant test. If we want to prevent the risk of an over-representation of populist parties, we need to put federal Europe at the centre stage of the electoral campaign. The pro-Europe political families should present their own candidate for the presidency of the European Commission and submit political agendas for the future of the EU, stressing that a federal solution would save significant financial resources. So, the federalist perspective could assume concrete meaning for all citizens, avoiding the risk of being perceived as an abstract juridical matter.

In 2014, exactly a century after the murder of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo that led to the destruction of Europe, we will have another opportunity to give a new impetus to the federal project, under the Italian presidency of the EU. And after 2014, a review of the treaties could give European citizens a stronger sense of ownership of our common institutions and ensure an easier coexistence between countries in the eurozone and the other member states.

If Europe does not solve its problems of recession and populism, we could lose all that we have achieved since the 1950s, with no estimate of how long it will take to regain the same level of democracy, prosperity and stability as before. But if we adopt a new vision, engage our citizens and unite our governments, we could start a new phase of boosting growth and fostering democratic legitimacy and global influence.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, May 6 2013 (IPS)

The European Union (EU) has asked its citizens to brace for further economic misery. In a report on European economic prospects released on May 3, the European Commission said that further deterioration is expected to last at least until 2015. But, as every such report says, things will then get better.

Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and publisher of Other News. Credit: IPS

Unemployment in the euro area is expected to climb to 12.2 percent this year, up from 11.4 percent last year. In Spain, unemployment will rise to 27 percent, up from the 25 percent of last year; in Portugal it will rise from 15.9 to 18.9 percent; and after three brutal years of suffering, in Greece it will climb by 2.7 percent to 27 percent.

The trend will be devastating for young people: in Spain alone, it is estimated that 52 percent of young people will be without a job. We are creating a generation that will probably never get back on track.

The same trend is also unfolding in the rich countries of northern Europe. The German economy is expected to grow this year by a mere 0.4 percent, and from Austria to the Netherlands, the picture is one of decline.

This crisis is sapping the foundations and the identity of Europe. Since the end of the Second World War, Europeans have come to expect a social safety net that would cushion the less fortunate until they were able to spring back to work and dignity. Compared with the American dream, in which anybody could achieve the highest economic and social status through individual effort, without meddling by the state, the European dream was very different.

Now, however, most economists agree that this dream has become very distant because there is no way that the economy can lift that many people any longer. In Europe, austerity is eliminating the social safety net.

But while the United States and Japan have taken the road of economic stimulus, injecting massive quantities of money into their systems every month, and already with some visible results, Europe has taken the opposite direction. The European policy is to cut public spending and raise taxes simultaneously as the recipe for eliminating deficits. And, despite clearly available facts and the declarations of some accepting the need for growth, this policy is not changing.

Besides losing its gloss, the EU is fostering a growing resentment. On the same day the European Commission report was released, the strongly anti-Europe United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) registered a major success by taking 25 percent of the votes cast in local elections in the United Kingdom. Similar parties are sprouting everywhere, from Belgium to the Netherlands, from Austria to Finland. And, for the first time, a similar party in Germany is now running on a platform to leave the Euro.

The lack of effective leaders who are up to the task is allowing the cracks in Europe’s foundations to grow. In Spain, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy enjoys a comfortable majority in parliament but is vilified every day by demonstrators throughout the country. In France, President François Hollande also enjoys a solid majority but he now has the approval of only 25 percent of the electorate. Portugal has an almost identical situation, Greece has a very strong anti-austerity and anti Europe party and Italy has a new government with an uncertain future.

Few realise that Italy is a special case of malfunctioning and lack of synchronism with Europe. The end of the Cold War led to the death of the modern Italian political parties, which were created and fuelled by the Cold War: the Communist Party and the Christian Democratic Party.

But in the creation of a new political system, an unparalleled event took place: Silvio Berlusconi, the richest man in Italy, with a powerful media empire, decided to enter politics to escape personal economic and judicial problems. He became a deft politician and ever since Italy has been split between pro-Berlusconians and anti-Berlusconians.

This latter camp has brought together the entire centre-left and left, and is unlike other European left-wing parties such as the Labour Party in England, the Social Democrats in Germany and the Socialist Party in France. Those parties predate the end of the Cold War, and were not built to counteract a one-person party like Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party. Out of this anomaly has emerged a new Italian political “party”, the Five Star Movement, again led very personally by a comedian-turned-politician, Beppe Grillo, which is also totally asynchronous with Europe. Until Berlusconi retires, Italy will remain split over him, and all elections will be inconclusive and bring no real political agenda to the centre of debate.

If the old generation of German pro-European leaders, like Helmut Kohl and Helmut Schmidt, were still there, it would probably try to educate the Germans on the values of Europe for Germany. Germans are deeply convinced that they should not put their wallets at the disposal of southern Europeans who work less, try to avoid paying taxes, have spent beyond their means and, instead of swallowing the bitter medicine, expect Germans taxpayers to bail them out.

But a study last year by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy found that, in 2011 alone, Germany was able to save the equivalent of 11.1 billion dollars. This was because it could borrow money at much cheaper rates than southern Europe. And last month, a study by Germany’s Bertelsmann Foundation claimed that to leave the euro would cost Germany the equivalent of some 1.6 trillion dollars over 13 years.

The whole of Europe is waiting to see what will happen in the September elections in Germany. The Social Democrats are less pro-austerity than Chancellor Angela Merkel, but in all probability she is going to win. Will she then change her stand against everybody, including even the International Monetary Fund, which is decrying the excesses of austerity? Nobody knows, but many hope.

Meanwhile, the world is not stopping to give Europe time to solve its internal weaknesses. Just read the report of the U.S. National Intelligence Council on global trends. Among others, the U.S., European and Japanese share of global income is projected to fall from 56 percent to 26 percent in 2030. Any further European decline would hasten those projections. So, time is not on Europe’s side.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Apr 24 2013 (IPS)

For a long time it was a given that while Europe was based on defending a more just society, with social values and solidarity, the United States was based on the glory of individualism and competition, and anything public was considered “socialist”.

Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency. Credit: IPS

One of the main accusations of the last electoral campaign in the U.S. was that Barack Obama had an unspoken design to transform the U.S. into another Europe, beginning with healthcare reform.

Well, it’s time for an update – the defenders of market fundamentalism are now in Europe.

At the last meeting of Ministers of Finance on Apr. 9, the freshly-appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew tried to convince Europeans to lessen their commitment to austerity as the best medicine for economic problems. The U.S. Treasury, together with the U.S. Federal Reserve, has launched a policy of economic stimulus, with concrete success.

Every month, the Federal Reserve alone is putting 80 billion dollars into the bond market. Incidentally, Japan is doing the same, on an even greater scale. Lew was met with a firm rejection: the best way to achieve growth in the long term (contrary to any evidence) is to cut deficits and reassure the markets, even at the cost of higher unemployment and social misery in the short term.

Europe’s most powerful minister, Germany’s Wolfgang Schauble, said: “Nobody in Europe sees this contradiction between fiscal consolidation and growth. We must stop this debate, which says that you have to choose between austerity and growth.”

He was echoed by the president of the European Union, Herman Van Rompuy: “There is no room for complacency. The European economies have a high level of debt, deep structural medium-term challenges, and short-term economic headwinds that we need to confront.”

"Share traders [are] both more reckless and more manipulative than psychopaths"
These short-term economic headwinds are the daily reality of all the countries of Southern Europe. Suffice it to point out that youth unemployment has climbed to 22 percent across Europe (Spain is close to 47 percent) to see that we are wasting a generation, which will have no access to a future pension or a house. Like it or not, a study by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) foresees that the generation now entering the labour market will retire with a pension of only 640 euro per month. Is that a sustainable society?

The reaction of British Prime Minister David Cameron to his country’s loss of Triple A status, was to reaffirm even more his commitment to austerity, including reductions in education and health spending. He conveniently used the funeral celebrations for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the forerunner of the dismantling of the welfare state, to place himself as the heir of the Iron Lady: TINA, There Is No Alternative.

Meanwhile, we now have the data for Cyprus. It is widely accepted that it will lose at least two percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in the coming months and the social impact will be dramatic. Soon, it will be obliged to ask for another bailout.

But under the new formula imposed by Germany, which is to make bank investors and depositors pay for the bailout, they have already lost 60 percent of their money. It will be interesting to see how Germany will find a way for a new bailout.

The Bank of Cyprus has already sold all its gold reserves. What will they now extort, the sale of houses? This is what is widely rumoured will be asked for in Spain and Italy, where citizens would pay a one-off amount and bank depositors would be taxed on their deposits as a condition for any European money.

At the same time, Germany sits comfortably on its trade surplus with Southern Europe, which has reached, according to the OECD, the magical amount of one trillion euro. And the bailouts to Greece, Portugal and Ireland were directed towards reimbursing bad German bank investments.

Yet, the situation of the banks and the volume of toxic titles they still possess are unclear. A number of figures circulate: what it is agreed is that banks still need money to stabilise. The case of Bankia in Spain is emblematic. The government has poured in 72 billion dollars, more than what it cut in health and education. Have the banks become wiser and less speculative now that they know that they will be bailed out anyhow?

The latest news from Wall Street is revealing. The banks that created risky amalgams of mortgages and loans – the so-called derivatives, which created the immense disaster that ignited the present crisis (with the added contribution of European bank speculation over sovereign titles) – are creating exactly the same instruments of risky speculation. Forgotten is the last crisis five years ago. In the last quarter alone, banks have issued 33.5 billion dollars in bonds backed by commercial mortgages and proven disastrous speculation is back, just like collateralised debt obligations.

The reason is simple. Unless banks are put back to the pre-Clinton era when deposit banks were rigidly separated from investment banks, all the money that goes to the banks will go first to speculation, which has a higher return (and if anything goes wrong the state will bail them out again), and then to deposits and loans, which have a much smaller return.

So, the traders specialised in those derivatives are being hired back by the banks.

Two experienced forensic experts working for a Swiss university have devised computer simulation and intelligence tests to measure the egoism of 28 professional financial traders, and to check their willingness to cooperate with others. They discovered that the share traders were both more reckless and more manipulative than psychopaths. Thomas Noll, a psychiatrist and a prison administrator, told Germany’s ‘Der Spiegel’ that the “more egoistic” traders “were more willing to take risks than a group of psychopaths who took the same test”.

What surprised the researchers was the competitive attitude of the financial traders, which had a destructive edge. Instead of being business-like and aiming to reach the highest profit, explained Noll, “it was most important to the traders to get more than their opponents, and they spent a lot of energy trying to damage their opponents”.

How many crises do we have to bear before regulations eliminate risks from the banks and they are confined to the world of speculation? Or, in other words, before regulations isolate normal citizens from traders who are not wired like us?

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

A Mar. 10 protest in Málaga, southern Spain, against unemployment and spending cuts. Courtesy of CCOO

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Mar 13 2013 (IPS)

“They wanted to hire me, and that was something that hadn’t ever happened to me before,” says Marta Seror, a 25-year-old college graduate from Spain who is now working in an outsourcing company in Poland.

Her story is similar to those of thousands of young people who are leaving crisis-stricken Spain because of the lack of job opportunities.

“I have spent three and a half months in this country, and I am seeing more and more people like me,” she tells IPS. “I feel like I was practically forced to accept a job outside of Spain, giving up my family and friends.”

She is now earning only 600 euros a month (780 dollars), “but this is an inexpensive country,” she says.

By the end of 2012, unemployment among young people under 25 reached 55 percent, amounting to 930,200 unemployed youths, according to Spain’s national statistics institute, INE.

Overall unemployment, which stands at a record high of 26 percent, or 5.9 million people, is the highest in the European Union.

“The cutbacks in education, research and science have made it impossible to start a scientific career in Spain,” says David, a 33-year-old with a doctorate in biology.

“We’re forced to emigrate to other countries,” he writes from South Africa in the on-line campaign “No nos vamos, nos echan” (nonosvamosnosechan.net – “We’re not leaving – they’re kicking us out”) launched by the group Juventud Sin Futuro (Youth without a Future).

The organisation was created in April 2011 by the Student Movement of Madrid, one of the groups that organised the protests that began on Mar. 15, 2011 and gave rise to the 15 Marzo or 15M Movement.

The aim of the campaign is to protest the “forced exile” of young people from Spain, put a face on the statistics, and weave networks among young people at home and abroad, in order to struggle together to change things.

“I really want the situation to change, although I’m not confident that it will in the short term,” Seror comments to IPS.

Eduardo González, a 23-year-old with a degree in journalism who belongs to Juventud Sin Futuro, tells IPS that the flood of young people leaving the country is a result of the economic crisis and austerity policies in areas like education and health.

“On one hand they cut spending and on the other they use millions of euros to rescue the banks,” he complains.

In just a few weeks, the campaign has managed to gather, on an interactive global map, 6,000 brief accounts of young people living in Spain and abroad. The stories are accessed by clicking on a yellow dot.

“I’ve only found jobs as an intern since I finished my studies,” González says. But while he protests the precarious working conditions in Spain, he also notes that “the great majority” of young people who have moved abroad have not found “a job paradise” there either, only poorly paid work, and not in their professions.

José is a doctor working as a waiter and tour guide in the Dominican Republic, and Gemma is a designer working as a ski instructor in Iceland, they say on the nonosvamosnosechan.net web site.

Seror, who has a degree in physical sciences, didn’t hesitate to accept a job in the Polish city of Lodz that has nothing to do with her studies, because of the poor prospects at home and “to put an end to the routine of getting up every day in my mom’s house, sending in CVs without receiving any response, and feeling depressed,” she says.

Now she is a process executive in the Polish branch of an outsourcing company from India, she says.

According to the INE, unemployment has affected young women slightly less than young men: 53.89 percent compared to 56.24 percent.

But all of them face the same problem: the fact that they have not paid into the social security system, which means they are not eligible for unemployment benefits, unlike older jobless people.

Other challenges they share are a late start in entering the social security system and long periods earning the low wages paid to an intern or working in the black market.

Juventud Sin Futuro is organising Apr. 7 demonstrations in cities around Spain and in front of the country’s embassies abroad, to show that young people are fed up.

“It’s time for us to organise, people who have been forced to move abroad as well as those who haven’t done so,” the group says on its web site and social networking sites like Facebook.

On Mar. 7, the government of right-wing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced the creation of “mini-jobs” for people under 30, which were introduced in Germany in 2003 to encourage the hiring and training of young workers part-time.

The contracts are temporary and for a maximum of 15 hours a week, with monthly salaries of around 400 euros (520 dollars).

Six out of 10 young people in Spain between the ages of 22 and 30 are in favour of mini-jobs, according to a survey carried out by the My World company, whose results were announced on Mar. 4 by the Cadena Ser radio station.

“When it’s a choice between not having anything and earning 400 euros, people accept these contracts,” says González, who has not ruled out seeking work outside Spain when his current nine-month contract as an intern ends.

Different voices have been raised against the labour reform approved by the Rajoy administration, which allows small and medium companies to lay off workers for no reason and with no severance pay during the first year of their contract. They say it opens the door to legalising precarious, temporary work.

The majority of the people who posted brief accounts on the interactive map are between the ages of 23 and 28, although “there are also some who are pushing 40, because the problem doesn’t just affect young people. Forced exile affects the entire populace,” says González.

Vicente Ortí, a 45-year-old journalist with 25 years of experience in the press and television, works in the capital of the Dominican Republic and is pessimistic about the future of young professionals in Spain.

“I left for the same reason that thousands of people are leaving – because of the lack of work: Spain, in labour terms, is in ruins,” Ortí tells IPS.

“That’s where I sleep,” says Fernando, indicating a puddled area under a bridge. A 62-year-old Portuguese citizen, he has lived in Spain for 15 years, and he is part of the growing number of homeless people in this country wracked by a merciless economic and financial crisis.

Homeless people share experiences near a shelter in Málaga, Spain

In 2008, there were 11,844 homeless people in Spain, but by 2012 the number had risen to 22,238, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE), which only counts people who have used homeless shelters, meaning the real number could well be higher.

Fernando*, a man wearing a full beard, walks slowly, pulling a small red cart containing two boxes of wine and a nearly empty bottle of water. He does not want to live in a hostel for the homeless, in spite of having bad legs and the weather being very cold.

He is divorced and has grown-up children. He begs from customers at the two big shopping centres in the southern city of Málaga, where people’s life stories mirror those in other Spanish cities.

Most homeless people, at one time or another, go to a shelter or soup kitchen, Toñi Martín, a member of the Street Unit team, a service provided by the local government for homeless people living on the streets, told IPS. But a small minority chooses to live on the streets, rejecting all help.

The reasons people end up on the streets are myriad. Forty-five percent say they lost their jobs; 26 percent say they could not afford to continue to pay their rent; 20.9 percent broke up with their partners and 12.1 percent were evicted from their homes, according to an INE survey published last December.

“The crisis hasn’t affected people who were already homeless, but instead those who were just keeping their heads above water and have now gone under,” Rosa Martínez, the head of the municipal reception centre for the homeless, told IPS.

Previously these people had managed to keep going, but when they were battered by the crisis, their family support networks fell apart, she said.

Martínez, who runs the 108-bed centre, says that in recent years the number of homeless people has grown and their profile has changed. “Now we are seeing entire families on the streets, people who are unable to pay the rent,” she says.

“We are seeing an increase in families, mostly single-parent families (women with children) who come to our network asking for some kind of help,” says a report by Puerta Única, a public agency coordinating care for homeless people in a diversified network of centres in Málaga.

The unemployment rate in Spain is just over 25 percent of the economically active population, and half of the youth. This month international bodies have forecast that the country’s economy will be even worse off this year than in 2012.

In the face of the crisis, the government of rightwing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has applied severe budget cuts, but it is difficult to draw a national portrait of how these measures have affected care services for homeless people.

Central government funds are spent through accords with the country’s different local governments. In some provinces (autonomous communities) “the administration is firmly committed while in others, there are difficulties”, sources at Caritas, a Catholic church body that is a leader in providing care for the socially excluded, told IPS.

“There will be no downsizing of funds in Málaga this year,” Martínez said.

According to INE, nearly 46 percent of homeless people are foreigners, like Hans, a burly German who can barely mumble a few words of Spanish.

Another case is a 51-year-old Latin American who prefers to remain anonymous. He is trying to escape a history of alcohol addiction and accusations of abusing his spouse, as a result of which he was forced into the shelter where he now sleeps, in spite of having studied at university and following, for a while, a professional career.

INE statistics show that 11.8 percent of homeless people have some higher education and 60.3 percent have secondary schooling.

Many homeless foreigners, especially those originally from Morocco, went back to their own countries because of the precarious employment situation, Paula de Santos, a social worker at the municipal reception centre, told IPS. “They can’t find jobs picking olives and strawberries, as they did before,” she said.

A large proportion are people with alcohol and drug problems, but some people are not addicts; they have just been unemployed for a long time and their unemployment benefits have run out, says Martín, as he is taken around the streets in a white van by his driver, Pepe, looking for what they affectionately call their “guys and gals”.

Martín persuaded Dolores, a 61-year-old woman, to go and live in the shelter where she now sleeps and gets three meals a day.

She left her partner who abused her and shared her addiction to alcohol. “I had a shower all by myself, holding on to the tap, because sometimes I get dizzy,” she told IPS, beaming with pride, a smile lighting up her lined face.

Thirty-two percent of people who were homeless in 2012 lost their homes that same year, while 44.5 percent had been homeless for over three years, according to INE.

“Some people have made living on the streets their way of life. It has become a chronic situation; they survive this way, and it is hard for them to change their lifestyle,” said Martínez.

When it comes to these people who find living a normal life difficult, “We try at least to ensure that they maintain minimum standards of hygiene,” Martín said.

People who became homeless most recently make the most use of social services, Martínez said. For instance, Jesús, who served a 10-year prison sentence, told IPS outside the shelter where he sleeps that he has been on the streets since he was released on Dec. 27.

Homeless people are a mobile population, and this also works against them, because a fixed address is required for receiving some benefits. “Sometimes we let them register at the municipal reception centre,” said de Santos.

* Surnames of some sources have been omitted in this article.

A youth smokes diamba (marijuana) at a gang base in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/IPS

By Tommy Trenchard
FREETOWN, Jan 9 2013 (IPS)

The air is heavy with the smell of marijuana as Gibrilla (23) expertly rolls a large joint at the Members of Blood (M.O.B) gang base in a poor neighbourhood of Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown.

He is part of a generation of young people faced with a chronic shortage of jobs, many of whom have turned to routine drug use as a way to pass the time and deal with the stresses of life in what is still one of the poorest countries in the world.

“Most of the young guys smoke diamba (marijuana) here,” says Gibrilla, gesturing towards the slum neighbourhood of Susan’s Bay. He says he has been smoking since he was 11, and usually smokes about 15 joints every day. “I have my first one at about five o’clock in the morning when I wake up,” he told IPS. “It makes me feel good.”

Sierra Leone’s high unemployment rate is fuelling a culture of drug use among the country’s urban youth. Experts say the trend is responsible for acts of violent crime, while medical practitioners are concerned about serious health repercussions for long-term users, which the country is poorly equipped to address.

In another part of the city, Patrick, who estimates his age as “twenty-something”, swigs from a plastic sachet of gin as he talks of his relationship with drugs.

“I use cocaine, marijuana, brown-brown (heroin) and liquor,” he told IPS. “I did not choose to live like this. I was living the street life…sometimes I did not even have somewhere to sleep. I had nothing.”

Patrick now feels he needs drugs and alcohol just to get through the day. “I feel hopeless when I don’t have them,” he explains.

His friend Alimu, heavily tattooed, with the initials of his gang shaved into his hair, speaks of a similar dependence. “I don’t want to stop,” he says. “I need it now.”

Alimu is not sure how much he takes every day, only that he spends all the money he can get on drugs and alcohol.

Assistant Superintendent of the Sierra Leone Police Force, Ibrahim Samura, says he is alarmed by the “spate of drug abuse and addiction”.

“It is worse than before…amphetamines, cannabis and heroin are all a problem,” he says, adding that cannabis is the most widely available. “Cannabis is now grown in almost every district. In some places in the north it is even used as a currency for barter.”

Samura says that there was a large increase in drug use and addiction during and after the country’s eleven-year civil war. “People used drugs to deal with the stress of war,” he explains.

Dr. Edward Nahim at his clinic in central Freetown. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/IPS

Dr. Edward Nahim has been working on drug and mental health issues in Sierra Leone for over 40 years. He agrees that the problem is, to some extent, linked to the civil war. “The conflict itself might be a contributing factor, because once you’ve learnt bad habits it becomes difficult (to stop).”

But he also says that drug addiction in Sierra Leone is tied to a lack of job opportunities. “It is more common amongst the unemployed vagrants, because they don’t have any work to do. (They) are the ones who spend most of their time in the…drug abuse bases or ghettos,” he says.

Impoverished and traumatised youth even use drugs just to “kill boredom”, Samura says.

Youth unemployment in Sierra Leone stands at a staggering 70 percent, according to the World Bank, and many drug users in Freetown say that if the government provides jobs for them, they will no longer feel the need to use drugs and alcohol.

“If I have a job I will stop smoking,” says Gibrilla. “But when I don’t go to work in the morning I just sit down and smoke diamba.”

Ibrahim Jones, a Susan’s Bay resident sporting a ‘Fight Against Drugs’ wristband, also thinks reducing unemployment is crucial to addressing drug use. “People smoke because there are no jobs,” he confirmed.

Samura says he is concerned about the relationship between illegal drugs and violent crime. He sees drug use as closely related to an increase in “gangsterism” in Sierra Leone.

“There are over 250 criminal gangs in this country,” he told IPS, displaying a list with names such as ‘Gang Killers’, ‘Blood Drain’, ‘Hisbola’ and ‘Da Elusive Thugs’.

He believes drug use “spurs them to behave abnormally and do things they wouldn’t do in their right senses.” On drugs, these young people “have the guts to kill, they’ll be brave (enough) to stab.”

The combination of high-grade cannabis and other drugs, together with cheap but potent local liquor, is also having severe mental health repercussions for long-term users.

“Drug abuse is a big problem in psychiatry in Sierra Leone today,” says Nahim, who runs a small mental health clinic in Freetown. He says around 80 percent of his patients, all of whom are between the ages of 10 and 35 years, are suffering from drug-induced psychotic disorders.

“By the time they get to about 40 years they are dead from the physical and psychological complications of these drugs,” he admits.

He adds that the problem is worst with young men, “but the girls are catching up now”.

Sierra Leone lacks the means to effectively treat such victims of drug and alcohol-induced psychosis. Nahim uses what he calls the “cold-turkey method” to treat addicts, physically restraining them and administering “very strong tranquilising drugs” for sedation. “Then after ten days it’s over,” he says.

But relapse rates are high. After treatment there are few safeguards to prevent patients slipping back into drug use.

City of Rest Rehabilitation Centre  is one of only a handful of establishments catering to drug users and the mentally ill on a longer-term basis. More than half of its 40 inpatients are suffering from drug-related problems.

It is run by Pastor Morie Ngobeh, who uses religion and counselling to treat individuals with drug-induced mental conditions. “We rely on prayer, for God to renew their minds,” he says.

Abdulai Bah’s family admitted him to City of Rest to deal with his chronic alcoholism. It is the second time he has been a patient there, but he feels that with a job waiting for him he will be able to stay off alcohol when he leaves in January.

“Some of my relatives promised to help me start my own business. If I start to get myself engaged, I will not drink alcohol again,” he says with conviction.

(END)

Young female market vendors at a fish stall. Female youth unemployment in South East Asia and the Pacific region is 14.2 percent. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
BRISBANE, Australia, Nov 26 2012 (IPS)

With youth populations growing faster than jobs in the Pacific Islands, young women, who are also confronting social pressures to conform to traditional gender roles, account for the highest rates of unemployment in most countries.

Female youth unemployment in South East Asia and the Pacific region is 14.2 percent, compared to 12.9 percent for males, while less than 35 percent of women aged 20-29 years in the Solomon Islands, Marshall Islands and Samoa are officially employed.

In Vanuatu, located west of Fiji in the South Pacific and with a population of roughly 246,000, the greatest gender-labour disparities are in urban areas, such as the capital, Port Vila, where only 43 percent of women are employed.

Men dominate jobs in both the private and government sectors.  Sixty-one percent of government employees, numbering 6,500 people, are male, while only 39 percent are female.

Though the majority of residents, known as Ni-Vanuatu, live in rural areas and practice subsistence agriculture, rapid urbanisation has contributed to a youth unemployment rate of 9.2 percent compared to the national figure of 4.6 percent.

The number rises to 27 percent in towns, where Ni-Vanuatu women are over-represented in jobs like cleaning, sales and service work.

Kathy Solomon, director of the Vanuatu Rural Development Training Centre Association, which trains young people in vocational and life skills and promotes gender equality, told IPS that young women face multiple challenges in securing employment, especially in the formal sector.

“There is still a cultural barrier set by the expectation that women will fill traditional gender roles,” Solomon explained.  “Also, not many women are really qualified to get high positions in the government or private sector and they are not very confident amongst male colleagues.”

The impact of unemployment is “evident in the high (rates) of domestic violence and abuse against women”, she claimed.

“Men believe that because they are the breadwinners they can do anything to women. Young women who can’t find work often become depressed and are more likely to get involved in prostitution and become heavy kava drinkers.”

Youth bulge in the Pacific Islands

Worldwide, and especially in the Pacific Islands region, young people are three times more likely to be out of work than adults. Amidst the fallout of the global economic crisis, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) – which predicts youth unemployment will continue to rise in South East Asia and the Pacific – has warned governments to prevent against the emergence of a ‘lost generation’ who may never reap the benefits of productive, remunerated work.

The region’s ‘youth bulge’ is a consequence of rapid population growth.  Twenty percent of the Pacific Islands’ population of 10 million falls between the ages of 20 and 24 years.  Regional youth unemployment is estimated at 6.6 percent, although this figure omits those in casual, low-paid or subsistence occupations.

The struggle to find jobs is exacerbated by inequitable economic growth, especially in Melanesia; geographic isolation and limited land resources in Micronesia; and narrow economies in Polynesia.

Educational curricula in many Pacific Island states have also given priority to office-based skills, resulting in many young people being unequipped for vocational trades or local industries, such as tourism.

In the competition for local jobs, young women frequently come up against the mindset that their ‘rightful place’ is in the home, even when statistics show that female participation in education – particularly in places like Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Samoa and Tuvalu – is higher than for males.

“It might be said that female unemployment has more to do with cultural attitudes that do not value female participation in politics and decision-making in the community, institutions and at the national level,” Mereia Carling, youth advisor for the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) in Fiji, commented to IPS.

“Other aspects of gender inequality in the education system – such as the fact that girls are often steered toward home economics and boys toward technology – may contribute to low female employment rates,” Carling added.

“So while girls are being sent to school, it appears that overall traditional attitudes still determine futures for young women.”

Tarusila Bradburgh, coordinator of the Pacific Youth Council, predicts that changes in cultural attitudes will take a long time, even though in countries like Fiji a large number of girls are completing school, receiving scholarships and attending tertiary institutions.

“Young women are slowly breaking boundaries particularly in male-dominated fields like engineering and civil aviation, but it is slow progress,” she said to IPS. “Until mindsets and attitudes towards women change, progress and change will be very slow.”

Other consequences of female youth unemployment in the region include poverty, crime, alcohol and drug addiction, prostitution and adolescent pregnancies.

The birth rate amongst 15-19 year-old girls is 138 births per 1,000 females in the Marshall Islands, 67 per 1,000 females in the Solomon Islands and 64 for every 1,000 young women in Vanuatu.  In these circumstances, women often drop out of school and become financially dependent on their extended families if they are unable to find jobs.

According to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), lost productivity in the region due to low labour participation by women is somewhere between the range of 42 and 47 billion dollars every year.

The SPC believes that sectors with the potential to boost youth employment include agriculture, forestry, fisheries, the environment, tourism and culture.

The Pacific Youth Charter, drafted in 2006 by regional youth delegates, identifies the need to advance entrepreneurial skills in young people and increase access to diverse job opportunities across the Pacific.

Bradburgh added that young women, in particular, need “to be provided with life skills training which will help build their self-confidence and decision-making (abilities)”.

Matching education and skills training with employment growth areas will be crucial for the next generation to reach its full potential and contribute to development across the region.

A riot policeman in Greece attacks a protester during an anti-austerity rally in Athens. Credit: PIAZZA del POPOLO/CC-BY-2.0

By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Nov 16 2012 (IPS)

The austerity programmes being rolled out in virtually every member state of the European Union (EU) – particularly in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy – have failed to reach their stated objective of consolidating public finances in order to solve sovereign debt crises.

Instead, these programmes – which entail massive public spending cuts in sectors such as education, health and governance – are “leading to collective folly” and even to “a social breakdown” across the continent, according to numerous economic experts.

Far from solving the debt crisis, as promised, the current fiscal consolidation plans will result in higher debt-GDP ratios in the EU in 2013, according to recent research.

Several reports have now confirmed what economists and activists warned months and even years ago: that the economic crisis, triggered by the financial collapse of 2007-2008 and the subsequent state-sponsored bailout of banks and investment funds, has resulted in higher unemployment and poverty rates in every country.

According to figures published by the official European statistics office, Eurostat, youth unemployment in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain is presently above 30 percent.

The situation is particularly difficult in Greece, where youth unemployment has more than doubled since 2008, to reach 55.4 percent in 2012. In Spain, where a 37 percent youth unemployment rate was the norm in 2008, the crisis has rendered over 50 percent of the youth labour force jobless.

Further deterioration of the social climate in Greece, where unions have orchestrated a wave of general strikes against yet another bout of state budget cuts, this time worth 17 billion dollars, augurs ill for the future of the Union under the shadow of austerity.

In its newest Global Prospects Report, released on Nov. 5, the London-based Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) predicts that the Eurozone recession will continue through 2013, with only “marginal growth … likely” in 2014.

According to the CEBR, the outlook is particularly calamitous in Greece, Italy, and Spain, with negative economic growth prospects. The report forecasts contractions of gross domestic product (GDP) in all three countries for 2013, of seven, 1.8, and 2.2 percent respectively.

“The economic situation in some parts of Europe is moving from bad to catastrophic,” Douglas McWilliams, chief executive of CEBR and a co‐author of the report, told IPS. “There is a danger that the economic problems will spill over into social breakdown in many areas of Europe as unemployment soars and governments run out of money.”

Yet another analysis of the economic and social situation in Europe, released Nov. 1 and authored by two leading economists at the London-based National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), goes even further, arguing that the austerity programmes across the continent are “self-defeating”.

The NIESR’s most benign scenario for 2013 forecasts a worsening of the present depression. According to their calculations, the austerity programmes will have a negative impact on the debt-growth ratios of 8.9 percent in Greece, 7.7 percent in Portugal, 4.2 percent in Spain, and 1.9 percent in Italy.

Jonathan Portes, co-author of the study, told IPS that his analysis of the present fiscal policies in Europe leads to the conclusion that “while in ‘normal times’, fiscal consolidation would lead to a fall in debt-GDP ratios, in current circumstances…fiscal consolidation is indeed likely to be ‘self-defeating’ for the EU collectively.”

Youth hit hard by austerity

In a study released late October, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound), an autonomous body of the EU, emphasised, “The immediate future of Europe depends upon the 94 million Europeans aged between 15 and 29.”

According to the study, the youth unemployment rate was 33.6 percent (or 19.5 million people) in 2011, “the lowest level ever recorded in the history of the European Union”.

However, there is huge variation between EU member states, with rates varying from below 7 percent in Luxembourg and the Netherlands, to above 17 percent in Bulgaria, Ireland, Italy, and Spain.

“The consequences of a lost generation are not merely economic,” the Eurofound report warns, “but are societal, with the risk of young people opting out of democratic participation in society.”

The drain of an unproductive youth force – in terms of lost output – amounts to some 153 billion euros annually, or 1.2 percent of the EU’s GDP, according to the Eurofound report.

Stefano Scarpetta, deputy director for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), charged that Europe was “failing in its social contract” with the young, and warned that political disenchantment could reach levels similar to those that sparked the North African uprisings that have been dubbed the Arab Spring.

According to a report released last May by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), unemployment among young people in North Africa jumped five percentage points in 2011, to 27.9 percent.

“North Africa and the Middle East stand out in terms of their overall unemployment problem and these are the only two regions where the unemployment rate exceeded 10 percent in 2011 for the population aged 15 and above,” according to the ILO.

That situation is now true in various EU member states, where discontent has emerged in the form of ‘indignados’ in Spain and mass youth mobilisations in Portugal, Greece, and elsewhere in Southern Europe.

Peter Matjasic, president of the European Youth Forum, the representative body of more than 90 national youth councils and international youth NGOs, urged the EU to make the European “vision (of a social democratic society) a reality for a generation.”

Matjasic also demanded that expectations raised by the bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize upon the EU this year be fulfilled. “The Nobel committee (talked) of the success of the ‘European dream’ and European leaders this week spoke about strengthening it. But without investing in youth now, it is in danger of becoming a lost dream.”

(END)