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By Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
SINGAPORE, Jul 21 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Singaporeans went to polls on Friday the 10th of July. It was a crisis election, seen as the most significant since the country’s independence in 1965, given the backdrop of the COVID 19 pandemic and its massive negative impact on the economy on this small but wealthy island republic. Out of a population of nearly 5.85 million on election day, the number of registered voters stood at 2.65 million. It was no surprise that in a nation with a reputation of unmatchable discipline, the voting was an orderly process. In conformity with rules each voter was masked, safe distancing was scrupulously maintained, and their hands were sanitized as they entered the booths. The elderly, who needed it, were provided assistance. The electorate returned what has been assessed as a sophisticated, calibrated and mature outcome. It re-elected the incumbent People’s Action Party (PAP) to power with a sufficiently strong enough mandate to help it pull the nation out of the crisis. At the same time, it also created a diversity in the legislature that would ensure that the government did not have a blank cheque for unrestricted authority.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury

The PAP, led by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong won 83 of the 93 seats contested, with its popular support showing 61.24 percent, 8.7 points down from its 69.9 per cent share in the 2015 elections. However, it must be remembered that 2015 was a jubilee Year for Singapore, which also saw the death of the ever-popular founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, father of Lee Hsien Loong, a fact that gave the PAP a sentimental bump in the polls. But the current result for the party was better than its showing in 2011 elections when it had only 61.1 per cent of the votes, its worst ever performance. The PAP, it must be noted, has ruled Singapore continuously for six decades, seen the country through a number of crises but most importantly, raised the island state from the third world to the level of a first world nation , one of the world’s richest. Indeed, today Singapore’s economy is generally ranked as the most open in the world, one of the least corrupt, with low tax rates, and with the third highest per capita gross domestic product the globe in terms of purchasing power parity.

One critique, that surfaced during the campaign, however, was the question of inequitable wealth distribution. This was a major thrust of the principal opposition platform, the Worker’s Party (WP), led by Pritam Singh, a bright and urbane political luminary, with impressive academic and leadership credentials. The PAP has consistently maintained that the Progressive Wage Model, currently mandatory in many sectors, works well for Singapore. The WP on the other hand has pitched for a national minimum wage, arguing that it ensures a baseline level of income for all, and signals the inherent dignity of labour in Singapore. Singh also insisted that the government becomes more responsive to people’s concerns when it loses seats. While for a variety of reasons the PAP’s return was a certainty, the key element was with what numbers. Singh’s WP contested for 21 seats, and secured 10, the best performance by any opposition party in Singapore’s electoral history. It was obvious that some of the points of the opposition had resonated with the electorate. Two other parties participated in the hustings: the Progressive Singapore Party (PSP) of the veteran opposition politician, Tan Cheng Bok, and the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) of Dr Chee Soon Juan. They put up a nail-bitingly close fights in several constituencies, but in the end failed to win any.

The campaign itself was conducted on-line, with well -organized structured debates, and avoiding crowds in line with current public health guide- lines. There were some interesting debates. The PAP positioned itself as the best party to lead the country out of the Covid crisis, as they had done in the case of other adverse situations before. They referred to the massive governmental fiscal injections of amounts totaling S $ 92 billion across four budgets to help the recovery process, tapping the country’s war-chest of reserves. Yet due the lock-down jobs were lost, and many companies folded. The PAP might have paid some price for it. Also, the government received some flak for the large number of infections in foreign worker’s dormitories, 45, 000 cases in total, as also for the pre-existing unsatisfactory living conditions there. What went in the PAP’s favour was the low number of deaths, only 26 in all, and the medical servicing, undoubtedly one of the best in the world. An interesting debate that drew some attention was an SDP claim that Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat, Lee Hsien Loong’s successor down the line, had publicly toyed with the idea of raising the island’s population to 10 million by bringing in more foreigner. The government quickly reacted by denying it. During the campaign WP projected itself as a moderate and rational entity, and largely desisted from criticizing the government’s role in the handling of the Covid issue, which, given the complexity of the crisis, reflected a pragmatic line of thinking. The WP’s success in bagging the largest number of seats for any opposition party in Singapore’s electoral history, doubling its number of 5 from the last polls to 10 in this one, seemed to be a result of prudent politics.

Singaporeans have no doubt that their government is better able to deliver in terms of good governance than most others around the world. Yet they have some concerns that they needed to demonstrate to the government, which they did by clawing back on some support. Prime Minister Lee Hsieng Loong took note. Viewing the results as a renewal of “a clear mandate”, he nevertheless, saw them as reflecting “the pain and anxiety the Singaporeans feel in this crisis”, also resulting in” a desire for more diversity”. Lee offered Singh the official designation of ‘Leader of Opposition’ another first in Singapore politics. Singh accepted with thanks, and also displayed all intentions of helping make the Parliament a robust forum for constructive deliberations.

With the elections behind him, which was a constitutional requirement time wise, and now armed with a fresh mandate, Lee will turn to addressing issues on hand largely unimpeded. Singapore has a unique system of transferring leadership from one generation to another, priming the new- comers for the responsibilities for a period of time. His own generation is called ‘3 G’ or the third generation of leaders, and Heng Swee Keat and his team, a younger lot, ‘4 G’, or fourth generation. There would be no need for any other election for Lee to seamlessly transfer the baton to Heng, who has proved himself a sharp intellect , efficient manager and a tireless worker despite a health hiccup some time ago,, but it will not happen just yet. This came through when Lee said to at a post- polls press briefing: “I will use this mandate responsibly through the crisis to deal with Covid 19 and the economic downturn and to take us safely through this crisis and beyond”. This could mean the transition might need to wait another one and half to two years. The time will most certainly be well used.

So, politically and economically, Singapore is on a post-Covid path to recovery. It will organize itself domestically to prepare to re-engage the outside world, with which this free-economy is so interconnected, when the others begin to open up as China has. Even prior to the pandemic, Asian economies were on the rise. The manner in which Covid19 has impacted on the US and European economies, and revealed some of their structural weaknesses, with Asia ( particularly South-East and East Asia) doing a much better job handling it, the crisis is like to provide even a greater fillip to Asia in the future. There will be an obvious role for Singapore for it, notwithstanding the current technical recession. A possible scenario beyond the rim of the saucer is ‘a flying geese’ paradigm for Asian economies, with China in the lead, and others like Singapore closely following. Of course, there are existing intra-mural political and security issues among them, which will require some deft diplomatic handling.

Singapore will also look out for new partners in other regions including in neighbouring South Asia. Bangladesh has the potentials for being one such. While the Pandemic is still a huge issue which Bangladesh is grappling with at this point in time, there will still be an afterwards. The fundamentals in Bangladesh are perhaps stronger than most other countries in the region. Singapore has vast experience of China, and China has huge investments in Bangladesh, with more in the pipeline. Logically Singapore could be an effective learning and functioning conduit between the two, both between companies and governments. Singapore also has large sovereign funds looking to potential investments. Bangladeshi businesses must learn that Singapore is much more than just a medical-tourism destination. During a visit to Singapore two years ago, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina offered lands for a Special Economic Zone for Singaporean investors. It is now time to resuscitate that project.

John F Kennedy used to say that in Chinese the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters, the one representing ‘danger’ and the other ‘opportunity’. He was wrong, for it does not. But what is right is that human efforts can actually create the correlation. Properly handled, the kite does rise against the wind.

This story was originally published by Dhaka Courier.

The post Singaporeans Opt for Continuity in Polls: ‘Strong Mandate’ for Government, but ‘no Blank Cheque’! appeared first on Inter Press Service.

72-year-old Ogiek community elder, Cosmas Chemwotei Murunga, inspects one of the trees felled by foreigners in 1976. Ogiek community protests put an end to government approved logging of the indigenous red cedar trees here. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
CHEPKITALE, Kenya , Jul 21 2020 (IPS)

The Ogiek community, indigenous peoples from Kenya’s Chepkitale National Reserve, are in the process of implementing a modern tool to inform and guide the conservation and management of the natural forest. The community has inhabited this area for many generations, long before Kenya was a republic. Through this process, they hope to get the government to formally recognise their customary tenure in line with the Community Land Act.

In collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), community elders, civil society members and representatives from the 32 clans that form the Chepkitale Ogiek community are mapping their ancestral territory using a methodology known as Participatory 3-Dimensional Modelling (P3DM).

Technically speaking, P3DM or 3D maps brings together three elements that were previously considered impossible to integrate – local spatial and natural resource knowledge, geographic information systems (GIS) and physical modelling.

“The mapping will support the spatial planning and management of the Chepkitale National Reserve by identifying actions required to address the various challenges affecting the management and conservation of the natural resources in the targeted area,” John Owino, Programme Officer for the Water and Wetlands Programme at IUCN, told IPS.

The process, which started in 2018, involves extensive dialogue with community members in order to document their history, indigenous knowledge of forest conservation and protection of natural resources using their traditional laws and geographical territories.

According to IUCN, which is providing both technical and financial support, the exercise was projected to be completed by the end of 2020. However, this target will be delayed as a result of the prevailing coronavirus pandemic.

Some of the Ogiek’s unique traditional community laws recorded in the participatory mapping exercise state that charcoal burning is totally prohibited, poaching is strictly forbidden and commercial farming is considered illicit.

“In this community, we relate with trees and nature the same way we relate with humans. Felling a mature tree in our culture is synonymous to killing a parental figure,” Cosmas Chemwotei Murunga, a 72-year-old community elder, told IPS. “Why should you cut down a tree when you can harvest its branches and use them for whatever purpose?” he posed.

Very famously, in 1976, the Ogiek community protests put an end to government-approved logging of the indigenous red cedar trees here.

The trees, felled some 44 years ago, still lie perfectly untouched on the ground in Loboot village.

The Ogiek indigenous community who live in Kenya’s Mount Elgon forest have conserved the forest’s natural ecosystem for centuries. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

While the Ogiek are an asset to the conservation of the forested area within the park, their dispute with the government over their rights to the forested land has been a long-running one.

• There have been several attempts by the government to evict the community from the forest, following the gazetting of the entire Ogiek community land as the ‘Chepkitale National Reserve in Mount Elgon,’ which made the land they live on a protected area from the year 2000.
• Since then, police officers invaded the Ogiek community land several times, torching their houses, destroying their property and forcefully driving them away from the forest.
• But in 2008, the community, through Chepkitale Indigenous People Development Project (CIPDP) — a community based organisation that brings together all Ogiek community members — went to court for arbitration. The court issued orders to immediately halt the forceful evictions. However, the case is yet to be determined.

“In many indigenous communities, governments have always used an excuse of environmental destruction to evict residents, and that was the same thing they said about our community,” Peter Kitelo, co-founder of the CIPDP, told IPS.

“However, we have proved them wrong, and when the case is finally determined, we are very hopeful that we will emerge victorious,” he said.

The 3D mapping, according to Owino, is in line with the Whakatane Mechanism, an IUCN initiative that supports the implementation of “the new paradigm” of conservation. It focuses on situations where indigenous peoples and/or local communities are directly associated with protected areas and are involved in its development and conservation as a result of their land and resource rights, including tenure, access and use.

• The mechanism promotes and supports the respect for the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities and their free prior and informed consent in protected areas policy and practice, as required by IUCN resolutions, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

There are previous examples of P3DM mapping proving successful among another Ogiek communities — those in the Mau Forest.

• In 2006, a P3DM exercise involving 120 men and women from 21 Ogiek clans in the Mau Forest resulted in a 3D map of the Eastern Mau Forest Complex.
• According to the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA), the 3D map was persuasive enough to convince the Kenyan Government of the Ogiek’s right to the land, and the need to protect the area from land grabbing and resource exploitation.

The CTA further reported that a rich P3DM portfolio of outputs, including reports, papers and maps, have been used at international forums to document the value of local/indigenous knowledge in sustainable natural resource management, conflict management and climate change adaptation, and in bridging the gap between scientific and traditional knowledge systems.

In addition to the 3D map, the Ogiek community is already working with the National Land Commission of Kenya, an independent body with several mandates. Among them is the mandate to initiate investigations, on its own initiative or based on a complaint, into present or historical land injustices and to recommend appropriate redress.

“Once completed, the 3D map will be a very important tool for this community because apart from effective management of the natural resources in Chepkitale, we will use it as an instrument to prove how we have sustainably coexisted with nature for generations,” said Kitelo.

The Ogiek community want their territory officially recognised as community land provided for by Kenya’s new constitution, particularly in relation to the Community Land Act, 2016, which provides for the “recognition, protection and registration of community land rights; management and administration of community land”.

According to elderly members of the Ogiek community, the forest is their main source of livelihood.

Inside the forest, the community keeps bees for honey production, which is a major part of their diet apart from milk, blood and meat. They also gather herbs from the indigenous trees, shrubs and forest vegetation, and feed on some species found in the forest. Their diet is not limited to bamboo shoots, wild mushrooms and wild vegetables such as stinging nettle.

“Since I was born 72 years ago, this forest has always been the main source of our livelihoods,” Chemwotei Muranga told IPS.

Now, armed with traditional knowledge of forest management and conservation of natural resources, community-based rules and regulations, and provisions within the country’s new constitution and the Community Land Act— they hope to be doing so for centuries to come.

“Living in such a place is the only lifestyle I understand,” Chemwotei Muranga said.

The inclusive approach of supporting indigenous peoples and local communities in conservation will be a major focus at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille, France, next January. The topic falls under one of the main themes of the Congress, “Upholding rights, ensuring effective and equitable governance” with sessions aiming to discuss and provide recommendations for how the conservation community can support the existing stewardship of indigenous peoples and local communities.

Related Articles

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• Trinidad and Tobago Struggles to Meet its Biodiversity Targets
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Credit: SEATCA

By Sophapan Ratanachena-McWhortor and Dr. Hana Ross
BANGKOK, Thailand, Jul 21 2020 (IPS)

A factoid is unreliable information repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. One such factoid repeatedly echoed across the globe by the tobacco industry is that tobacco tax increases worsen cigarette smuggling.

For governments facing challenges to curb smuggling, particularly in the global South, this factoid has scared political leaders from effectively using taxes as a public health tool.

Tax increases used as part of comprehensive tobacco control have been shown to successfully reduce smoking in many countries, including Australia, Thailand, Philippines and South Africa.

In 2016, Australia implemented annual increases in tobacco excise of 12.5% a year till 2020, raising the cost of a pack of cigarettes to about AUD 40. Australia’s current smoking prevalence at less than 13 percent is one of the lowest in the world.

According to the World Bank, taxes and prices have only a limited impact on the illicit cigarette market. In fact, another study found that lower income countries, where cigarette taxes and prices are low, have higher levels of cigarette smuggling than higher income countries with high taxes and prices.

The tobacco industry supports small tax increases but opposes large increases that effectively reduce the affordability of their products. Asia being a major market for tobacco companies, it is tactical for them to defeat or undermine effective tobacco tax increases in Asian countries.

Tobacco industry-commissioned studies routinely link high levels of smuggling to tax increases. One such report is the Asia Illicit Tobacco Indicator 2017 report sponsored by Philip Morris International (PMI) and done by Oxford Economics (OE), a U.K. based think tank.

The study, for example, shows Malaysia having among the highest tobacco smuggling in the world at 56%, followed by Pakistan at 42%. However, alternate studies on illicit trade in both countries show significantly lower levels at 27% and 16% respectively.

Many governments have been fed data from this PMI-funded report by OE, which has been described as severely flawed in a critique recently released by the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA). The critique uncovers the report’s poor data quality, identifies multiple deficiencies in the methodology, and exposes the deceptive presentation of study results, underlining the fact that industry-commissioned reports do not provide scientifically sound information to policy makers and are biased to the interests of the tobacco industry.

Previous critiques, More myth than fact and Failed, already identified similar flaws of industry-funded OE reports on illicit trade in 2012 and 2013.

Using think tanks to conduct industry-friendly research is a known tactic of the tobacco industry. These research reports are launched using high profile spokespersons to promote the report findings.

This was clearly seen in Malaysia when the report was referred to by a criminologist and used as a launching pad for tobacco company activities to counter smuggling. The industry continues to use this tactic because of its impact on governments that are vulnerable to economic downturn and lack resources to curb illicit trade.

The illicit trade factoid is a key “go-to” narrative used repeatedly by the tobacco industry to undermine tobacco control efforts across countries in Asia and globally, whether tax increases, standardized packaging, large pictorial health warnings, advertising bans, public smoking bans, or bans/regulations on new and emerging tobacco products, such as e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products.

During the current global economic slowdown, despite a recognized link between smoking and COVID-19, tobacco companies continue to manufacture and profit from tobacco products.

Governments must therefore use this COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to level up their tobacco control policies and programs and redouble their efforts to protect public health policies from tobacco industry influence, as there is an irreconcilable conflict of interest between public health and the commercial and vested interests of the tobacco industry.

Governments must recognize that tobacco is a harmful and unessential product and should reject partnerships with the tobacco industry and fully scrutinize any information provided by tobacco companies. Governments must seek to eliminate the problem of illicit tobacco trade, but they shouldn’t be intimidated by the tobacco industry’s illicit trade factoid.

*SEATCA is a multi-sectoral non-governmental alliance promoting health and saving lives by assisting ASEAN countries to accelerate and effectively implement the tobacco control measures contained in the WHO FCTC. Acknowledged by governments, academic institutions, and civil society for its advancement of tobacco control in Southeast Asia, the WHO bestowed on SEATCA the World No Tobacco Day Award in 2004 and the WHO Director-General’s Special Recognition Award in 2014.

The Economics of Tobacco Control Project (ETCP) is housed in the Research Unit on the Economics of Excisable Products (REEP) at UCT’s School of Economics. The ETCP aims to expand current research efforts in the economics of tobacco control and to enhance the knowledge of economic and tax issues among tobacco control advocates and policymakers to strengthen support for tobacco tax and price increases in sub-Saharan Africa. These expanded efforts will increase the quantity and quality of research on the economics of tobacco control in the region, facilitate the growth of a new generation of tobacco control economics researchers and contribute to the creation of a centre of research excellence in sub-Saharan Africa.

 

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Excerpt:

Sophapan Ratanachena-McWhortor is Tobacco Tax Program Manager of SEATCA* & Dr Hana Ross is the Principal Research Officer of Economics of Tobacco Control Project (ETCP) at the University of Cape Town.

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By Vladimir Popov and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
BERLIN and KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 21 2020 (IPS)

GDP has been increasingly challenged on many grounds as a measure of economic and social progress. Clearly, GDP does not take account of other dimensions of wellbeing, natural resource depletion or environmental damage.

What increases GDP?
There is a humourous economic fable instructive about money-metric measures of economic progress. Two economic professors find a dead rat while on a long stroll. In disgust, the older don dares his younger colleague: “if you eat it, I’ll pay you $10,000”. The younger economist makes a quick cost-benefit analysis in his head, then accepts the challenge, to his colleague’s surprise.

Vladimir Popov

Sometime later, realizing the enormity of his financial loss, the older man offers to reciprocate to get his money back. Feeling ashamed of being the only one to eat a dead rat, his younger colleague quickly agrees.

A few days later, feeling quite foolish about what happened, the younger don laments: “Looks like we both ate dead rats for nothing”. The more senior professor reassures him, “Yes, but remember we increased GDP by $20,000”.

Did gross domestic product (GDP) really increase? From a national income accounting perspective, the two ‘meals’, requested and paid for by the other, constitute paid services unlike, say, much care work by family members which goes unremunerated.

Indeed, there are many other controversies over measuring GDP.

Lower GDP better?
At the end of the 20th century, similar arguments were made regarding ‘transformational recessions’, i.e., the deep and protracted GDP contractions with the transition in former communist countries from largely collectively owned, centrally planned to much more privately-owned market economies in the 1990s.

The sharp declines were unprecedented in peacetime. The recessions lasted several years, and output fell by more than half in some countries!

‘Shock therapy’ was said to be necessary to overcome interrelated obstacles to progress in one fell swoop. Slogans such as ‘no pain, no gain’ were bandied around to justify and explain the hardship caused.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

However, for some economists in the West, such falling ‘redundant output’, e.g., of tanks and Lenin statues, did not adversely affect the populations’ welfare.

If only such redundant output was excluded from GDP measures, it could be shown that welfare did not decline.

Thus, for Åslund, the actual output decline was much less as “Socialism was a system of waste. Soviet production usually needed three times more inputs than a Western factory since costs were irrelevant to managers. Some of these losses represented inefficiency, others theft … The investment that was sheer waste should preferably be deducted from GDP”.

Similarly, Gaddy and Ickes insisted that “value added can rise…even as domestic consumption, investment, and standards of living appear to decline”. They argued that “measured GDP” in transition economies should, but do not accurately reflect “true value produced in the economy”.

Military spending, armaments production
Åslund dismissed the recorded output contractions during the transformational recessions as “a myth”, partly due to the unusually high share of defence spending in many ‘socialist’ countries (estimated at 15~17% of Soviet GDP in the 1980s), and its reduction during the transitions.

With the transitions, these shares were brought down closer to the “internationally normal level of about 3 percent of GDP”. Åslund therefore recommended deducting 10% of GDP from statistical output losses due to transformational recessions.

For Gaddy and Ickes, less measured output due to lower defence spending represents a welfare gain, not loss, at least in such ‘communist’ economies: “This is an output fall, but welfare is certainly higher with lower defence production”.

Åslund invokes a variant of this logic to recommend deducting the excess over “the internationally normal level of about 3 percent of GDP” from total output.

As these methodologies are quite arbitrary, one may well ask why not zero or the newly recommended 2% of GDP threshold for NATO member countries? And what about military spending and armaments production in other economies?

Defence spending has long been counted as part of GDP. Defence expenditure’s share of GDP in the US was 40% in 1945 at the end of the Second World War, 15% in 1953 during the Korean War, and 10% in 1968 during the Vietnam War.

Arbitrary criteria
Soviet production may well have been inefficient, but so is most protected economic activity throughout the world. Soviet monuments may be dismissed as value subtracting, but what about those erected elsewhere, whether or not politically controversial?

Such arguments also largely ignore evidence of welfare declines due to such transformational recessions, e.g., of much reduced life expectancy.

Also, unlike much else produced in the former Soviet Union, armaments were among the few internationally competitive exports, bringing in valuable foreign exchange.

Excluding some economic activities, but not others, when calculating a country’s national income is also problematic as it is difficult to agree on what economic activities should be included to enhance welfare.

Clearly, setting criteria for what to include or exclude when calculating national income is typically a quite arbitrary exercise.

Measuring progress
Unsurprisingly, there is now a large and growing literature on the shortcomings of national income accounting, proposing many alternative indicators of economic and social progress.

Interestingly, US and European statistical offices only started national income accounts after the Second World War using Simon Kuznets’ pioneering work for the Roosevelt administration.

The Soviet Union had introduced an accounting system in the 1920s to compute its national income. This differed from GDP, e.g., by not recognizing value added by services, or by not depreciating fixed capital stock, but otherwise included data needed for computing GDP.

Undoubtedly, GDP related measures have long been criticized, and we should strive to do better to measure and improve human progress. After all, as Robert F. Kennedy famously quipped over half a century ago, GDP “measures everything, except that which makes life worthwhile”.

 

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Extraordinary session of the Senate of the Republic of Mexico, June 29, 2020. Credit: Senado de Mexico.

By Leonardo Beltran and Andrés Chambouleyron
LA JOLLA, California, United States, Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

On June 10, 2020, Senator Ricardo Monreal, President of the Political Coordination Board of the Senate of Mexico, presented a legislative initiative to reform Article 28 of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States, in order to cluster in a single regulator of economic competition, the Telecommunications, Broadcasting and Energy sectors.

The initiative contemplates the creation of the National Institute of Markets and Competition for Social Well-being “INMECOB” as an autonomous constitutional body with legal identity, technical, operational and management autonomy that would replace the following institutions:

1. The Federal Commission of Economic Competition (“COFECE”)
2. The Energy Regulatory Commission (“CRE”)
3. The Federal Telecommunications Institute (“IFT”)

The main purpose of the initiative is to contribute to the austerity policy of President López Obrador administration, with the integration of these three regulators that, although they share some general characteristics and objectives, the final goods and/or services they provide are different.

The three regulators are intended to ensure that social welfare is maximized through economic competition in each sector, for example, by ensuring free access for competitors in cases where due to the characteristics of the infrastructure they naturally tend to become monopolies (i.e. electrical networks or gas pipelines, where duplicating the infrastructure would result in a much higher cost to the final consumer).

Although the legal framework of the three regulators, in terms of competition, is the same, each institution applies a different set of processes, which can result in different evaluation standards that could penalize or benefit individuals simply due to the interpretation and organizational culture of each entity in question.

Likewise, administrative management in terms of procurement of goods and services, material and equipment, social communication, among other functions, could be optimized by integrating them into a single institution.

The initiative estimates that from the merger of the three institutions, savings of 500 million pesos per year (22 million dollars) could be obtained, as a result of the reduction in the workforce and operating budget of both COFECE and IFT, where 79.6% is represented by cutting out 440 positions (1 in 5 employees) and the rest would come from general services or operating expenses.

The initiative also argues that in addition to the financial benefit, there will be a lower risk in the capture of the regulator by the private sector, as the relative importance of a certain sector would be reduced within the activities of the regulatory body.

Considering that Senator Monreal’s project cites the National Commission of Markets and Competition of Spain as a precedent for consolidating competition authorities and sector regulators in a single body, we analyzed in detail this particular case and its potential application to the Mexican case.

 

The role of the National Commission of Markets and Competition in Spain

According to its own internet portal, the recently created (2013) National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC) aims to guarantee, preserve and promote the proper functioning and transparency of markets, ensuring the existence of effective competition and defending the interests of consumers and companies.

It is a public body with its own legal personality under parliamentary control, which guarantees its independence from the government and legal certainty.

The CNMC is the result of merging the former National Competition Commission (CNC) created in 2007 with sector regulators – the National Energy Commission (CNE), the Telecommunications Market Commission (CMT), the Committee of Railway Regulation (CRF), the State Council for Audiovisual Media (CEMA), the National Commission of the Postal Sector (CNSP) and finally the Airport Economic Regulation Commission (CREA).

The functions of the National Competition Commission (CNC) were essentially three, a) the prosecution of anticompetitive behaviors such as collusive behaviors and abuses of dominant positions, b) the control of operations with economic concentration (prior control of mergers or acquisitions), and c) the promotion of competition in those concentrated markets through liberalization or a greater opening.

Similarly, the National Energy Commission (CNE) created in 1998 had as its essential mission to ensure effective competition in energy systems, which would include the electricity market, as well as the markets for both liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons (natural gas and oil).

The CNE regulated tariffs and service quality in natural monopolies (electricity and gas distribution and transport networks), but also promoted competition in those segments where competition was not effective (gas and electricity commercialization) and resolved conflicts or disputes between different market agents (access to transport networks).

On the other hand, the objectives of the Telecommunications Market Commission (CMT) created in 1996 were a) to be the arbitrator between operators in the face of conflicts such as network interconnection, b) to control compliance with universal service obligations, c) to assign numbering to the operators, d) to adopt measures to ensure free competition between operators, e) to set rates for regulated services, f) to set interconnection charges between networks, g) to exercise sanctioning power, h) to carry out analysis and definition of markets and finally i) to coordinate its functions with the National Competition Commission.

Lastly, the objectives of the Committee for Railway Regulation (CRF), the State Council for Audiovisual Media (CEMA), the National Commission for the Postal Sector (CNSP) and the Commission for Airport Economic Regulation (CREA) were to regulate each of the markets by setting tariffs where competition was not possible and deregulating and promoting competition where it was technically feasible and desirable.

The creation of these regulatory bodies was due to the privatization of state-owned public service companies, the end of state monopolies and the need for Spain to adapt to European regulations.

 

Operation of the CNMC

The CNMC exercises its functions through two governmental bodies: the Council and the President, who is also the Council’ president. The Council is a collegiate decision-making body made up of ten members appointed by the Government with the proposal of the Economy and Competitiveness Minister, and includes persons of recognized prestige and professional competence, after the candidate appears before the corresponding Commission of the Congress of Deputies. Their mandate is for 6 years, non-renewable and is subject to a strict incompatibility regime.

The Council can act in Plenary or in Room. To this end, it is organized into two rooms: one dedicated to competition issues (Competition Room) and the other to supervision of regulated sectors (Regulatory Supervision Room). The Plenary is made up of all the members of the Council and chaired by the President.

In addition, the CNMC has four directions of instruction: Competition; Energy; Telecommunications and the Audiovisual Sector, as well as Transport and the Postal Sector, as illustrated in the following table.

 

 

What are the advantages of a consolidated body?

The arguments used by the Spanish government to justify the consolidation process of the competition authority and the sector regulators in a single body are basically the following: 1) guarantee legal certainty and institutional trust, 2) avoid unnecessary duplication of control of each operator and contradictory decisions in the same matter, 3) take advantage of economies of scale and regulate the administered sectors, establishing an integrating vision in terms of regulation and the defense of competition to adapt it to the changes that have occurred in the economic environment for the benefit of consumers, 4) aim at effectiveness, efficiency, rationalization, agility, objectivity and transparency, 5) unify criteria to offer a balanced and comprehensive solution to consumer problems, 6) adjust the operation of the regulatory authority to the regulations of the European Union, especially in the telecommunications and energy sectors, seeking a greater market integration of the European Single Market.

In summary, what they were looking for was to save administrative costs, streamline and make management more transparent, avoiding duplication and preventing potentially contradictory opinions by unifying criteria in a single agency.

 

Economic analysis and application to the Mexican case

The creation of the original sectoral regulators that regulated energy, telecommunications, railways, ports and the postal market occurred due to the need generated after the privatization of the former state monopolies by becoming private monopolies.

Sector regulation in this case is essentially an ex-ante regulation that is applied to those segments of the markets considered natural monopolies, which are unable to compete due to their technology. These segments are normally electricity and gas distribution and transport networks as well as the old landline network before the irruption of mobile and internet.

In these cases the regulation is ex-ante because it is applied before observing how the market behaves, since it is assumed that natural monopolies (by definition) cannot compete and therefore their rates must be regulated and they must provide their services with a minimum acceptable level of quality.

The body in charge of defending and promoting competition, on the other hand, exercises supervision and eventually also regulation, but of an ex-post type, on those markets in which anti-competitive behavior is observed. In this case the remedy (e.g. sanctions or prohibitions, obligations etc.) is applied after observing how competitive the market is, not before, because it is not possible to predict how competitive a market will be before observing how the companies behave in that market.

The eventual state intervention in a market is normally subsequent to the observation and verification of anti-competitive behavior by the authority.

It is for these two reasons that both types of agencies (competition and sector regulator) are normally separate: their nature is different because they serve markets and/or companies with different characteristics or technologies. Some are natural monopolies that require ex-ante regulation of rates and quality due to their technological impossibility of competing and the others operate in markets that are not competitive enough and that require supervision and (eventually) ex-post regulation to inject more competition, which is, by nature, impossible to achieve in the first group.

While there are segments within regulated sectors that are potentially competitive, such as the production, generation, and commercialization of natural gas and electricity, where sector regulators normally have the power to make ex-post regulation by deregulating potentially competitive markets, the competition agencies are the natural authorities to apply such policies.

Having said all this, there is no argument (economic at least) that justifies the adoption of a super regulatory body that consolidates the competition authority and the sector regulators.

Reviewing the arguments put forward by the Spanish authorities in the previous section, it can be easily verified that: 1) All the advantages that a single regulator supposedly has would also be shown by two separate regulators: one competition authority on the one hand and another multi-sector regulator on the other that regulates natural monopolies, 2) In fact, the CNMC works with 2 suites, the Competition Suite and the Regulatory Supervision Suite, each suite with its directions of instruction that operate separately.

Apparently, and judging by the arguments wielded by the Spanish authorities, the only advantage that the creation of a single authority would offer (in addition to complying with some European regulations) would be to have a single board of directors and a single president, avoiding duplication and reducing administrative costs.

It is clear that for the Mexican case, neither of the two apparent advantages put forward by the Spanish authorities would apply, since, on the one hand, there are no USMCA regulations obligating to adopt a similar measure (Canada and the United States have separate authorities) and there is no assurance that consolidating the current competition authority and sector regulators into one body will result in lower administrative costs.

The CRE of Mexico also has the power to dispose of the income derived from the rights and uses that are established for its services to finance its total budget and a public trust in which it will contribute the remainder of the excess income that it has to accumulate the equivalent to three times its annual budget and if there are additional resources, these will be transferred to the Treasury of the Federation.

This means that CRE’s operation does not represent a burden for public finances and that the cost is self-sustaining from the payment of those regulated by the reception of the service. The CRE, in addition to the regulatory mandate in economic matters, has the mandate to establish technical regulations to address the reliability, stability and security in the supply and provision of electrical energy services, a technical attribute that does not share with the other two Mexican institutions.

In summary, the consolidation project presented does not seem to be able to guarantee any of the objectives it pursues, neither reduction of administrative costs nor less capture power by the authorities. In fact, consolidation into a single agency could generate a superstructure with greater duplications than those that exist today, and nothing guarantees that the new agency will be less prone to capture by the regulated sectors.

The post Pros and Cons of a Super Regulator – The case of the Spanish Regulator appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Leonardo Beltrán and Andrés Chambouleyron are non-resident Fellows at the Institute of the Americas located in La Jolla, California.

The post Pros and Cons of a Super Regulator – The case of the Spanish Regulator appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: UN Women.

By Mamello Makhele
THABA-TSEKA, Lesotho, Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed and given rise to a new, deeply concerning wave of rape culture in Lesotho. Although the true extent is not known yet, we have noticed concerning reports that the onset of the pandemic has worsened sexual violence with more women and girls being confined to small living places whilst social tensions are exacerbated.

According to Senior Inspector ‘Malebohang Nepo from the Child and Gender Protection Unit under the Lesotho Mobile Police Service (LMPS), two weeks into the lockdown she said 18 cases of sexual assault had been reported, which was unusually high.

This new wave includes distressing reports of many Basotho women who, when the lockdown restrictions came into place, had to leave their roles as domestic workers in South Africa entrenching them back into a system of poverty that forced them to return to Lesotho.

However, after having to illegally return to the country, the majority were raped and tortured by security and border officials.

Mamello Makhele.

Most of these distressing accounts have not been officially reported due to fear, prejudice and societal stigma – the same reasons why many rapes in our country go unseen. In the few cases where reports have been made, no action has been taken against the perpetrators. These are the same men entrusted by the government to provide security to our nation.

But let’s be clear, this is not a new issue or phenomenon. Even prior to the pandemic, the prevalence of rape in Lesotho was extremely high. Last year, Gender Minister Dr Mahali Phamotse noted that 90% of male prison inmates had been imprisoned for sexual offence charges (a survey conducted whilst she was Justice Minister) and a report by NGO Gender Links in 2014 found that 62% of women surveyed had experience intimate partner violence, with 8% reporting that they had been raped by a non-partner in their lifetime.

Whilst the pandemic has served to expose and exacerbate this problem, rape culture has existed throughout generations and societies. It is a culture that typically permits men to exercise power and masculinity over women to ultimately deny their basic right to bodily autonomy. It is language and behaviours that encourages men to justify sexual violence. For decades, rape has been viewed as a weapon of oppression to silence and degrade women.

As a midwife, I know only too well the far-ranging consequences that sexual and physical violence has on the lives of women and girls. Only a few weeks ago, a twenty-year-old woman who was nine months pregnant was admitted in my facility with bruises on her back and shoulders, indicating that her husband had physically abused her.

The increasing prevalence of rape in our society means we have to act now. Education and awareness are key to tackling this problem head on. Technology is an especially powerful mobilisation tool to achieve this, especially during a pandemic, and I have been using social media to highlight the pandemic’s impact on women’s rights. It gives me the opportunity to amplify women’s stories of sexual violence and spread awareness of the issue to a wider audience.

Most importantly however, I’m currently hosting online education and awareness sessions with men in rural communities who are largely illiterate and have patriarchy deeply rooted in their behaviour and thoughts. This attitude is highlighted during our conversations when many say that rape is the victim’s fault and that her choice of clothing “forced” her to be raped.

Concerningly, the 2014 Gender Links report found that 39% of men said rape survivors could be seen as responsible because they may have been promiscuous.

These sessions, which will take place in person later on in the year, are designed to challenge this thinking and encourage men to uproot their traditional masculine attitudes and behaviours. I’ve also had informal conversations about rape with men whilst on duty as part of my role as a midwife, where many don’t understand the concept of women’s rights.

If we are to bring about change, we need men to start respecting a woman’s right to choose and to realise that her choice of clothing is by no means an invite for her to be raped.

However, my actions and those of my peers alone are not enough, more is needed. To truly remove entrenched rape culture from our societies, we need a unified approach between governments, justice systems and community organisations that will ensure sexual violence perpetrators are held accountable.

We need to work together so that women are not afraid to come forward and share their stories. We need change in the perceptions of what traditional masculinity is so that victims are not blamed. We need allies to mobilise political and financial support.

Covid-19 has presented many challenges of our country and the fight to defeat this destructive disease is not over yet, but throughout this a woman’s right to decide must be prioritised, maintained and respected. She must have the right to safety, information and healthcare. These are basic human rights. Without Question.

 

Mamello Makhele, midwife and SheDecides 25×25 young leader

The post Challenging Cultural Norms and Removing Stigma is Key to Confronting Lesotho’s Rape Culture appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Mamello Makhele is a midwife and SheDecides 25x25 young leader

The post Challenging Cultural Norms and Removing Stigma is Key to Confronting Lesotho’s Rape Culture appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Yasmine Sherif is Director, Education Cannot Wait

By Yasmine Sherif
NEW YORK, Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

“We may all come on different ships, but we are in the same boat now,” Martin Luther King Jr once said. His timeless wisdom rings truer than ever today for the many challenges the world is facing. COVID-19, continued armed conflicts and forced displacement, climate-change induced disasters, deep divides and widespread discrimination mark the human family in the 21st century.

Yasmine Sherif

While COVID-19 is indeed a health crisis, the state of the world is in a bigger, multi-dimensional crisis. The one safe solution is education. Not just any education, but a quality education. One that is holistic and empowers the young generation, especially girls, to realize their potential, be productive and bring lasting peace to their communities and the world. Without a quality education, we will succumb to a spiral of crisis, as a human family.

Indeed, we are all in the same boat. However, those left furthest behind in conflicts and forced displacement may never have the chance to recover and bounce back. COVID-19 risks plunging them further into the abyss of disempowerment and hopelessness. Without education, there is no hope for them. Tragically, COVID-19 is but one crisis in their abnormal world of widespread violence and systematic violations, dispossession and extreme poverty. All impacting them at the same time.

To tell them that the world is in a health-crisis, but not in an education crisis, implies a failure to recognize their world and their suffering. They amount to 75 million today, of whom 39 million are girls, though the numbers are predicted to rise due to COVID-19. Absence from school or structured remote learning will culminate in millions never returning to school. As many recent reports show (Save the Children, UN Women, to mention a few), they risk being forced into child marriage, early pregnancy and child labor, or being recruited into violent forces and terror groups. These very real protection threats are now escalating and making their way into the daily life of millions of vulnerable children and youth in countries already affected by emergencies and protracted crisis.

Their education cannot wait until COVID-19 has passed, until peace has arrived or until the financial recession is over. On the contrary, as Canada’s Minister of International Development Karina Gould says in her interview in this month’s ECW Newsletter: “The world needs you to keep studying, to keep dreaming, to keep pushing for what you want to see in the world.”

It is now incumbent on the rest of us to move. We must sprint with speed, and we must do it together.

Since WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic, Education Cannot Wait has invested in over 100 grantees (partners) across 35 different countries/contexts in multiple phases of our First Emergency Response. This includes the second phase of our COVID-19 response dedicated exclusively to refugees, internally displaced and their host-communities, as well as consolidated efforts to deepen our support to the Sahel.

Across these countries, ECW supports collaboration between host-governments, UN agencies, international NGOs and local organizations through established education in emergency coordination mechanisms. In Mali, UNICEF is working alongside Save The Children, Humanity and Inclusion, Plan International and World Vision International as a result of ECW’s continued prioritization of support to the Sahel. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, UNHCR facilitated a joint application from international organizations AVSI and Terre Sans Frontieres, both of whom had formed consortia with local NGOs. In South Sudan, UNHCR played a similar role, supporting the submission of successful applications from Lutheran World Federation, World Vision International and the local NGO ACROSS. In Iraq, three international NGOs, INTERSOS, Save the Children and the Norwegian Refugee Council are partnering with two local NGOs, People in Need and Public Aid Organization. In Cameroon, UNESCO and UNICEF, collaborated to develop a joint COVID-19 application. In Chad, WFP is partnering with UNHCR and a consortium led by Humanity and Inclusion on interventions in support of the national COVID-19 response.

“At first I was in shock at the closure of the schools which had also led to the suspension of the meal,” said one mother in Niger. “But when I heard of the resumption of school meals and remote learning, I felt joy. The school meal that WFP (World Food Programme) offered to my children, allowed me to keep my children learning despite my meagre resources.”

“The massive mobilization of parents and the massive attendance of children (2,300 children in classes including 150 refugee children) in this COVID-19 learning project is a remarkable success,” said a chief of the village in Niger, in response to a complementary intervention by World Vision.

These examples highlight the diversity of these partnerships and demonstrate ECW’s commitment to joint planning as well as the localization agenda. We are grateful to our partners who work together in-country to deliver in the most difficult of circumstances. Their work is what makes the difference. As a lean global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crisis, Education Cannot Wait’s objective is to be useful to them and to the crisis-affected children and youth we serve.

But we can’t be in an emergency mode forever. There is a “new normal” and we need to adjust to this reality. Consequently, Education Cannot Wait is now also resuming its investments in multi-year resilience programmes (MYRPs), which are designed to support coordinated joint programming across the humanitarian and development community to advance humanitarian-development coherence, national ownership, recovery and sustainability.

As a cost-effective fund, ECW urgently needs $310 million to support our partners to reach the target of 25 multi-year resilience programmes by 2021. Indeed, $310 million is our immediate funding gap and we call on our strategic partners to support our collective efforts to prevent a total disruption to the education of millions of children and youth impacted by conflicts and forced displacement.

We are all in the same boat. But some may not make it through the storm. We need to prevent losses in the progress made and we need to prevent the loss of hope when all else has been taken away. We can only save this world if we first save the lives of those left furthest behind. They need an education and the world needs them. We need you to make it happen.

 

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The post The World Needs You. Now. appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Yasmine Sherif is Director, Education Cannot Wait

The post The World Needs You. Now. appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The “Non-Violence” (or “Knotted Gun”) sculpture by Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd on display at the UN Visitors’ Plaza. Credit: UN Photo

By Siddharth Chatterjee
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

“The vision and promise of the United Nations is that food, healthcare, water and sanitation, education, decent work and social security are not commodities for sale to those who can afford them, but basic human rights to which we are all entitled.” Those were the poignant words of the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, in a hard hitting speech on 18 July 2020 to mark Mandela Day.

For every staff of the United Nations family the Mandela speech by Mr. Guterres was powerful and inspirational. Speaking about the scourge of inequality, he said, “while we are all floating on the same sea, it’s clear that some are in superyachts while others are clinging to the drifting debris.”

For me, the United Nations (UN) is personal. Coming from a family rendered refugees due to the partition of India in 1947, as a child I benefited from its immunization programmes- I actually survived polio. The UN’s work with the Government of India helped to eradicate smallpox and polio in my home country, where these diseases used to take a huge toll on lives and livelihoods.

Although forged in the crucible of wars and crippling ideological rivalries between East and West, the United Nations has since managed to convince the world of the need to compromise and to take each other’s views into account and to listen to others while facing humanity’s enduring challenges. That this has been achieved in just 75 years is remarkable.

In the narrative of the period when humanity made great social, cultural, and economic advances, the UN takes centre stage. For more than two decades during my service in the UN system, I have been part of this story and am convinced that the UN still matters, perhaps now more than ever.

While the calamitous cost of two World Wars and subsequent ideological fault-lines convinced humankind of the need for a body like the UN, the challenges facing us today remain just as formidable. As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, it does not take much to upend not only individual lives, but entire societies and economies. There are numerous reasons for people to feel insecure in today’s world.

Among these are strong indications of resurgent nationalism and warning signs of ethnic and religious isolationism that not only threaten states, communities and individuals. Combined with humanitarian and climate disasters, these challenges have been articulated and framed for action as the Sustainable Development Goals that the UN is spearheading everywhere in the world.

Just as diplomacy was the basis for the establishment of the UN, my experience in the frontlines of combat operations when I served in the Indian Army convinced me that there is a better way to solve conflicts. My early career in the UN was spent in countries almost defined by war and instability, such as Iraq, Sudan, South Sudan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Somalia. The images of men, women, and children driven from their homes by murder, rape, and the burning down of schools and homes is seared in my mind.

I am proud to have been part of the United Nations response to complex humanitarian challenges. In Indonesia, for example, an innovation by the UN called a “school-in-a-box” helped children return to their regular school routine as quickly as possible during the conflict in Aceh when schools were being burned down. We helped maintain immunization, reproductive health services, education as well as nutrition services, working in difficult and life-threatening situations in Darfur, Somalia, and Iraq. We demobilized child soldiers in the midst of a conflict in South Sudan.

Child soldiers of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army march away after surrendering their weapons during a demobilization ceremony at the army barracks in Malou, South Sudan, in Feb. 25, 2001. Under an agreement with UNICEF, the SPLA demobilized 3551 child soldiers aged between eight and 18. UNICEF airlifted them away from combat zones to safe havens in Rumbek, South Sudan. Credit: UNICEF/OLS

With the Coronavirus pandemic raging, UN country teams all over the world are working tirelessly with their respective host governments to flatten the curve.

In various countries today, internecine conflicts, hunger, and disease continue to take a tragic toll, especially among the world’s children. The malignant neglect of our global environment threatens all of us. The UN retains unprecedented respect, acceptance, and mobilizing capacity to rally member states to act together to solve these problems.

The nature of today’s challenges compels us towards integration and collaboration. Humankind must find new ways to work together more effectively in pursuit of our collective interests and to think anew about how our institutions of international cooperation can be strengthened.

The UN has enabled many member states to embark on transformational journeys; life expectancy is rising, jobs being created, and people lifted out of poverty. Yet in many others, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, progress is fragile and unequal. The UN constantly seeking new models that are inclusive and sustainable, and is opening up new opportunities to harness big data, technology and innovation to leapfrog development, through ground breaking partnerships with the private sector.

Many factors have sometimes stymied the United Nations’ work. These range from reliability of funding to the difficulties of achieving consensus between diverse member states on complex topics. Such factors have sometimes made us slow and limited our impact.

Antonio Guterres has said that “worldwide consultation process around the 75th anniversary of the United Nations has made clear that people want a global governance system that delivers for them”. Therefore the bold reforms underway, led by Mr Guterres, will make the organization more nimble, better equipped and prepared to deal with contemporary challenges.

UN country teams are adapting to new realities in their programmes, reflecting the shifts (such as peacekeeping to peace-building) through social and economic development support and humanitarian relief.

In Kenya, the country’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta is spearheading the charge to eradicate female genital mutilation supported by the United Nations. I have seen firsthand the reduction in maternal and infant mortality due to complications at childbirth, universal access to primary education and better a collective push to achieve universal health coverage.

Aisha Hussein and her team pose for a picture during the youth caravan in Isiolo as part of a joint UNFPA-UNICEF initiative to eradicate FGM. Credit: UNICEF Kenya

I continue to see the promise of peace and prosperity for the most vulnerable marginalized that comes with the UN’s work, such as the Kenya Uganda cross border initiative to promote peace and development in the Karamoja area, mired in rivalry over scant resources and experiencing the debilitating impact of climate change. Amina Mohammed the UN Deputy Secretary General said, “It’s exciting to see the new ways in which governments, communities and partners are coming together with UN teams to mobilize across borders especially when it comes to taking climate action”.

COVID-19 has confirmed that the era of national problems is receding fast, by revealing national and global fragilities to an invisible virus. The pandemic is a stark reminder of the need for cooperation across borders, sectors and generations.

Today we can see that most challenges are global and interconnected, and can only be tackled through global action coordinated through global institutions.

At the signing of the United Nations Charter, in San Francisco in 1945, the President of the United States America, Harry Truman said, “If we fail to use it, we shall betray all those who have died so that we might meet here in freedom and safety to create it. If we seek to use it selfishly – for the advantage of any one nation or any small group of nations — we shall be equally guilty of that betrayal”.

Those farsighted leaders who founded the United Nations 75 years ago gave us the momentum to propel humanity to greater security and prosperity. Today, the UN continues to be a sound investment, a real beacon of hope.

Siddharth Chatterjee is the United Nations Resident Coordinator to Kenya. This OPED was first featured in Forbes Africa.

 

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Credit: Nepali Times.

By Nunuta Rai
KATHMANDU, Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

Nepal’s education system was in crisis long before the pandemic hit. But with schools closed now for four straight months, remote learning has also exposed the class divide in access to education.

There was already poor quality of instruction in government schools, and parents were sending their children to more expensive private institutions. But this inequity in schooling has been further exacerbated by the need for remote instruction due to the COVID-19 crisis.

While better endowed schools are conducting online classes, the digital divide has meant that a majority of schools and students in the country have been left out.

“It is difficult to conduct online classes even in households that have equipment. Some families have only one smartphone or laptop and there are up to three children taking online classes simultaneously”

By making self-contradictory rules, the government has sowed further confusion. It announced classes would be conducted through ‘alternative’ systems, but did not ensure that students had tv sets, mobile data, laptops, and did not train teachers in distance learning.

Even in Kathmandu Valley, many students do not have access to computers and WiFi to take online classes, so the situation in the remoter districts are much worse. Meanwhile the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology just issues directives, tells schools conducting regular online classes not to charge fees, but without making alternative provisions for teacher’s salaries.

In May, the ministry issued the ‘Student Learning Facilitation Guide for Alternative Systems’ which mentioned radio, television, online and offline lessons, self-learning, and remote teaching as methods to be used. But uneven access to technology has created a divide in the past four months between those who get to learn who does not.

“The main problem with alternative learning systems is the digital divide,” explains Shishir Khanal, co-founder of Teach for Nepal. “The only way to bridge this is to go back to in-person teaching by organising staggered classes with precautions, or for teachers to physically visit students’ homes maintaining distance. Trouble is that many of the schools have been converted to quarantine centres.”

A survey of access to technology in Tulsipur in the western Tarai recently showed that even in the town, only 6% of students in government schools had WiFi access at home. Only 21% in higher education had radio sets at home for FM classes.

Most private schools had been taking online classes for the past two months until the private school organisation PABSON decided to shut all online classes from Thursday to protest the government’s decision not to allow them to take fees from parents.

There is technology gap among students even in Kathmandu Valley. At the Pragati Shiksha Sadan Secondary School in Lalitpur, only a quarter of students are taking online classes. Of the rest, many are stuck outside the Valley because of the lockdown and poorer families cannot afford laptops and Wifi.

Principal Surya Prasad Ghimire says the school is conducting classes for lower grades through radio and television, and higher classes online. He adds: “Students in the Valley studying in government schools are from weaker economic backgrounds, and do not have the equipment to take online classes.”

Students unable to attend online classes are provided with alternative textbooks and class materials, but this is not as effective as online learning. “Some students feel inferior because they do not have the equipment for online classes,” says Ghimire. “It is good that we are able to do remote learning, but this is not accessible to many.”

Professor Ram Krishna Regmi says the digital divide has brought out the class divide in Nepali society. He says: “Focusing only on teaching through the use of technology is discriminatory for people who do not have access to it.”

Ministry of Education, along with local levels and schools, decided to classify students who did not have access to the internet and provide them with resources to aid their learning. They were instructed to categorise students according to access to radio, FM radio,  tv, and access to a computer but no internet.

In Lalitpur, for example, students in 219 government schools who do not have online access have been instructed to listen to radio or tv classes at a specified time. However, Mahendra Chhetri at Lalitpur Municpality admits that alternative learning is inherently unequal unless the technology gap is bridged.

Even before the government decided on alternative instruction Bhaktapur had already started remote learning through a local tv channel in its 33 public school, while many of the 60 private schools are doing online classes.

However, despite this there are problems of access. Hari Parsad Niraula of Bhaktapur’;s education department says while 80% of the students from private schools are taking classes, only 48% from public schools are online.

In Kathmandu, there is a total of 500 private and public schools. According to Ishwar Man Dangol, spokesperson of the Kathmandu Municipality, most schools have effectively implemented an alternative learning system. Apart from using Zoom and Messenger,  schools are broadcasting lessons through radio and tv.

“It is difficult to conduct online classes even in households that have equipment. Some families have only one smartphone or laptop and there are up to three children taking online classes simultaneously,” says K B Karmacharya, a teacher in Wagishwari Higher Secondary School. “The parents are getting fed up.”

One government school in Dharan in eastern Nepal had around 30 students who did not have access to online platforms, radio or tv, says principal Indra Mohan Jha. “Even if families have laptops or phones, they do not have WiFi and cannot afford mobile data.”

 

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

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A woman farmer selling her produce at a local market in Casamence, southern Senegal. In sub-Saharan Africa, 90 percent of those in informal employment, which is typically low-skilled with poor working conditions, are women. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD , Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

Growing up in the Senegalese capital of Dakar, Siny Samba (28) watched with fascination as her grandmother made snacks for her family, using the fresh fruit from their garden. She would often help her grandma make these snacks to feed the neighbourhood children.

“One day, I am going to have snack parties for children like Granny does,” Samba would tell herself.

But years later, when she visited local stores to buy fruit preserves, she was disappointed to see only expensive, imported products on the shelves. They neither tasted as fresh as her Grandma’s ones, nor where they as high in nutritional value.

So in 2017, armed with a degree in food processing engineering from France, Samba launched Senegal’s first baby food startup – Le Lionceau (The Lion Cub). Her goal: to provide Senegalese mothers and infants with a choice of locally-processed food, made from organic, fresh farm produce.

Initially, she started with three types of fruit jams. But now, three years later, she has expanded to 15 products, including jam, jelly, marmalade, cereal and biscuits. Her company now employs nine people and also trains fruit and vegetable farmers across Senegal in safe harvesting techniques and safer storage methods as well as the organic certification process. 

“We have a very simple philosophy: make the best use of our country-grown fruits and vegetables and sell to people who love feeding their children healthy, nutritional products. So, we are building a business that sustains and improves the local food value chain and organic farmers while providing high quality food to Senegalese people,” Samba tells IPS.

Senegal – a fertile ground for startups

Samba’s Le Lionceau is one of the many startups that have mushroomed up across Senegal in recent years.

According to VC4A — an organisation that provides technical and financial support to startup ventures globally and in Senegal — there are 128 registered startups in the West African nation, over a dozen of which are owned by women.

However, it is often assumed that the number of women-owned startups are much higher as many women entrepreneurs hesitate to register their businesses due to high taxes, which include 18 percent Value Added Tax (VAT) and 30 percent company taxes.

The figures are not unusual for the continent.

“Participation in informal employment that is typically low-skilled and comes with poor working conditions is higher among women than men. In 2018, this was the case in more than 90 percent of sub-Saharan African countries,” states a policy document by Women Deliver, a global advocacy organisation that champions gender equality and the health and rights of girls and women.

However, the introduction of the Senegal Startup Act promises to provide support for startups, while easing their tax burden.

The law was passed in December 2019 after 19 months of intense consultation and discussions among 60 Senegalese innovation enthusiasts, 20 startup supporter organisations and government representatives, including the tax authority, and the education and economy and finance ministries.

The law aims to promote and provide tax breaks and other benefits to innovative new businesses in various fields, ranging from food and agriculture to health and mobile banking. Senegal is only the second African country after Tunisia to have such a law supporting startups.

Perhaps it will create an encouraging environment for women entrepreneurs, but the law itself has no special provisions for them. 

“The new law is really a big ball of hope for all of us who have started without any external help and were struggling to create everything from scratch, like consumer awareness, training of suppliers, creating a conducive market, building infrastructure etc,” says Samba.

Giving the information women need

• In Senegal, 49.9 percent of women of reproductive age have anaemia, says the global nutrition report which profiles the burden of malnutrition at the global, regional, sub-regional and country level.
• In children the rate of acute malnutrition is nine percent, which is higher than the developing country average of 8.5 percent, the report states.

Despite the high burden of challenges, resources are always inadequate, say many experts.

There is never enough credible information available to mothers on malnutrition, nor is there enough funding for those who are working to improve women’s and children’s health, says Fatou Ndiaye Turpin, the executive director of Réseau Siggil Jigéen (RSJ), a women’s rights organisation that aims to promote and protect women’s rights in Senegal.

RSJ is also one of the convenors of the Deliver for Good campaign coalition in Senegal, which is part of a larger, global campaign powered by Women Deliver. The Deliver for Good campaign promotes 12 crucial investments in women and girls, including dramatically reducing gender-based violence; the respect, protection and fulfilment of sexual health and rights; ensuring equitable and quality education as well as boosting women’s economic empowerment.

Seynabou Thiam, a Dakar-based digital entrepreneur and mother of two young children, agrees with Turpin. In Senegal, there isn’t enough credible information in the public domain on issues that mothers need such as childcare, child nutrition, mothers’ health and well-being etc., Thiam tells IPS.

In 2013, Thiam founded Yaay.sn, a social networking group for mothers that aims to close this information gap. The network, Senegal’s first digital social community, has over 12,000 members.

Using blogs, posters, videos and photographs as resources, Yaay.sn offers Senegalese mothers the information they need about childcare, nutrition and health though a platform that allows them to connect, share their problems and seek support from each other.

Thiam  has won several awards for her startup, including the Female Digital Enterprise Award in 2015 and Africa Digital Communication Days Awards 2019.

“We currently have two major platforms – a group page on Facebook and a channel on Youtube. The construction of our website has already started, so technically, we are in a transition phase right now. But I am hopeful that our website will be completed and operational soon,” Thiam tells IPS.

In 2011, only 15 percent of Senegalese had access to the internet, according to World Bank data. But today, less than a decade later, the number has dramatically increased to 58 percent. The rapid digitisation is an encouraging factor for women who have the potential to become digital entrepreneurs, says Thiam.

“Women have a systemic approach to business. Sustainability is always at the back of their mind, even as they create wealth. They also constantly think of the welfare of those around them – including their families,” Thiam tells IPS.

Women sell farm produce in Casamence, southern Senegal. Evidence shows that women’s full participation in the economy drives better performing and more resilient businesses and supports economic growth and wider development goals for nations. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Joining the Fight Against COVID

Gaelle Tall is the co-founder and chief sales officer of Paps, an e-logistics start-up that provides delivery services across Senegal. When the COVID-19 crisis began to effect the country, which has no online grocery stores, Tall quickly added a new service to Pap’s offers: delivery of food, water and hygiene products to people living under lockdown restrictions.

Another health startup which has been quick to join the fight against COVID-19 is SenVitale, which created the Passeport Universelle de Santé.

Launched in 2017 and co-founded by 22-year-old Nafissatou Diouf, the Passeport Universelle de Santé is a QR scan of a patient’s medical data that is integrated on a card, bracelet, or a pendant. Doctors can instantly access patient medical data by scanning the QR code.

When the COVID-19 outbreak reached Senegal, SenVitale created a web platform where citizens can take a coronavirus self-assessment test before approaching a medical facility. So far, over 100,000 people have taken the test, thereby taking some burden off a stressed national health service. Senegal has over 8,000 cases reported. 

“I lost my aunt who died mainly because she couldn’t find enough information on her sickness. So, we wanted to find a system that would help our doctors and health practitioners act faster,” Diouf, who won Best Startup of the Year (Senegal) awards and also the Feminine Coup de Coeur awards in 2019, tells IPS.

Areas awaiting urgent interventions

Senegal’s population, currently 16.7 million, is expected to rise to 22.3 million by 2030.

“In such a context, reproductive health programmes for young and inactive populations are essential for Senegal to capture the demographic dividend and for the country’s economic and social situation to improve,” Turpin tells IPS.
She identified four crucial areas of women’s health that urgently need greater attention: maternal mortality, access to contraception, information on reproductive health and investment.

The current volume of investment and attention to all of these four areas remains inadequate, although some NGOs are providing services, Turpin says.

“The NGOs are closely linked to public health structures and most of the time operate as referral clinics for public sector clients. These NGOs also create digital platforms to facilitate access to information and products on sexual and reproductive health,” she adds, admitting that no start-up business has stepped into the reproductive health area with a bankable service.

Perhaps its time for a woman to take on the challenge. “Evidence shows that women’s full participation in the economy drives better performing and more resilient businesses and supports economic growth and wider development goals for nations,” Women Deliver notes in a policy brief.

Meanwhile, female entrepreneurs like Samba are trying to add value to their current services by making videos on health, food quality, nutrition, organic food and the need for building immunity through the consumption of fresh, healthy food.

The videos in Senegal’s main indigenous language, Wolof, are free and handed to women and girls who purchase her products.

“Working for health, nutrition and food is hard,” she says, explaining that remains a lack of funding and infrastructure, taxes are high and there are many cultural barriers.

“For example, when I go for a business appointment with my male co-founder, people speak to him and ignore me,” Samba says.

But she believes things are changing.

“But (there are) many organisations providing training to women entrepreneurs, there are networking facilities. There is a new law plus the opportunity to improve women and children’s health. So, it’s an exciting time to have a startup.”

 

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Peace Corps volunteers in Nepal. Credit: Peace Corps Media Library, Nepal

By Kul Chandra Gautam
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Jul 20 2020 (IPS)

I have had 5-decade long and happy association with the Peace Corps since I was a 7th grade student in the hills of Nepal. My wonderful Peace Corps teachers were instrumental in helping transform my life. And the 4000+ Peace Corps Volunteers who have served in Nepal have contributed immensely to my country’s development.

I feel sad that because of the COVID Pandemic the Peace Corps had to temporarily withdraw its Volunteers from all countries, including Nepal.

Today I join my fellow panelists* from Guatemala and Kenya to address some weighty questions about the future of the Peace Corps from our perspective as global citizens, and that of our home countries.

I deeply appreciate the soul-searching motivation for our reflection at this time of historic convulsion in the US triggered by not only the COVID crisis but also the Black Lives Matter movement, and other crises facing America and the world.

Recent events have made all of us introspect deeply about combatting systemic racism, and more broadly, promoting social justice, and ending the long legacy of racial, ethnic, religious and gender-based disparities.

We find these phenomena not just in America, but in all countries where the Peace Corps serve.
Let me try to address these issues in a historic and holistic perspective.

During the past century, the United States has been the world’s greatest super-power. There have been 3 major sources of America’s super power status in the world – its economic prosperity, its military strength and its cultural vibrancy.

America has been the richest country in the world for nearly 2 centuries. The US has only 4% of the world’s population, but 15% of the world’s GDP, and 30% of the world’s billionaires. But we also find in America grotesque inequality, and great poverty in the midst of plenty.

It is the only rich country in the world without universal health coverage. In terms of people’s health & well-being, the US is no longer a world leader.

Peace Corps worker in Nepal. Credit: www.peacecorps.gov

The fact that the US has more cases & deaths from COVID-19 than any other country in the world, is a telling example of how America’s vast wealth fails to protect its people’s health.

America’s military strength has also been unparalleled in recent history. Currently, the US spends more than $700 billion annually on defense. That is close to 40% of the word’s military spending.

But this is increasingly becoming a burden without proportionate benefits for America. The trillions of dollars America spends on its military is increasingly becoming counter-productive. Instead of winning friends, America’s military might is turning people into enemies and even terrorists.

Look at what the trillions in military spending have produced in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, the Arab world, and even in Latin America – a wave of anti-Americanism.

I believe it is time now to reorient the American economy, drastically reduce military spending, and redirect it to end poverty, to reduce inequality, to provide health care and quality education for all, and to protect the earth from the climate crisis.

This is where America’s third strength comes into play. America’s educational, scientific and cultural vibrancy have earned the US tremendous soft power in the world.

40 % of the world’s Nobel Prize winners have been Americans. More than 50% of the world’s Nobel laureates were trained in America. And 60 of the world’s 100 best universities are in America. The American scientific, technological and cultural innovations have enveloped the whole world.

That is what gives America a positive soft power for the good of the world. I consider the Peace Corps as one element of that benevolent American soft power.

I dare say that the less than half a billion dollars that America spends annually on the Peace Corps touches more ordinary people’s hearts, and helps nurture peace and friendship in the world than the many billions the US spends on military aid to developing countries.

I recall that was precisely the vision of President John F Kennedy when he established the Peace Corps. Kennedy envisioned the Peace Corps – as an opportunity for young Americans to better understand the challenges of living in a developing country, to impart their knowledge and skills, and to help overcome poverty and underdevelopment.

Those are precisely the building blocks for peace and prosperity. It is that spirit of solidarity and empathy that makes America, or Nepal or any other country truly Great.

To paraphrase the late Senator Teddy Kennedy, to make America Great Again: “It is better to send in the Peace Corps than the Marine Corps”.

I so wish that President Trump had been a Peace Corps volunteer. If he had the Peace Corps experience, he would have tried to make “America Great Again” by responding to the greatest challenges of our times – the COVID-19 pandemic, systemic racism, global poverty, and the climate crisis – in a completely different manner.

Let me now reflect on two questions that the NPCA asked us:

– “How can the Peace Corps be a true partner with host countries
in the new post-COVID world?
– And how must the Peace Corps change to be relevant for the 21st century”

Well, even before COVID-19 invaded and destabilized the world, we already had a universally agreed global agenda called the Sustainable Development Goals. Those goals, with dozens of specific and time-bound targets to be achieved by 2030, include ending extreme poverty, promoting prosperity with equity, protecting the environment and safeguarding people’s human rights.

They were endorsed by all countries of the world, including the United States, at the United Nations in 2015. The SDGs comprise a non-partisan agenda, so all of us can support them whether you are a Republican or Democrat or neither.

The Peace Corps Volunteers already promote these goals in their work as teachers, health promoters, agriculture extension workers, and a variety of other vocations.

What is needed now is to refine the skills of the Peace Corps Volunteers to ensure that their services are provided to truly empower local people and communities.

Like all other institutions are doing at this time, the Peace Corps too would benefit from an organizational soul searching to root out any trace of racism, gender discrimination or a colonial mentality that may occasionally and inadvertently influence its work and mission.

I honestly believe that the Peace Corps can help transform the multiple crises facing the US and the world into opportunity for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

I know from my own personal experience and observation that Peace Corps Volunteers can make a transformational impact on the lives of many ordinary people, and future leaders of host countries.

Our increasingly inter-connected world demands global solidarity, not charity, to solve global problems that transcend national borders like the specter of war, terrorism, racism, climate change, and pandemics like COVID-19.

I sincerely believe that the Peace Corps can be a great organization dedicated to promote such global solidarity at the people to people level.

Let us remember that solidarity, unlike charity, is a two-way street. The Peace Corps experience is just as important for the education and enlightenment of the Peace Corps Volunteers as it is for them to help their host communities.

More than any other group of Americans, I believe that Returned Peace Corps Volunteers can instill a sense of a more enlightened America as part of, not apart from, a more just, peaceful and prosperous world.

So, I hope and count on the Peace Corps to survive and thrive, and help build an enlightened post-COVID America and the world.

*In an address to the National Peace Corps Association sharing views on the future of the Peace Corps from the perspective of a host country, Nepal.

www.kulgautam.org; kulgautam@hotmail.com

 

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Excerpt:

Kul Chandra Gautam is a former Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF, winner of the 2018 Harris Wofford Global Citizen Award conferred by the National Association of the American Peace Corps, and author of: ‘Global Citizen from Gulmi: My Journey from the Hills of Nepal to the Halls of the United Nations’.

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Prior to the pandemic, supporting and catalysing women entrepreneurship was a topic that was gaining traction across intermediary organisations and investment firms. Picture courtesy: Charlotte Anderson

By Saipriya Salla
BENGALURU, Karnataka, India, Jul 19 2020 (IPS)

Two years ago, Aarti started a small business selling traditional handicrafts online, supporting artisans based in rural Karnataka. After an initial phase of struggle, she had a steady stream of orders and was looking to procure manufacturing equipment and scale the impact of her business by supporting more local talent.

All this came to a grinding halt in March 2020. The pandemic, and subsequent lockdown, meant severe restrictions on travel and business. Aarti’s new equipment couldn’t be delivered and she had no way to move her existing inventory.

Historically, it has been documented that economic crises widen existing inequalities for women across key facets like access to healthcare, education, and finances
She was slowly burning through her savings and was unsure about how she would continue to provide basic income to her staff and artisans. Moreover, her in-laws had moved in with her family, which meant she now had extra caregiving responsibilities.

Unfortunately, Aarti’s story is not unique. 2020 marks 25 years since the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, once declared the most progressive blueprint for advancing women’s rights. Despite the years that have passed since, this story continues to be the reality for many working women, especially women entrepreneurs, who have had to deal with significant lifestyle changes in the wake of the pandemic, both personally and professionally.

We are no strangers to the fact that women are disproportionately impacted during crises. Women make up a larger percentage of health and social care workers—professions whose representatives are increasingly on the frontline fighting this pandemic.

Historically, it has been documented that economic crises widen existing inequalities for women across key facets like access to healthcare, education, and finances. Nearly 40 percent of women in wage employment are estimated to lack access to social protection mechanisms. In the social sector, there have been several articles and online webinars in the past two months that have brought to light how the pandemic and lockdown has exacerbated gender inequities across the board.

Does this impact extend to women entrepreneurs? Initial evidence indicates that it does so, disproportionately.

 

Factors impacting women entrepreneurs

 

1. Increase in unpaid care work

One in four of women entrepreneurs surveyed by WeConnect International stated that the increased care demands placed on them, with families being physically distanced and confined to their homes, has reduced the time they spend on their businesses. This shouldn’t come as a surprise because in most of the Global South, a majority of responsibilities at home have traditionally been borne by women.

With support services like domestic help and daycare facilities also being impacted due to the pandemic, women like Aarti are now having to shoulder an increased domestic workload, in addition to trying to keep their businesses afloat.

 

2. Disproportionate gender balance in affected sectors

Small and growing businesses (SGBs) have definitely been one of the hardest hit segments during the pandemic. Close to 40 percent of SGBs in emerging markets are staring at potential failure in the next half of the year.

Latest estimates from the Sixth Economic Census suggest that 13.8 percent of Indian establishments are owned by women, majority of which are microenterprises and self-financed. However, many of these women-led businesses are found in sectors like tourism, education, and beauty, which are also the ones most affected1 due to new physical distancing measures. Although we are still computing the actual economic losses, a recent survey conducted by us at the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) shows that women-led businesses are twice as likely to consider shutting shop.

 

3. Lack of external investment

Prior to the pandemic, supporting and catalysing women entrepreneurship was a topic that was gaining traction across intermediary organisations and investment firms. Gender-lens investing was becoming a part of mainstream conversations. Now, all gears have shifted to focus on immediate relief. As one entrepreneur stated, “We were just about to raise our seed equity round when the pandemic struck. The world of equity impact investing is hard to break into for a women entrepreneur, and this has definitely set us back even further”.2

Once we enter the recovery and rebuilding phase, it is likely that women will take longer to resume their business/careers, (as was seen in the last downturn). This  will only reinforce and widen existing investor biases and slow down investment in women-led enterprises.

 

4. An assumption of access

A lot of support services for entrepreneurs have shifted online to ensure that they have access to the guidance they require even in the absence of physical convenings. However, in doing so, the assumption that both men and women have equal access to space, internet, and available time to leverage these resources, is in itself flawed. Additionally, women often do not have the same network of peers to reach out to for moral or technical support.

 

What can we do?

Supporting women entrepreneurs with relevant trainings, and providing access to flexible financing options to help keep their businesses afloat are definitely good places to start. We have an opportunity to pivot and rebuild support structures. Here are some things to keep in mind as we do so:

 

1. Make interventions gender responsive

We need to ensure that, in addition to considering gender norms, roles, and relations, our interventions understand how these affect access to resources, and offer remedial action to overcome these obstacles. Collaborating with known experts in the field is a good way to work towards this. For example, the Indian Women Social Entrepreneurs Network (IWSEN), formed from one such collaboration, seeks to provide women social entrepreneurs across India with leadership and management skills to help scale their businesses, especially in these times.

 

2. Make financial services more inclusive

Women in developing countries tend to not have the same access to information, skills, or awareness to fully leverage financial services. The pandemic provides governments and private finance providers an opportunity to design or tweak existing financial services to be made more inclusive for women entrepreneurs, both from rural and urban backgrounds.

 

3. Focus on digital inclusion

SGBs are undergoing a transformation to make it through this crisis. In a country where the female internet user population is only half of that of the men, with the divide being more distinct in rural India, this overhaul of services to digital platforms can widen inequalities. Entrepreneur-support organisations must work with SGBs to set in place an inclusive plan to gradually build digital awareness and adoption.

This pandemic has acted as a mirror for the unequal systems and structures we had become accustomed to as a society. However, it is also presenting us with an opportunity to change the status quo and look at designing inclusive and sustainable support systems for entrepreneurs. Let us use it to build back better.

 

Saipriya Salla is a senior program coordinator at the India chapter of Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs

 

This story was originally published by India Development Review (IDR)

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By External Source
Jul 17 2020 (IPS-Partners)

How do we incorporate different knowledge systems in the battle for biodiversity? Billy Offland set off on a 2-year journey to learn about conservation from as many different people as possible. In his travels, he met Dr. Anne Poelina in the Kimberley in Western Australia. Anne is a Nyikina Warrwa Traditional Owner and chair of the Mardoowarra Fitzroy River Council.What can we learn from the Fitzroy River Council? How do we create “forever industries”? How can we use this knowledge in global policymaking?Music: River Feeling by Kalaji (Mark Coles Smith)To find out more about IPBES, head to www.ipbes.net or follow us on social media @IPBES.

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Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Fiona Broom
Jul 17 2020 (IPS)

Global travel restrictions as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak are accelerating a trend towards research publications focussed on the global South, publishers say.

It means the days of fly-in-fly-out field work may be winding back for researchers from developed countries.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted some research programmes, the pause offers opportunities to develop greater, more equitable collaboration between researchers in the global North and South, an Oxford Forum on Research for Development (OX4RD) online seminar heard last month (30 June).

“Research by African institutions is conspicuous by its almost complete absence in Western media”

Peter Green, Managing Director, AlphaGalileo

“Recognition of the expertise of researchers worldwide is important in tackling both global and local problems,” Siân Harris, communications specialist at INASP, a research-focussed international development organisation, tells SciDev.Net.

Harris says the range of responses to the COVID-19 crisis has also highlighted the importance of learning from health workers and researchers in Africa and Asia.

The science news service AlphaGalileo says the contribution of research in the global South, but particularly Africa, must be recognised.

“Research by African institutions is conspicuous by its almost complete absence in Western media,” says managing director Peter Green.

“Research about Africa is carried by AlphaGalileo, but it is always undertaken by organisations based outside Africa.”

Green says AlphaGalileo had already been working to encourage Africa’s research community to engage with the media, by reducing subscription rates for African academic institutions and taking news from African peer-reviewed journals at no cost.

 

Journals

The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journal groups, has announced The Lancet Regional Health, a suite of open access titles based on World Health Organization region designations, in planning since 2019.

The English-language Western Pacific title will launch this month with online articles, while the first issue is expected to be published in August, says editor Jie Cai. The remaining five titles will follow over the next two years.

Article authors whose primary funder is in a low- or middle-income country will be exempt from an article publishing charge, but those in wealthier countries will be charged a processing fee.

A spokesperson for The Lancet tells SciDev.Net the regional titles will “aim to stimulate conversations and facilitate information exchange within and between communities”.

Local research is “immensely important and relevant to the health and wellbeing of underrepresented communities”, The Lancet spokesperson says. “[W]e see an opportunity to promote the best science from these regions to advance health and improve lives of local populations.”

Kamran Rafiq, co-founder and communications director at the International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases, says the open access format is “something to applaud”.

Rafiq says the emerging regional focus of research publications “could … ultimately build up the evidence base that could change operating models and culture to facilitate [developing] country ownership [of research programmes]”.

 

New barriers

INASP’s Harris says there is widespread support for open access to research in the South. Many journals are publishing articles under gold open access, which makes final versions of articles freely and permanently accessible while authors retain copyright.

But, Harris says these new models are also creating new barriers. “[T]here are well-documented challenges and concerns about replicating the costs and structural inequities of the subscription model, with a pay-to-read barrier being replaced by a pay-to-publish barrier,” she says.

Costs to publish are often high, says Harris, and waivers for researchers in the global South can be unclear. “[W]e have seen in our own research that many researchers pay these costs out of their own pockets,” she says.

Many Southern journals enable open access without passing on high charges to authors, through government or institution-based support, or by using volunteers. New models for journals and research publishing platforms that are emerging in the developing world have been neglected by Euro-American science policy, Harris argues.

Language is also important, as many journals publish in English. “We hear often of challenges faced by researchers whose papers are rejected because of imperfect English rather than problems with the science,” Harris says.

“It is also important to recognise the challenges that language can bring for readers. What impact can research have to a local problem if it is written in a language that the healthcare professional or farmer or policymaker cannot understand?”

 

Future

Existing journals serving local communities play an important role in communicating research within their countries and beyond, Harris adds: “INASP believes it is vital that Southern research becomes more visible and trusted — and this requires Southern representation and accessibility to international journals.”

She cites African Journals Online (AJOL), which hosts 526 journals including 265 open access publications, Nepal Journals Online (NepJOL) — an active platform that hosts 179 journals — Sri Lanka’s journal database SLJOL and Central American Journals Online (CAMJOL), with 58 journals.

AlphaGalileo news manager Kosta Stefanov says much of the research now being published through his news service has a focus on topics that often have specific relevance in global South contexts, such as life sciences, biology, personal protective equipment and, of course, virology.

He predicts this trend will continue “for at least a year or two” — in which time the research landscape may have expanded to include a larger cohort from across the developing world.

 

This story was originally published by SciDev.Net

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Credit: UNICEF/DE WET

By Ann McLaughlin
SEATTLE, Washington, Jul 17 2020 (IPS)

The United Nations’ first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) is “No poverty,” the most important because almost half the world, 46%, lives on less than $5.50 a day according to the World Bank. But world attention has turned away from poverty. Why?

In 2004, I founded NGOabroad to link people’s skills to humanity’s challenges. Most people coming to me to volunteer believe that the most important issue in the world today is the Syrian refugee crisis; that Syrian refugees are those suffering the most and see this as THE humanitarian crisis of our time. I say, “What about Yemen? What about Sudan? …Five million Syrians fled but 3.4 billion people struggle to meet their basic needs.”

Our focus is on what the news covers and what is dramatic or traumatic

The slow grind of poverty – what Amartya Sen, Nobel prize winning economist originally from India, calls “unfreedoms” – are more dispiriting than barrel bombs. Based on my conversations with Congolese refugee women, not being able to feed your children in the “lean months” is harder than all the rapes Congolese women suffered.

So why is the world turning its eyes away from poverty?

1. Many people in North America or Europe see fighting poverty as hopeless.
Donald Trump’s “shithole countries” comment was the epitome of this point of view.

We need to shift how we present poverty and emphasize the strides which have been made. People want to be part of a winning team. The Gapminder Institute does hilarious TED talks asserting that chimps more accurately answer questions about world poverty than people! We are operating on stereotypes, not facts. The truth is we are doing better than we think. We have made huge strides: 2 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty in the last 25 years reports the UN.

From pathos to possibility
We must switch from a negative image and instead promote the image of what the world would look like if everyone is thriving. This will attract more people to the cause. We’ve been doing it backwards.

2. People have tried in the past or joined in some effort and feel it didn’t help.

a. Jubilee 2000. Many idealistic people, myself included, jumped onboard the Jubilee 2000 movement to “Make poverty history” by forgiving the IMF debts of 35 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries hoping monies would be redirected to health and education. Sigh, it was not a panacea. Only half the HIPC are meeting MDG health and education targets. Some of those countries are now in debt again.

We need a sustained, forever-learning-and-tweaking approach to assist countries rather than “slam-dunk-done.” One of the lessons of debt forgiveness: would it help to balance budgets and tackle corruption? Autocrats live like kings while their people starve.

One of the positive results of the Make Poverty History campaign: I believe that it changed the ethos of the World Bank. Amartya Sen was invited to deliver his “Development as Freedom” lecture.

Jim Yong Kim, who with Paul Farmer founded the pro-poor organization, Partners in Health, was appointed President of the World Bank injecting pro-poor priorities into World Bank programs.

b. Microfinance.

Muhammad Yunus who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work in microfinance inspired business schools to teach microfinance and MFI’s (microfinance institutions) were launched. I was heartened when so many people wanted to help people out of poverty. But did it work?

I talked to many MFI’s all over the world to create NGOabroad’s microfinance volunteer programs. About half the MFI directors said they struggled with staying solvent if their micro-entrepreneurs did not pay back their loans. Equally important, do micro-loans help people move out of poverty? My observation of MF programs is that you must teach entrepreneurship skills and mentor micro-entrepreneurs to ensure success.

We need to nurture solutions over time as a farmer would: planting seeds, weeding and watering

3. Shift to good news and solution focus as it empowers. Rather than more news coverage about the problem of world poverty or SDG’s, we need to put more emphasis on the solutions. E.g. from 2008 to 2015 the headline could have read “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 192,000 since yesterday.”

4. We need to celebrate achievements:

~ Brazil’s Bolsa Família and Mexico’s Progresa program which provide cash transfers to the poor IF the children are going to school and getting vaccinated have been hailed as innovative successes.
~ Rwanda is lauded for their $1/year health insurance; incorporating tech and courting foreign investors. Rwanda emphasizes self-reliance and the empowerment of their people.

5. People need hopeful models and solutions which have worked to vanquish poverty
~ Liberation Theology – pro-poor Catholic movement in Latin America

~ Gandhi’s influence rippled through South Asia for decades

~ BRAC in Bangladesh

~ Gawad Kalinga in Philippines began with work in the slums

~ Ashesi University in Ghana teaching entrepreneurship

~ African School of Economics in Benin

6. We need to create people-centered governments that care about their citizens and will develop programs which help move people out of poverty. To move out of poverty people need a voice in matters which affect their daily lives.

7. We need models of places which have improved quality of life
~ Kerala, India: high literacy rates and quality of life; engaged citizens

~ Botswana was seen as a success story: not borrowing from IMF; their diamond profits ploughed back into health and education programs; and balancing their budget

~ Costa Rica decided in the 1930’s to not have an army and instead fund health and education. They were in the vanguard of women having the right to vote. They have a health care system that Americans flock to for medical and dental vacations.

When viewed from the top down, people say things are horrible. However if you ask local people, they are very hopeful and engaged. Common citizens and grassroots organizations are circumventing the obstacles.

When the SDG’s were launched, the United Nations emphasized that “For the goals to be reached, everyone needs to do their part: governments, the private sector, civil society and people like you.”

If we look past the poster of the stereotypical emaciated woman, behind that is a vibrant community of people collaborating to tackle poverty. We have a long way to go, but all over the world people are moving forward. When the people lead, the leaders will follow.

*Much of the content of this article will be more fully explored in a forthcoming book: International Development: Brilliant Solutions.

The post World Poverty: We Have Come So Far… But so Much Further To Go appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Ann McLaughlin has been a psychotherapist and social worker for over 20 years helping people untangle human problems and to accomplish goals. For the last 15 years she has directed NGOabroad: International Careers and Volunteering, a unique service to match skills to humanitarian needs and help people enter or advance in international development careers. https://ngoabroad.com/

The post World Poverty: We Have Come So Far… But so Much Further To Go appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Farmer ploughing the field: Source: Divya Pandey/IFPRI

By Suresh Chandra Babu and Vaishali Dassani
Jul 16 2020 (IPS)

The global outbreak of Covid-19 has disrupted the food system throughout the world. From initial lockdown by the national governments to slow the spread of the Covid-19 to now opening of the economies have had food security implications for all players in the food system ranging for the farmers to consumers and the rest in between.

The responses of the countries have also resulted in changes related to food availability, access, affordability, food safety and price levels. In response to the increasing spread of Covid-19, the government of India took early action for a complete lockdown on March 25, 2020. The lockdown continues as of July in various forms and in various states depending on the intensity of spread of Covid-19.

In the Indian context, the pandemic has hit the most vulnerable population the hardest, especially in the informal sector who were unable to work and have little or no savings. In addition, infrastructure and transportation challenges disrupted the supply of food.

On the demand side, the loss of income, closing of food transfer schemes such as school feeding programmes and rising food costs made access to food difficult leading to decline in dietary quality by a majority of households. The exports of food and agricultural commodities have stagnated. Labor availability for production has come down as the migratory laborers have moved back to their hometowns.  The sum, the food system is in doldrums.

Indian policy makers have embarked on major policy reforms and have broken down regulatory challenges in food and agricultural markets in ways no one thought was possible for the past 70 years

In this context, a key policy question has been how to revive the agricultural markets that can enable both the producers and consumers by converting the challenges posed by COVID-19 into opportunities?

In response to this question, Indian policy makers have embarked on major policy reforms and have broken down regulatory challenges in food and agricultural markets in ways no one thought was possible for the past 70 years. A quick response from the farmers is to increase the area sown by 40 percent for the next season.

While this supply response will have major implications for agricultural growth and transformation in the years to come, how did the government of India use this COVID -19 pandemic as an opportunity to usher major policy reforms in the agriculture sector?

The third tranche (first was on business including MSME and second on poor including migrants and farmers) of economic relief packages, the government of India introduced a set of policy measures that remove logistical barriers in agricultural supply chains and bring in the private sector to support development of ‘one national open market.’ Though these reforms will take time to reach the grounds due to implementation challenges ahead, it is a step forward for long-term gains for farmers, marketers and consumers.

First, the government amended the Essential Commodities Act (ECA) through an ordinance route to enable better price realization for farmers which will result in the deregulation of prices for food items including cereals, edible oils, oilseeds, pulses, onions and potato.

The ordinance assures that stocking limits will not be imposed on the private sector, except under exceptional circumstances such as natural calamity, and wars. The changes in the ECA will now allow private sector investment and making agriculture sector competitive. It will help drive up investment in cold storages and modernization of food supply chain.

Second, through barrier-free trade in agriculture, the government will provide adequate choices to farmers to sell their produce at an attractive price and through free interstate trade. It will also help farmers in regions with surplus produce to get better prices and at the same time, consumers in regions with shortages, can benefit from lower prices.

In addition, a framework for e-trading of agricultural produce will be established. The move aims to end market fragmentation farmers face forcing them to sell their produce only to licensed Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) in their locality.

Third, agriculture in India is fragmented due to small holding sizes and is highly dependant on weather which makes it risky resulting in inefficient input and output management. The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Ordinance, 2020, will empower farmers for directly engaging with processors, wholesalers, aggregators, wholesalers, large retailers, and exporters to have a better say in defining the terms of the contract with the aim to remove middlemen.

In the fourth intervention, the government will create a Rs 1 trillion Agri-Infrastructure Fund for farm- gate infrastructure for small and medium farmers, which will include primary agricultural co-operative societies and farmer producer organizations. This will fix the current gap in value chains resulting from poor access to cold chain and post-harvest management near farm-gate.

Finally, through the Prime Minister Farmers Fund – Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN), over 95.4 million farmer families (as on first June 2020) benefited disbursement of Rs. 195.15 billion and provision of Rs30,000 crores of additional refinancing facility by National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development during the lockdown period. These measures are positive steps toward long-term growth of the high value agriculture sector.

On June 3, 2020 the President of India, converted some of the key policy announcements into ordinances through swift action. The final impact of these policies will crucially depend on their implementation on the ground at the state levels.

These policy changes have gone beyond the regular challenge of individual states taking policy action given the federal nature of policy making in India. However, it is necessary for states to step up on their role in the implementation of these policy interventions. There is also a need to understand the process of translating national ordinances into state level programs.

Yet such a translation process requires institutional and human capacity at the state and at the local levels. Decentralized and context specific interventions that address specific challenges of the famers are needed for realizing he full impact of the policy reforms.

Allocation of resources at the right time that is based on right strategic and investment plans is also needed to strengthen the necessary infrastructure for developing one national market. Developing cold storage facilities through such infrastructure facilities will also reduce wastages and enhance supply chain efficiency benefiting both farmers and the consumers.

Finally, establishing monitoring and evaluation systems for learning and modifying the implementation strategies is needed to gain maximum benefits from these reforms induced by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Systematic campaigns to inform and educate the district level authorities is one of the important factors to consider for the implementation. Even in countries where suitable capacities exist to meet with long‐ term planning and policy changes, but even the capacity for planning, and implementing policies and programs to bounce back (better) from recurring challenges may be too low.

Despite the pandemic, agriculture production has been consistently growing and is expected to grow 3 per cent in 2020-21. It is ironic that despite such growth, farmers continue to lag behind. One can say, the Covid-19 pandemic was a wake up call for the government of India, and they were quick to convert crises into opportunities. The overall benefit to the farmers will only be known in due course, but from the beginning the government needs to ensure farmers benefit from the reforms.

 

Suresh Babu is Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute

Vaishali Dassani is Former Communications Specialist, International Food Policy Research Institute

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This screenshot from the U.S. Embassy in Ghana website shows Ambassador Stephanie Sullivan, right, donating technology to the executive director of the Economic and Organized Crime Office, Frank Adu-Poku, rear, and Jacob Puplampu, left, at a “cyber dark web investigations training” session in Accra in May 2019. Credit: Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)

By Jonathan Rozen
NEW YORK, Jul 16 2020 (IPS)

In May 2019, senior members of Ghana’s law enforcement posed for photos with the U.S. ambassador to their country at a ceremony in the capital, Accra. Between them they held boxes and bags, gifts from the U.S. government to Ghana which, according to one of the recipients, contained Israeli phone hacking technology.

That recipient was Maame Yaa Tiwaa Addo-Danquah, then-director general of the Ghana police’s criminal investigation department. In May 2020, she spoke to CPJ about how the U.S. and U.K. governments, as well as Interpol, provided Ghana’s security forces with digital investigations training and technology.

She cited tools made by the Israel-based Cellebrite corporation – whose website says their technology can break locks and encryption – and two U.S.-based companies, IBM and Digital Intelligence.

Journalists in Ghana say they are worried about how such technology may be used against them or their sources.

Last year, CPJ documented the use of Cellebrite’s Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED) by Nigerian security forces, and how the military targeted journalists’ phones and computers with a “forensic search” trying to reveal their sources.

Six days before the U.S. gave the same tools to Ghana, The Washington Post reported on how police used UFED to retrieve documents from journalists’ phones in Myanmar. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Cellebrite has pitched its technology to help authorities access devices of infected people to trace their contacts, Reuters reported in April.

“If a state agency can decode my system without access to my password, that is scary,” Emmanuel Dogbevi, managing editor of the website Ghana Business News, told CPJ in early July.

Dogbevi, a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, has reported on sensitive subjects, including offshore finances and Ghana’s purchase of hardware from the Israel-based spyware company NSO Group.

He told CPJ that many sources were already hesitant to speak for fear of being identified, and the years-long pattern of Ghanaian authorities trying to intimidate journalists left him worried he too may be targeted. “Sources send me information, send me documents. I wouldn’t want anyone to have access to that,” Dogbevi said.

Before being transferred from criminal investigations to head police welfare in January 2020, Tiwaa Addo-Danquah said she sought to strengthen prosecutions by building the police’s capacity to extract and analyze information from phones and computers. “In this [digital] era, most of the evidence are held on electronic devices…You arrest one person and the person says I’m not going to inform you [of] my accomplice. These are the tools that can help you to know who or whom that person is talking to,” she told CPJ.

A year earlier, in June 2019, officers from Ghana’s National Security Ministry arrested editor Emmanuel Ajarfor Abugri and reporter Emmanuel Yeboah Britwum, both of the Modern Ghana news website, held them for days, and searched their phones and computers in an effort to reveal their sources for a report on National Security Minister Albert Kan Dapaah, CPJ reported at the time.

Abugri told CPJ his devices were taken to an “IT room” and he was forced to give the officers his passwords. “They were going into my gadgets,” he said.

The Greater Accra police command still has Abugri’s phones and tablets, while the National Security Ministry has his computer, Abugri said. (A police spokesperson, Afia Tengey, said she was unable to comment because she could not locate the case files).

The experience changed the way Abugri thought about the safety of information: “Sometimes in journalism there are certain information that are very confidential to you, that you don’t want any other person to know the source…having those information on your gadgets and those same gadgets are in the hands of certain people [security forces], I feel threatened.”

Abugri sued Ghana’s national security coordinator, inspector-general of police, and attorney general claiming his arrest and detention, including alleged torture, violated his constitutionally guaranteed rights; the case is due in court July 15, he told CPJ.

CPJ’s calls to Kan Dapaah following the June 2019 arrests and in June 2020 rang unanswered. But Tiwaa Addo-Danquah told CPJ that she had at times relied on the National Security Ministry digital forensics and surveillance capacities to assist with police investigations.

“If the phone is on, [based on a telephone number] they were able to tell that this person was here at this time, he moved here at this time,” she said.

Manasseh Azure Awuni, a freelance investigative journalist, told CPJ the arrests of the Modern Ghana journalists and seizure of their devices shows that journalists and sources are vulnerable. “If it has happened to some journalists, it is possible it can happen to me,” Awuni said.

Awuni said he received death threats and was forced into hiding in 2019 because of a documentary that alleged Ghana’s ruling party operated a secret militia group. The party denied ties to the group, he said.

“It can exert a chilling effect on press freedom,” Roland Affail Monney, president of the Ghana Journalists Association, told CPJ of security forces’ capacity to break into journalists’ phones and computers.

Ghana’s police first received Cellebrite’s UFED technology from Interpol in 2017 at training for West African law enforcement in Cote d’Ivoire, Tiwaa Addo-Danquah told CPJ. The year before, Cellebrite signed an agreement to provide Interpol with “digital forensic equipment [including UFED] and training services over a three-year period,” according to their websites. Interpol’s press office acknowledged in an email that has provided Cellebrite tools to some national police but did not identify which countries or otherwise elaborate.

Tiwaa Addo-Danquah said that in 2019 the U.K. trained and provided Ghanaian police with IBM i2 Analyze to help organize and evaluate information pulled from devices. IBM i2 Analyze “facilitates analysis of large volumes of data” and “uncover[s] hidden connections,” according to its website.

CPJ emailed the British High Commission in Accra requesting an interview regarding U.K. digital forensics support for Ghanaian law enforcement, but no interview was arranged before publication.

IBM’s head of communications for the Middle East and Africa, Mark Fox, told CPJ in an email that IBM had “no record of selling or providing” IBM i2 Analyze to the government of Ghana, but declined to comment on whether Ghana’s police used the technology. “[W]e carefully review potential business opportunities to ensure they do not conflict” with IBM’s principles of trust and transparency, Fox said.

Separately, a 2019 British Immigration Enforcement document appears to show that the agency supplied Ghana’s Immigration Service with Detego digital forensics equipment made by U.K.-based MCM Solutions (the document misspells the equipment as “Detago”).

Detego can “[e]xtract and seamlessly analyse data from multiple devices,” according to MCM’s website. In March 2019, MCM posted on Twitter that its staff were in Ghana “conducting an advanced [Detego] training course for a number of specialist units.”

John-Paul Backwell, MCM Solutions’ global sales and marketing director, told CPJ that the company had multiple clients in Ghana, but did not respond by publication time to a question about which security agencies had the technology. Backwell said MCM Solutions’ ambition was to have their technology “used for good” to “solve security challenges,” but acknowledged the company “cannot always control how a customer uses the software.” MCM Solutions would investigate cases where their tools may have been used against journalists, he said.

The U.S. embassy provided Ghana with Cellebrite UFED and UltraBlock, another digital forensics tool made by the Digital Intelligence corporation, in May 2019 at the ceremony with U.S. Ambassador Stephanie Sullivan, Tiwaa Addo-Danquah told CPJ. UltraBlock is used to facilitate the extraction of information from hard drives, but does not have decryption capacity, Chris Stippich, the president of Digital Intelligence, told CPJ by phone in late June. He said company policy did not permit him to comment on Digital Intelligence’s customers.

Procurement documents reviewed by CPJ and a report by the Nextgov news website indicate that in December 2018 the U.S. embassy in Ghana made a request to purchase UFED and UltraBlock technology. The request specified UFED be capable of “extraction” and “decoding” of major cellphone models, including Android, Blackberry, Nokia, and Huawei, as well as GPS systems like TomTom.

According to a U.S. government database, State Department contracts were awarded to two U.S.-based companies—BIT DIRECT INC and Lyme Computer Systems, Inc— for cyber investigations equipment for Ghana. Other contract listings indicate that in recent years U.S. embassies around the world have ordered equipment directly from Cellebrite.

CPJ’s calls and an email to Josh Longacre, Lyme Computer Systems’ CEO and president, as well as calls and a voicemail to the publicly listed number for BIT DIRECT INC, went unanswered.

CPJ’s questions emailed to Cellebrite’s press office and Masao Koda, a representative for Cellebrite’s Japan-based parent company, Sun Corporation, were not answered before publication.

The U.S. embassy in Ghana told CPJ in an emailed statement that it gave the country’s police and the Economic and the Organized Crime Office (EOCO) “assistance to enhance their capability in investigating cyber-related offenses” with technology and training.

It said those who were trained underwent “Leahy vetting,” a reference to U.S. laws that prohibit spending on foreign security forces implicated in human rights abuses. The embassy did not directly answer CPJ’s questions specific to UFED and UltraBlock.

CPJ reached Frank Adu-Poku, executive director of Ghana’s EOCO, by phone in May 2020, but he declined to comment. Ghana immigration service spokesperson Michael Amoako-Atta told CPJ by phone that he would check for information about British support in 2019, but CPJ’s subsequent calls and text messages to Amoako-Atta went unanswered.

“Any data that is accessed by police would be done so in accordance with [the] law,” Sheila Kessie Abayie-Buckman, a spokesperson for Ghana’s police, told CPJ by phone. She said a “framework for police-media relations and safety of journalists” launched on July 1 would help curb instances where officers seized journalists’ devices or interrogated them about their sources. Abayie-Buckman did not provide answers to emailed questions concerning police use of Cellebrite and IBM technology.

“Sometimes I think it is good for governments to have that kind of [digital forensics] tools,” Abugri told CPJ, noting that there are public safety reasons for devices to be searched. “But in a situation where people like us [journalists] are involved…those tools are not being used for their intended purpose…that is where it becomes a worry.”

• For information on digital security, consult CPJ’s Digital Safety Kit.

The post US, UK, Interpol Give Ghana Phone Hacking Tools, Raising Journalist Concerns on Safety & Confidentiality appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Jonathan Rozen is CPJ Senior Africa Researcher

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The post The SDGs, COVID-19 and the Global South: Insights from the Sustainable Development Report 2020 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Every year, the Sustainable Development Report (SDR) tracks the performance of all UN member states on the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – adopted in 2015 by world leaders. This article discusses progress made on the SDGs in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia, as well as the likely short-term impacts of COVID-19 in these regions where reported daily cases and virus transmission are growing rapidly. It identifies five key measures that international cooperation efforts should urgently include to address the immediate consequences of the health and economic crises in vulnerable countries and population groups.

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Longer term investments are needed to enable the over 500 million small holder farmers in developing countries to grow more food, thus increasing their incomes and resilience. Credit: Miriam Gahtigah/IPS

By Esther Ngumbi
ILLINOIS, United States, Jul 16 2020 (IPS)

African countries are beginning to reopen borders, and this is finally enabling many citizens to resume their normal life. However, there is still an urgent need for African countries to prioritize agriculture to tackle food insecurity issues that have been exacerbated by COVID and will continue to be an issue into the near future. According to the latest estimates by the United Nations World Food Programme, COVID-19’s compounding effects could drive 270 million people into food insecurity.

While re-opening is something we have all been looking forward to, the truth is, without a COVID-19 vaccine yet, and without implementing strict safety measures, new waves of COVID-19 may emerge, as has been seen in the United States, forcing countries to shut down again, and again, and go through new waves of hunger and food insecurity for many citizens.

Given this uncertainty, it is extremely important for countries to have well thought out actions, initiatives, strategies and articulated plans on how to address on-going and future COVID-19 related food insecurity challenges.

African countries have the potential to produce safe, abundant, and nutritious food to meet the continent’s food needs, especially, when food systems are disrupted. But to get there, there is need to invest and improve the agricultural production methods and post-harvest technologies that farmers are using

Doing so will result in improved food security and more efficient and resilient agricultural and food systems while allowing countries to implement these plans should the need arise to close countries because of COVID-19.

What are some of the actions that can be taken? Here are a few suggestions.

First, start building resilient social safety nets. Indeed, the presence of or lack of existing food banks and other social safety nets programs such as school feeding programs and social pensions was key during the shutdown as all countries grappled with finding immediate ways to provide food for their citizens. COVID19 has drawn the attention to the importance of these safety nets to ensure food security for all citizens and to reduce vulnerabilities of families.

According to a 2018 World Bank report, most African countries have recently established these social safety net initiatives as part of a broader strategy to protect the vulnerable and assist the poor. As the report reveals, these social safety net programs are reaching only 10 percent of the African population. Majority of these initiatives target children, orphans and the elderly, through school feeding, nutrition interventions and old-age social pensions.

Left out are the youth, women, people with disabilities and other groups that are equally vulnerable. Clearly, much more needs to be done, to ensure the existing programs can deliver, now and into the future.

Time is ripe for countries to scale up protective safety nets or to think of alternative approaches to meeting immediate and future food security needs. There is a need to rethink implementing equivalent of food banks across African countries.

Food banks, which are diverse-from small operations to large facilities act as food and grocery storage and distribution depots. Stored food is then distributed to people who need it through food pantries, and meal programs. In 2019, over 3.6 billion meals were distributed by Feeding America, a national network of foodbanks. A recent report suggests that because of COVID19, these numbers may have increased, by over 70 percent.

One way is to build food warehouses in cities and rural areas. These warehouses could in turn be used as foodbanks, where citizens can collect food when they need it. In the United States during the pandemic, foodbanks and government funded food programs have been main points through which Americans received food when they needed it.

Typically, food banks receive funding from several sources including government grants, donations from individuals, corporate and foundation grants. A similar model, can be implemented in African countries with modifications.

Another suggestion is to continue to invest in agriculture. African countries have the potential to produce safe, abundant, and nutritious food to meet the continent’s food needs, especially, when food systems are disrupted. But to get there, there is need to invest and improve the agricultural production methods and post-harvest technologies that farmers are using.

Accompanying improved methods is the need for farmers to easily access soil fertility assessment and management initiatives, improved seed varieties, agricultural inputs such as fertilizers to ensure that farmers make the most out of their farming enterprises for the rest of the 2020 year.

Equally, there is a need to focus on longer term investments to enable the over 500 million small holder farmers in developing countries to grow more food, thus increasing their incomes and resilience. These investments include improved access to water and water conservation technologies, financial services, better infrastructure such as roads, internet and cell phone technologies, and functioning markets

Undoubtedly, there is evidence that clearly shows that with the right knowledge, tools and resources, smallholder farmers based in the African continent can become dynamic players in agriculture. They have the potential to not only feed the world, but become the game changers of 21st century agriculture.

Accompanying the aforementioned initiatives is the need for continued surveillance, monitoring and evaluation of these food insecurity mitigating action plans and enhanced coordination among all food security stakeholders. Data driven surveillance and monitoring will continue to be key and invaluable in helping governments to predict food insecurity crisis while guiding their formulation of initiatives to tackle food insecurity.

Moving forward in these uncertain times, and learning from food insecurity challenges that have been exacerbated because of the pandemic, African countries should make it a priority to build and establish strong national food safety systems and assistance programs so as to ensure citizens are food secure.

 

Dr. Esther Ngumbi is an Assistant Professor at the Entomology Department and African American Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She is a Senior Food security fellow with the Aspen Institute.

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