Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

A health worker administers a COVID-19 vaccine to a woman, in Malawi. The COVID-19 vaccination rate in Africa needs to increase six-fold for the continent to meet the 70 per cent target set for the middle of this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on 3 February 2022. Credit: UNICEF/Thoko Chikondi

By Gordon Brown
LONDON, Feb 14 2022 (IPS)

I am not sure the world will ever forgive us for worsening vaccine inequality and treatment of Africa as bad as under colonial rule.

People have become complacent about COVID-19. Our global (health) funds are fast running out of money. Vaccine inequity is getting worse.

We must alert the conscience of the world to act given the high possibility of more lethal variants coming back to haunt even those who are fully vaccinated. We may feel safe, but we are not safe, as long as the disease can spread and mutate.

The Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) ―the WHO’s initiative to coordinate the fastest health response out of the crisis― currently has a $16 billion funding hole, with only “weeks” left to resolve this.

Unless the money comes in urgently, we will not be able to fund the next stages of vaccines, treatments, testing, and even the medical oxygen and PPE needed by nurses and doctors (around the world).

Governments should take extraordinary measures, as it did for the 2008 global financial crash, and share the burden of funding according to their ability to pay, as they do now in funding UN peacekeeping or the World Bank or the IMF, rather than “unfair” and failing voluntary contributions. How the world had eradicated smallpox was a successful example.

It was short-sighted to take such a narrow view of national self-interest for rich countries to vaccinate only their own citizens in prolonging a mutating crisis that could cost them $5 trillion in loss of trade, economic activities, companies going bust, and jobs lost.

This will bite back even those countries that have a big vaccination program. Vaccination rates in rich countries currently stand at 75 percent against 11 percent across Africa.

We need a vaccine patent waiver and technology transfer. What’s happened in Africa is as bad as what happened under colonial rule. Africa has been deprived of vaccines but also of the ability to manufacture its own vaccines because it does not have the patents to do so.

The EU is unconscionable for taking vaccines made in South Africa late last year, at a time that Europe was 60 percent vaccinated while Africa stood at less than 3 percent. The World Trade Organization should have agreed a long time ago for the patent waiver.

The most urgent and immediate priority in tackling COVID-19 and getting more vaccines to people, especially in developing countries, was money. People are dying now ―right now― because we can’t get enough vaccines and equipment and therapeutics to them quickly enough. We have to solve the problem now, and that requires proper funding now.

Even now more than 70 percent of vaccines are still coming to the G20 countries which means that the other 175 countries are simply losing out. We’re in this terrible position where 60 million vaccines have already had to be destroyed in the US, Canada, the UK and the European Union. And 250 million more may have to be destroyed by Easter as being past their used-by date.

The COVID-19 response was lacking funding, coordination and leadership. An enlightened view of self-interest would tell rich country leaders that all people must have the chance to be vaccinated to eradicate a disease that is likely to mutate and come back to hit you, he said.

Social grassroots movements should come together around this big picture of saving lives. We have to expose the anti-vaxx lies. We have to realize that social media matters. Most of all we have to give people a bridgehead of hope and a sense of that we can change things.

If you can work for change and hope that the world can be a better place, you can persuade people to join you. I would stress organization and education and agitation, but I would stress the importance of persuading people that the world can be a better place through engendering hope in a better future.

Gordon Brown, a former Prime Minister of UK, was appointed in 2021 as World Health Organization (WHO) Ambassador for Global Health Financing and is a member of the Club de Madrid forum of democratic former Presidents and Prime Ministers. Last week he was guesting on Oxfam’s EQUALS podcast.

 

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It makes good economic sense for countries to invest in and fully utilise their total populations. Credit: Bigstock

By External Source
Feb 11 2022 (IPS)

Women remain under-represented in science careers and research all over the world. There are several reasons for this, including stereotypes about what kind of work women “can” or “should” do; patriarchal attitudes; and a lack of support for women pursuing science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) careers.

This isn’t just an abstract concern. Gender equality matters for many sound reasons. For one, it’s enshrined in international human rights law and it is one of the Sustainable Development Goals.

It also makes good economic sense for countries to invest in and fully utilise their total populations. Inclusive scientific leadership in which women are equally represented is best suited to the needs of modern society. Plus, valuing diversity and multiple perspectives sparks creativity and innovation. Both are important hallmarks of scientific endeavour.

We found a big divide between actions and words. For instance, 68% of international disciplinary organisations said they were committed to diversity and inclusivity. But only 32% said they were taking action by, for instance, developing policies that would drive diversity and inclusion. Only 16% of these organisations reported that they had a budget for activities related to gender equality

So, how are the world’s science academies and international disciplinary associations doing when it comes to getting – and keeping – women on board as members and leaders. That’s what we set out to examine in our new study. We focused on science academies and disciplinary unions because together, these organisations represent a large proportion of global scientific endeavour. They have the potential to be powerful change-makers and leaders.

The study followed a 2015 survey on gender inclusion in academies. This allowed us to pinpoint whether and how academies had made any progress in certain areas. There were some encouraging findings: for example, women’s membership of academies increased from 13% to 17% and women’s leadership on governing bodies from 21% to 29%. Young academies, which generally represent early career scientists, fared far better than their senior counterparts, which is a promising sign for the future.

But there’s still plenty for young academies to do. Most still have less than a quarter women’s representation, though there was one bright spot: South Africa’s Young Academy of Science is ranked highest in the world when it comes to female membership; 57% of its members are women.

The report sets out several recommendations for furthering gender representation and equality globally. These include developing and maintaining a central repository of gender-related policies and actions as well as working intensively with disciplinary associations where improvement is needed in women’s representation.

 

Key findings

The study was coordinated by GenderInSITE (Gender in Science, Innovation, Technology and Engineering), an initiative aimed at promoting the role of women in these disciplines and demonstrating how the application of a “gender lens” leads to more effective, equitable and sustainable development. It was a collaboration with the InterAcademy Partnership and the International Science Council.

The academies and disciplinary organisations surveyed are all members of the InterAcademy Partnership or the International Science Council. In total, they represent more than 250 unique organisations. That means the results we collected provide important baseline information for taking transformative action at a global level.

Here are some of the key findings:

• Young academies are setting the pace when it comes to gender equality. On average, women’s share of their membership is 42%; ten young academies are ranked ahead of the highest ranked senior academy in terms of percentage of women members.
• The highest ranked senior academy is the Academy of Sciences of Cuba. It increased its share from 27% in 2015 to 33% in 2020.
• There are big disciplinary differences in women’s representation. This perpetuates familiar patterns evident also in women’s representation in research fields. For instance, representation was relatively higher in biological sciences (28%) and social sciences, humanities and arts (27%). It was lowest in the mathematical sciences (8%).
• The Tanzania Academy of Sciences was among those academies that grew their representation of female scientists the most, increasing from 4% in 2015 to 12% in 2020. The Ethiopian Academy of Sciences now has the lowest representation of women members on the continent, at 9%.

We also found a big divide between actions and words. For instance, 68% of international disciplinary organisations said they were committed to diversity and inclusivity. But only 32% said they were taking action by, for instance, developing policies that would drive diversity and inclusion. Only 16% of these organisations reported that they had a budget for activities related to gender equality.

One of our most disappointing findings was that only six science academies of the 72 that participated last time discussed the 2015 survey report and its recommendations at a strategic planning session. This has prompted us to recommend that the IAP and ISC establish centralised monitoring and evaluation frameworks that require regular reporting of gender statistics by their member organisations.

 

Recommendations

The new survey contains a number of recommendations, which GenderInSITE, the InterAcademy Partnership and the International Science Council are committed to taking forward.

One of our next steps is to extend the survey to other global science organisations. This will contribute to a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of gender equality in global science. The report also recommends developing and maintaining a central repository of gender-related policies and actions as a way of encouraging those organisations committed to gender transformation to learn from best practice examples.

GenderInSITE, the InterAcademy Partnership and the International Science Council have all committed to using their regional presences to gain insights and advance the gender equality agenda. This is especially so in countries or regions that are lagging. The same sort of work will be undertaken in disciplines that have been found wanting in terms of women’s representation.

Our three organisations will also establish centralised monitoring and evaluation frameworks that require regular reporting of relevant gender statistics by our member organisations. This reporting will happen at a high strategic level. In this way, we hope that gender transformation is prioritised.

It’s also important to note that we’re not merely focusing on numbers, since these are only part of the picture. Science academies and disciplinary organisations are also being encouraged to focus on making diversity and inclusion central to their institutional cultures.

Roseanne Denise Diab, Director: GenderInSITE, Unesco and Peter McGrath, Researcher, Biosciences, The InterAcademy Partnership

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A woman is vaccinated against COVID-19 in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo. February 2022. Credit: UNICEF/Jospin Benekire

By Svenja Blanke, Felix Kolbitz and Oliver Dickson
BUENOS AIRES/ DHAKA/JOHANNESBURG, Feb 11 2022 (IPS)

In 2021, Global South countries came out on the short end of vaccine supply deals. In 2022, they are building capacity to produce vaccines themselves.

Latin America’s vaccination rate is among the highest in the world. Chile leads the way with 86 per cent of the population completely vaccinated, followed by Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Some countries even achieve rates of over 90 per cent for those having received the first jab.

The region, which had been struggling with very high infection and death rates, put on a remarkable vaccination marathon in 2021. All existing vaccines from the West, China, and Russia were being used to meet the huge demand.

Since the turn of the year, however, Omicron has caused incidences to spike again – in Argentina alone from a 7-day incidence of 57 in mid-December to an incidence of 1720 exactly one month later. Luckily, the relatively high vaccination rates can prevent the worst.

The geopolitically most relevant issue in this third pandemic year, however, is vaccine production in countries of the Global South itself. Some countries are setting out to produce their own vaccines. The Caribbean island nation of Cuba – as has often been the case – is taking a special path. It has already developed various vaccines, rolled them out, and – with over 90 per cent – now has the highest vaccination rate in all of Latin America. But what is happening in the region beyond Cuba’s special path?

In 2021, the three largest countries in Latin America – Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina – started to produce components of the production process of existing vaccines. Argentina launched its vaccination campaign on 29 December 2020 with Sputnik, making it the first Latin American country to approve the Russian vaccine.

Meanwhile, 20 million doses have been used in the country. And parts of the European or Russian vaccine production have been relocated to Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil – or rather, it was the countries’ proactive approach which brought production to the region through agreements with the market-leading laboratories.

For example, the Richmond laboratory near Buenos Aires – a traditional Argentine pharmaceutical laboratory and company – handles the filtration of the active ingredient from Russia and subsequently the filling, finishing, and packaging of the Sputnik vaccines through a transfer technology agreement with the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF).

By January 2022, 6.5 million doses had already been produced. This strategy made it possible to cover local demand more quickly.

At the same time, a new production plant of the company is being built in Greater Buenos Aires, with the aim of covering the whole manufacturing process from active ingredient to packaging, with up to 400 million vaccine doses per year – also for export.

AstraZeneca’s production by the mAbxience laboratories from Argentina and Liomont from Mexico was only able to start with a delay in 2021, as US national security interests had initially prevented the export of the raw active ingredient from the US. In the meantime, 70 million doses have been jointly produced and distributed in the region. Many more are to follow. But this is only part of Argentina’s global health strategy.

Argentine laboratories and academic research institutes, supported by the state, are already developing their own Covid-19 vaccines. The four most promising projects are called ARGENVAC, ARVAC, COROVAXG.3 and ‘Spinetta’. They come from different Argentinean public-private partnerships and are either in the preclinical or clinical phase with the aim of bringing these vaccines to market in 2023.

The Argentine government under President Alberto Fernández emphasizes the importance of ‘sovereignty’ and independence from existing market leaders. And of course, local production and regional distribution is necessary to reduce global inequality in distribution and access.

Moreover, Argentina has so far donated 1.7 million vaccines within the region. While a patent waiver or the lacklustre COVAX initiative are being debated, local vaccine development in the countries of the Global South, which have or are building a corresponding infrastructure, provides for a much more promising geopolitics of health.

Bangladesh

Bangladesh’s vaccination campaign has been marked by ups and downs. Following an agreement with India and the Serum Institute, the vaccination campaign began as early as the end of January 2021, with mass vaccinations nationwide starting in February. A digital registration system that worked well from the beginning contributed significantly to the success, but made it difficult to register for those without an internet connection.

With India’s export ban in April 2021, the vaccination campaign in Bangladesh had suddenly collapsed. With emergency approvals in the same month, vaccination only resumed with Sputnik V from Russia and Sinopharm from China.

After the approval, the possibility of producing both vaccines under licence in Bangladesh was also discussed for the first time. Sinopharm then signed an agreement with the Bangladeshi company Incepta in August 2021 to fill and distribute 5 million doses per month in Bangladesh.

However, the vaccine will not be produced in Bangladesh itself. According to its own estimations, Incepta could fill up to 800 million doses per year.

In parallel, Bangladesh is currently developing its own vaccine: Bangavax. The Bangladesh Medical Research Council (BMRC) approved Globe Biotech Limited’s Covid-19 single vaccine Bangavax for human trials in November 2021.

These human trials are currently underway and are expected to continue for at least six months.

However, because of bureaucracy and scientific complications, the approval process has been delayed for several months. As these procedures are too lengthy, further mutations in the virus could mean that Bangavax is already obsolete by the time approval is granted.

A successful result, however, could help reduce vaccine shortages in Bangladesh and the Global South. The Bangladeshi vaccination campaign, which has so far been quite successful but dependent on vaccine supplies, would then run more smoothly.

So far, vaccination scepticism has only been observed towards Chinese vaccines, as they have the reputation of being less effective or losing their effectiveness more quickly. Overall, the willingness to get vaccinated is very high. The government has set ambitious targets and plans to have the majority of the population vaccinated by March.

Since the end of January 2022, the number of infections has been rising rapidly because of the Omicron variant, hitting a country where, according to the World Health Organisation, only about 35 per cent of the nearly 170 million inhabitants are vaccinated. At the same time, the will to wear masks, keep distance, and reduce contacts has decreased considerably.

Reports from Europe that Omicron only leads to mild symptoms mean that a not insignificant part of the population no longer takes the danger seriously. In response, the government has started a booster campaign. By the end of January 2022, just under one million people had been boosted.

Bangladesh has a large generic pharmaceutical industry and the technical know-how to produce vaccines on its own, including mRNA vaccines, through Beximco Pharma. So far, however, the government has had to rely on agreements with the pharmaceutical giants of the Global North to enter into patent-legal production. But even if the patents are waived, Bangladesh would have to streamline and speed up its own bureaucratic approval systems to enable timely production.

South Africa

South Africa, much like most of the developing world, realised very early on that it lacks critical infrastructure for Covid-19 vaccine production, storage, and transportation. This put the country at an early disadvantage during global vaccine production and supply negotiations through various international fora and direct bilateral engagements between the South African government and global manufacturers.

When the vaccine rollout finally began, the Cyril Ramaphosa administration was heavily criticised early on for being slow off the mark. While many African countries had already started vaccination programmes, the South African government reported being stuck in complicated negotiations with manufacturers Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.

One of those negotiations paid off really well as the government was able to announce the local manufacturing and packaging of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine in South Africa through the local privately owned pharmaceutical company, Aspen Pharmaceutical.

The announcement of local production stirred hope in the country and across the continent that Africa will finally get the equitable and timely supply of the Covid-19 vaccine. But that hope was quickly dampened when it was discovered that the Aspen-produced vaccines were exported to Europe first, while African states had to wait.

While Aspen Pharmaceutical is a manufacturing partner to Johnson & Johnson, the company still ultimately decides and instructs where those shots end up.

On the bright side, the partially state-owned vaccine developer and manufacturer, BioVac, having been a long-standing local manufacturing partner to Pfizer will finally be able to manufacture the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in 2022. This is a result of ongoing negotiations between South Africa and Pfizer.

While this is a major win for the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), as BioVac is a key vaccine supplier in the bloc, it still does not settle concerns about exclusionary patent protections.

While the Ramaphosa administration faced criticism at first for securing vaccine supply too slowly, its redemption came when the government of South Africa along with the government of India lobbied for developing nations to be granted TRIPS waivers and was able to win over the White House after President Biden announced that the US government that they support the waiving of Covid-19 vaccine patents. This proposal, however, was strongly opposed by the United Kingdom, Germany, and several other EU member states.

While securing reliable vaccine supply through local manufacturing, the South African government is now concerned by the impact of vaccine scepticism and hesitancy, a problem that plagues the continent at large. With only about half of the adult population in South Africa having received at least one jab of a vaccine and uptake continuously slowing down, the African vaccination crisis still looms large.

Dr Svenja Blanke is the editor of the social science journal Nueva Sociedad based in Buenos Aires; Felix Kolbitz heads the office of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bangladesh; Oliver Dickson is a broadcaster, political analyst, and former Director in the Ministry of Home Affairs in South Africa.

Source: International Politics and Society (IPS), published by the Global and European Policy Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hiroshimastrasse 28, D-10785 Berlin.

 

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By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Feb 11 2022 (IPS)

While living and working in Paris I joined the Cercle Suédois, a social club founded in 1891, at a time when Sweden and Norway were unified in one kingdom. By that time, Alfred Nobel was a frequent guest and in one corner I sometimes ended up standing in front of the writing desk where he in November 1895 had written his famous testament, stipulating that 94 percent of his total assets (equivalent to 120 million USD in today’s money value) was to be allocated to the establishment of five prizes. These prizes would every year be awarded to deserving individuals, who ”irrespective of their nationality” had contributed to ”the progress of humanity and preservation of peace in the world.”

Nobel desk

Placed on the desk is a facsimile of the will that actually is quite difficult to understand. Alfred Nobel had spent most of his time outside of Sweden and even if he was a polyglot, with proficiency in French, Russian, English, German, and Italian, his Swedish had after many years abroad become somewhat rusty and the formulations he used in his will are occasionally slightly peculiar.

The first three prizes would be awarded for ”eminence” in physical -, medical – and chemical sciences, while a fourth prize would be bestowed upon authors of ”literary work in an ideal direction.” During the entire century which followed upon the establishment of the literary prize, the meaning of the word ”ideal” has been disputed. Could it mean that the “literary work” had to be ”idealistic” in the sense of promoting peace and general well-being? Or did Alfred Nobel by ”ideal” mean ”excellent”? The members of the Swedish Royal Academy, who were given the task of awarding the prize, have mainly leaned towards the latter meaning.

The fifth prize stipulated by Nobel’s testament has been considered as even more controversial and has over the years been agitatedly debated. Alfred Nobel stipulated that it was to be awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, constituted by five members appointed by the Norwegian Parliament, and bestowed upon persons or institutions that have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Criticism of Alfred Nobel has focused on his leading role in the global sale and manufacture of weapons. Accordingly, it has been suggested that his main motive for creating the Nobel Prizes was to improve a tarnished reputation. In 1888, had the death of his older millionaire brother, Ludvig, caused several French newspapers to publish lengthy obituaries of Alfred Nobel. One newspaper wrote: “The merchant of death is dead, Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” Alfred became upset by this confusion with his brother and he was in particular disturbed by the accusations that he had benefited from and become wealthy due to misery inflicted on others.

Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) was born in Sweden, but after several business failures his father had moved to Saint Petersburg, where he became wealthy as manufacturer of machine tools, explosives and sophisticated weaponry. In 1842, the family joined him in the Russian city. Since his factory produced armaments for the Crimean War (1853–1856) Immanuel Nobel’s wealth increased even more, but when the fighting ended his firm had difficulties in switching back to regular production and after some years he was forced to file for bankruptcy, leaving his Russian factory in the care of his eldest son, Ludvig. Immanuel Nobel moved back to Sweden with his wife and other children. By investing in innovative and highly effective arms manufacture and the developing oil extraction around Baku, Ludvig recuperated the finances and assured a rapidly increasing wealth for the entire family. His very gifted, younger brother Alfred could thus dedicate himself to science and profitable innovations. He invented dynamite, a safer and easier means of harnessing the explosive power of nitroglycerin and it was soon used all over the world for mining and infrastructure development.

During his life, Nobel issued 355 international patents, among them ballistite, precursor of several modern smokeless powder explosives, which among other uses currently are employed as rocket propellants. Besides his activities as researcher and innovator, Nobel wrote poems and tragedies in English and French and like his older brothers he was a skilled businessman, establishing more than 90 armaments factories around the world – most notably the still existing Swedish firm Bofors, which he developed from being an iron and steel producer into a major manufacturer of cannons and other armaments.

Alfred Nobel traveled around the world, maintained sumptuous houses in France, Germany, Italy and Sweden. He enjoyed opera and theatre, had several love affairs and became friendly with literary giants like Victor Hugo. However, he remained a solitary character, given to bouts of depression, did not marry and had no children.

In 1876, Alfred Nobel put an advertisement in a Viennese newspaper, probably because he assumed Germans in general were diligent and well educated, though he considered that German-speaking Austrians were more agreeable than German nationals: “Request: Wealthy, well-educated elderly gentleman, living in Paris, seeks contact with a language-proficient lady of mature age for employment as a secretary-head of household.” The young Austro-Bohemian Countess Bertha Kinsky responded to the ad and was eventually hired as Alfred Nobel’s secretary. She soon left his employment to marry a previous lover, Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner, though this did not hinder Bertha from maintaining an intensive correspondence with her former employer.

Bertha von Suttner had become a fervent pacifist after experiencing the French aggressive thirst for revenge after a devastating loss to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. As part of her efforts to spread her message of peace and fraternity Bertha von Suttner wrote the novel Die Waffen Nieder – translated into English as “Lay Down Your Arms!: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling”. It became a bestseller and was promptly translated into several other languages. Bertha von Suttner lectured around Europe, appealing to younger audiences and supporting efforts to educate them about the horrific costs of war. It has been argued that Bertha von Suttner aroused a sense of shame and guilt in Alfred Nobel, particularly through her insistence that “great accumulations of property should go back to the community and common purposes and support a renewed enrichment of the world.”

While I watched Nobel’s writing desk at Cercle Suédois, remembering that he at the insistence of Bertha von Suttner had bequeathed 94 percent of his assets for what he believed to be for ”the progress of humanity and preservation of peace in the world”, I could not avoid thinking about a statement Bill Gates and Warren Buffett made in 2010, asking for “a commitment by the world’s wealthiest individuals and families to dedicate the majority of their wealth to giving back.” The Giving Pledge website states that up until now, 210 mega-millionaires have agreed to accept Gates’ and Buffett’s appeals.

I doubt if this is really happening, assuming that many billionaires are giving to fake, or rather ineffective, charities while continuing to accumulate wealth faster than they can possible give it away. This does not mean that I doubt that Bill and Melinda Gates are doing a lot of good, though in 2010 Bill Gates net worth was 53 billion USD and it has now become more than 134 billion, while Warren Buffett’s net worth increased by 43 billion USD. I cannot help wondering what half of these enormous fortunes would have accomplished if dedicated to improving the well-being of the world’s population. Of course, some of Gates’ and Buffett’s humongous wealth must have been dedicated to their much advertised ”pledge”, but what about the other ”mega-millionaires”? I wonder – in particular while considering Trump’s fake charities and blatant tax-dodging and the offshore accounts that billionaires are opening in their efforts to pay next to nothing in taxes.

It is far from any negligible sum. The World’s Billionaires is an annual ranking by documented net worth of the wealthiest billionaires and is in March every year compiled by the US business magazine Forbes. In 2021, the list included 2,755 billionaires with a total net wealth of 13.1 trillion USD, 86 percent of these billionaires had more wealth than they possessed the year before. To me these figures are as incomprehensible as the vastness of the Universe.

Topping Forbes’ preliminary list in 2022 is Elon Musk with 256.1 billion USD, followed by Bernard Anault (with family) with 195 billion, Jeff Bezos with 187.1 billion, Bill Gates with 134 billion, Larry Page with 119.7 billion, and Warren Buffett with 116.5 billion USD.

Currently, individuals with a fortune of more than 1 million USD constitute approximately one percent of the world’s population, while they control 46 percent of the global wealth. This is quite incomprehensible and considering the minuscule impact of these billionaires’ philanthropy, I cannot avoid thinking there must be some truth to the French anarchist Pierre Joseph Prudhon’s famous dictum that La propriété, c’est le vol! Property is robbery! The good intentions of a guilt-ridden Alfred Nobel and the emerging benefits from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation might contribute to ”the progress of humanity and preservation of peace in the world.” Nevertheless, it must be something fundamentally wrong with a world order enabling such a staggering accumulation of private wealth. Hopefully, some of these fabulously rich people might like Alfred Nobel one day realise that their fortunes originate from the labour of others and donate their wealth for the benefit of community.

 

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Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 11 2022 (IPS)

The Joint Inspection Unit (JIU)– the UN’s only independent external oversight body mandated to conduct evaluations, inspections and investigations– is conducting a survey probing the widespread racism and discrimination in the world body.

In a circular to staffers worldwide, the JIU says it is conducting “a system-wide review of measures and mechanisms for preventing and addressing racism and racial discrimination (RRD) in the institutions of the United Nations system.”

The survey will examine the various forms of RRD at the individual, institutional, and structural levels and the measures and mechanisms in place, including cultural and contextual factors that facilitate or constrain efforts by organizations.

According to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ latest annual report submitted to the UN’s Administrative and Budgetary Committee last month, the United Nations currently has more than 36,000 staffers in 463 duty stations world-wide and spread across 56 UN agencies and entities.

The survey is expected to gather both staff and non-staff perceptions of the entire UN system, in the context of an ongoing JIU review on measures and mechanisms for preventing and addressing RRD in the institutions of the United Nations system.

The survey is web-based and can be accessed through this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/JIU_CSWS_RRD.

As widespread discrimination – based either on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or nationality—continues throughout the UN system, there are several interest groups who have bonded together to fight for their legitimate rights.

These groups include the United Nations People of African Descent (UNPAD), UN Globe for LGBTQ community, the UN Feminist Network, and most recently, the Asia Network for Diversity and Inclusion (UN-ANDI).

Shihana Mohamed, a founding member, and one of the coordinators of UN-ANDI, told IPS: “We, welcome the proposed reforms initiated by the Secretary-General and by other UN bodies, including the on-going JIU review, towards addressing racism and racial discrimination in UN system.

She pointed out that the issue of racism in the UN system is deep-rooted with many forms and dimensions.

“While addressing and preventing racism in the UN system will not be an easy task, I believe that these initiatives will assist us in identifying the root causes and other associated factors’” said Mohamed, a Sri Lankan national.

“I strongly encourage the UN-ANDI members to participate in the current JIU survey and provide the pertinent information to identify forms, patterns and root causes of racism in the organizations of the UN system,” she declared.

Credit: Joint Inspection Unit, United Nations

In its circular, the JIU says anonymity and confidentiality are assured in all phases. All analyses will be treated with strict confidentiality. There will be no direct attribution to the original source of the data collected.

“In developing the survey, we have analyzed the similarities and differences of 7 separate UN system organization survey instruments on racism, racial discrimination and staff engagement”.

“For a system-wide review, they provide potentially useful questions, many of which we have used in this survey based on their overlap with the criteria of interest and alignment with established items that are commonly employed in empirical research and that have proven to have strong psychometric properties, and also based on value from a system-wide perspective.”

The development of the survey, JIU points out, was guided by an expert on diversity, inclusion and equity (DEI) and on racism and racial discrimination. It was supported by an ad hoc advisory group of experts on racism and racial discrimination from the private and public sectors, and from within the UN system. It also benefitted from several United Nations personnel, including senior staff.

Last year, the UN Secretariat in New York, faltered ingloriously, as it abruptly withdrew its own online survey on racism, in which it asked staffers to identify themselves either as “black, brown, white., mixed/multi-racial, and any other”.

But the most offensive of the categories listed in the UN survey was “yellow” – a widely condemned Western racist description of some Asians, including Japanese, Chinese and Koreans.

The online survey came to an inglorious end— even before it began—without an apology towards those who were offended.

According to the 2021 annual report of the International Civil Service Commission (ICSC A/76/30), the largest number of unrepresented (17) and underrepresented (8) countries in the UN system were in the Asia and the Pacific region (para. 148)—perhaps victims of discrimination.

In 10 or more organizations with no formal guidelines for geographical distribution, staff were not represented from 64 countries and among them, 25 countries were from the Asia. Twelve countries did not have staff in 15 of the organizations, with seven of these countries from Asia and the Pacific (para. 155).

In an interview back in 2020, and citing his personal experiences in overseas peacekeeping operations, Roderic Grigson, a former Peace Keeping Officer and a twelve-year veteran of the UN, told IPS: “When I arrived in Ismailia, which was where the UN Emergency Force (UNEF II HQ) was located, the UN compound was a mixture of both civilian and military staff. The international civilians, like me who came from overseas, were treated very differently to the local Egyptian staff in many ways”.

For example, he said, the locals who were disparagingly called ‘gyppos’ were not allowed into the international mess (club) in the compound unless they were cooks, waiters or barmen.

“If I wanted to bring a local into the bar for a meal– even if it was someone who worked right next to me during the day– I would be refused entry”, said Grigson, author of the ‘Sacred Tears’ trilogy: a historical fiction set during the civil war in Sri Lanka.

This attitude towards the locals, he noted, “extended across all the UN peacekeeping operations I visited during my time in the Middle East– whether in Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, or Cyprus, it did not matter.”

“The International UN staff in all the UN missions treated the locals like lackeys. And they hated us for it. And I felt very uncomfortable working in this environment,” he said.

“Even though I was considered an ‘international’ having been recruited in New York, I was from Sri Lanka and felt I was a ‘second class’ international given the European clique that was predominant at the time”.

Having grown up in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), which was once a British colony, “I had experienced first-hand what it felt like to be treated as one of the colonial masters on the island”.

“My grandfather who was Scottish, lived with us. He worked in a senior management position in the British colonial administration of the island. He had a position of privilege given his race and colour which extended down to his family. Working for the UN felt exactly like that,” Grigson declared.

Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last month announced plans to appoint a Special Adviser to investigate the growing discrimination based on racial, national or ethnic origins in the world body.

“Racism and discrimination have no place in our world — least of all at the United Nations”, he warned, pointing out that the “diversity of our personnel is a source of profound richness. Yet I am fully aware and deeply concerned that colleagues have experienced the indignity, pain and consequences of workplace racism and racial discrimination.”

“This is unacceptable”, said Guterres in a message to UN staffers January 25.

He has also pledged to establish a Steering Group to oversee implementation of the Strategic Action Plan on racial discrimination —and report progress to the Executive and Management Committees.

 

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By External Source
Feb 10 2022 (IPS-Partners)

Speed dating is about having a short time to communicate things that could change your life. That’s exactly what we’re doing on this podcast, by introducing you to people with unique insight into our relationship with nature.


 

I know the work we do isn’t easy but I truly believe that if I can help get voices out, I want to continue doing what I do. | Picture courtesy: Bisma Bhat

By Bisma Bhat
Feb 10 2022 (IPS)

My name is Bisma Bhat and I am a journalist in Srinagar, Kashmir. I currently work as a features writer at Free Press Kashmir, a weekly magazine.

I have lived in Srinagar all my life. My father passed away when I was very young. My two younger sisters and I were raised by our mother. Becoming a journalist was not a part of my life plan. After completing school, I got admission at Shri Mata Vaishnodevi University in Katra, Jammu and Kashmir, for a bachelor’s degree in architecture.

However, because the college was a little far from home and my mother was concerned about my safety, I decided not to go. Instead, I graduated with a bachelor’s in science from a women’s college in 2016. That same year the militant Burhan Wani was killed in an encounter, which led to a lot of tension in Kashmir.

Around that time I visited a nearby tertiary care hospital with my mother for her annual check-up. While I was waiting for her outside the doctor’s room, I saw an unconscious man with a bullet injury in his head being rushed down the corridor on a stretcher. I could hear his mother crying.

As my shock wore off, I remember thinking that I had not spotted even one journalist or media person in the hospital covering what was happening there. I was shaken up, but I also felt that I needed to do something.

Following that incident, I decided to apply to the Central University of Kashmir for a master’s in convergent journalism. I graduated in 2018 and got my first job at Kashmir Monitor, a daily English newspaper. I worked there for almost three years, up until August 2020. I then joined Free Press Kashmir.

It isn’t easy being a journalist in Kashmir. I sometimes only end up covering stories from Srinagar and the areas around me due to lack of connectivity and safety. I also can’t stay out for too long during the day and have to be back home before it gets dark

We currently don’t have a lot of reporters at Free Fresh Kashmir and so I also end up doing a lot of daily reporting work. However, my main interest lies in covering conflict-based and missing-persons stories. I also write for national news portals such as The Wire, Article 14, and Firstpost.

7.00 AM: I spend most of the morning finishing household chores—cleaning the house and utensils and also preparing food for my husband before he leaves for work. Because of COVID-19, my office has allowed me to work from home, but my husband has to go to office every day since he is a government employee with the Department of Education.

Whenever my father-in-law sees me doing household chores, he urges me to go to the office or go outside to source stories. He often tells me I should focus on my job and not spend too much time working at home.

1.00 PM: I quickly finish lunch and sit down with my laptop to start working on a new story. As a first step, I make a list of all the people I have to get in touch with to piece the story together. Once I’ve finished identifying potential sources for the story, I start calling each of them.

For me, talking to all the parties involved is very crucial to the process of writing a piece. I recently worked on a story in Peerbagh, Srinagar, where the domestic help had stolen INR 3–4 lakh and was on the run.

When I got to know about this case, I first reached out to the family whose house had been robbed and got the details from them over a phone call. I asked them exactly what had happened, when they found out, about the role of the placement agency in this entire incident, etc.

After speaking with them, I called the district police station and the agency that had placed the domestic help in that house to hear their version of the event. I won’t go into too much detail about what I found out through my calls because it is a bigger story I am currently working on and hope to pitch to national publications soon.

Having worked as a journalist for a few years, I am comfortable reaching out to people to ask for information. However, this wasn’t always the case. I remember when I started out as a journalist with Kashmir Monitor, I didn’t have many sources in the field.

It was very difficult to find stories, and often I had to travel to the location of the story to be able to write it. During my initial days, I also had to visit various government offices and interact with senior officials in order to get information for research.

As a young female journalist, this wasn’t an easy task. Sometimes I was offered information in exchange for ‘certain favours’. I remember being scared back then. I was very young and had just started building my career; I didn’t know how to handle those situations. It is only now, after having spent many years in this field, that I know how to approach people and how to respond in such instances.

3.00 PM: Once I’ve made notes from all my calls, I start researching online to see if articles covering similar cases have been published in India before. If I find any, I read them. When I need to, I also step out to speak to sources for the story that I am writing. As soon as I feel confident about the outline I have, I shut my laptop and bag. I prefer to start the actual process of writing only the next afternoon and I usually email the story to my editor by the evening.

I remember when Article 370 was abrogated in Kashmir in 2019. Neither could I go to the office nor could I email stories to my editor because all network towers had been blocked. At that time the government was allowing limited internet connection at the Media Facilitation Centre. So I would download my stories on a pen drive and travel all the way to the centre, only so I could share what was happening in Jammu and Kashmir with editors in Delhi.

It isn’t easy being a journalist in Kashmir. I sometimes only end up covering stories from Srinagar and the areas around me due to lack of connectivity and safety. I also can’t stay out for too long during the day and have to be back home before it gets dark.

However, when I got selected for the Sanjay Ghose Media Awards in 2020, it gave me the opportunity to travel to rural areas and write stories that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to. As a part of the process, I was also able to work on five pieces covering issues related to women.

I spoke to a lot of women during that time and realised that they are all suffering in some way. Most of them aren’t aware of their rights and they don’t know whom to approach or what steps to take when they are ill-treated at home by their husbands or families.

I also realised that very few people from media organisations visit these parts of Srinagar and write about the problems that people are facing here. Reports of violence and conflict in areas such as Anantnag and Bandipora—areas that I was covering at the time—are fairly common.

However, there are very few human-interest stories. The voices of the people living in these places almost never reach us, let alone the rest of the country. As a journalist in Kashmir today, I want to try and change some of that.

6.00 PM: After preparing dinner, I make myself a cup of tea and pick up a book on the history of Kashmir that I’ve been reading. I usually enjoy conflict and war-based stories, but recently I’ve also found myself reaching out for historical fiction and non-fiction books on Kashmir.

Over the course of my career, I’ve realised how important it is to have hobbies and interests that help me relax. As journalists we encounter violence, bloodshed, and deaths almost on a daily basis, especially in a conflict area such as ours. These experiences often don’t leave you.

I still can’t seem to shake off the memory of this one story I was working on in 2020. It was about a girl in Kulgam who had been raped and left to die. When I went to talk to the family, it had only been three days since the girl’s death. I spent one or two hours with them so that they would feel comfortable sharing the details of the incident with me.

They were still in shock but they were also angry because they felt that nobody was doing anything—the entire valley, according to them, was quiet about what had happened. I remember them asking one question repeatedly: When did we get so insensitive?

After covering and writing stories like this on a regular basis, especially about violence against women, I decided to seek professional help for my mental health. Thinking about this case still causes me anxiety.

7.00 PM: I get a call on my phone; it’s the police. They assure me that it’s a routine verification call. They ask me where I work and what exactly I do. As I answer their questions, I try to remember if I’ve written something recently that could warrant a call from the police. As soon as they hang up, I call up my colleagues to check if they have also received similar calls. Thankfully, they inform me that they all did and were asked the same questions.

8.00 PM: My husband and I have dinner together and I tell him about the police call I received earlier. He gets worried and asks me to seriously consider changing my profession for my own safety. This is a conversation we’ve had many times—he tells me it’s too dangerous to do the work that I do, and I tell him that while I do understand the dangers, I don’t want to do any other job.

There is so much suffering in Kashmir. Every day someone’s son, brother, or father is reported missing. Recently I ended up helping a family I had never even met because of a story I had written about three Muslim boys who got arrested in Uttar Pradesh after cheering for Pakistan’s cricket team.

Out of the three boys, two were extremely poor and were on scholarship. In order to afford a lawyer, one of their families had to sell their cow. When I wrote and tweeted about the story, my Twitter feed was filled with messages from people wanting to help and transfer money to the family so that they could get their cow back.

I know the work we do isn’t easy but I truly believe that if I can help get voices out, if I can help someone in any way, I want to continue doing what I do.

As told to IDR.

Bisma Bhat works as a journalist with Free Press Kashmir. Her features have appeared in leading national news portals including Firstpost, Article 14, and The Wire. She has a master’s degree in convergent journalism. Bisma was awarded the Sanjoy Ghose Media Award 2020 for her reportage on the violence against women in Jammu and Kashmir.

 

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

By External Source
Feb 10 2022 (IPS-Partners)

 

ECW: You played a critical role in establishing Education Cannot Wait just five years ago. As the Chair of ECW’s High-Level Steering Group, what are some of the key successes achieved by ECW over the last five years; and what needs to be done in the next five years as we approach the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development deadline?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: Education Cannot Wait has had to deal with increasingly difficult challenges, from Myanmar, Syria and Yemen to the Sahel and now Afghanistan. Yet it is delivering beyond all expectations – with speed in its humanitarian efforts and depth in its coordinated approach to development – and is supporting our global efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, especially SDG4. This work – delivered in partnership with governments, donors, UN agencies, civil society organizations, the private sector and other key stakeholders, including the media – is having positive, concrete impacts aiming to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for the world’s most vulnerable children and adolescents.

In just five years, the ECW Trust Fund has mobilized over US$1.1 billion and has a growing number of public and private sector donors. In January, ECW received its single largest contribution – an additional €200 million from Germany – which is now the Fund’s largest donor, followed by the United Kingdom and Denmark. At the country-level, an additional $1 billion worth of programming has been aligned to ECW multi-year resilience and joint programmes.

ECW and its partners have delivered investments in 42 countries to date. This includes 24 countries experiencing protracted crises supported through multi-year resilience education programme investments and 35 countries experiencing new or escalating crises supported through First Emergency Responses, including the Fund’s fast-acting response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

As well as catalyzing help for millions, over 5 million children and adolescents have been reached directly and given the hope and opportunity of a quality education. An additional 30 million have been reached through the Fund’s COVID-19 emergency education response, which provides remote learning, new water and sanitation facilities, and life-saving messaging that slowed the spread of the virus.

We know that investing in 12 years of quality education for girls is one of the best investments we can make, and I’m proud to say that around 50% of the children reached through ECW’s multi-year investments are girls, and around 48% of the 70,000 teachers we’ve reached are women.

But there is so much more that needs to be done. ECW needs an additional US$1 billion in urgent funding, bringing the total to $3 billion by 2026, to accelerate the impact of this breakout and breakthrough UN global fund. ECW wants to represent the UN at its best, and the Fund has become a UN model for reform, partnership, innovation, multilateralism and most importantly, results for crisis-affected girls and boys.

As we look forward to the next five years – and in our sprint to deliver inclusive and equitable quality education for all by 2030 – we must bridge the humanitarian-development nexus and deepen our investments to integrate short-term emergency responses into our longer-term development aid interventions in crisis-zones.

This will need to include what are called ‘whole-of-child’ holistic education packages that are adapted to the specific needs of girls and boys in crisis settings. Our transformative approaches hope to address access to gender-sensitive issues, water, sanitation and hygiene, mental health and psychosocial support, gender-sensitive issues, as well as protection, targeted responses for children with disabilities, refugees and IDPs, and embracing new and innovative ways of delivering education.

ECW: ECW has identified a minimum an additional $1 billion by 2026 in funding gap for education in emergencies and protracted crises. What must be done now to both close the funding gap and build even more effective approaches across various key actors like ECW, IFFEd, GPE, UN agencies, civil society organizations and donors?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: This year, ECW will launch its new Strategic Plan to deliver on our promise of quality education for the world’s most vulnerable children and adolescents. This is our investment in public goods, our investment in peace, and our investment in prosperity. The strategic plan will build on successes and lessons learned from the first rounds of multi-year investments and adapt to the amplified risks connected with armed conflicts, forced displacement, health pandemics, the climate crisis and protracted crises.

For the strategic plan period of 2023-2026, ECW is calling on all public and private supporters to contribute at least an additional US$1 billion. This increased funding will support the education of an additional 10 million children and youth furthest left behind in conflicts and emergencies – including 6 million girls to reach our 60% target.

Germany just announced €200 million (US$228.3 million), in new, additional funding for ECW. With this new multi-year announcement, Germany is now ECW’s number one donor and the Fund’s leading donor to commit to multi-year funding. I call on world leaders and the private sector to follow Germany’s inspiring example and immediately scale up funding to ECW and meet and surpass the generous contributions of ECW’s top three donors: Germany, the United Kingdom and Denmark.

These multi-year financial commitments are crucial to increase the predictability and effectiveness of education responses in protracted crisis settings. COVID-19 and climate change have compounded humanitarian needs with the number of people needing aid reaching new records in 2022 at 274 million people. More than 1% of the world’s population is now displaced. Recent estimates indicate that the number of crisis-impacted children being denied their human right to an education has now jumped to 128 million.

These crises are not going away. Environmental problems will intensify the pressures. This is our chance to literally change the course of humanity, by changing the lives of every single crisis-affected, out-of-school child today. We must continue to work even more efficiently and effectively across governments, global funds, UN agencies, public and private sector donors to rise to the challenge with decisive action and united resolve.

ECW: How can we activate the private sector to both address the funding gap and to help better deliver on the world’s promise and commitment for equitable, inclusive, quality education for every girl and boy, no matter who or where they are? Importantly, why is addressing the education in emergencies challenge a good investment from the perspective of the private sector?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: ECW offers a unique proposition for private sector companies, philanthropic foundations and corporate social responsibility operations. By partnering with ECW ¬– and following the visionary example of The LEGO Foundation and Verizon – you are partnering with the United Nations. This means global reach, global depth and global opportunities.

Investments in education deliver a fantastic return on investment by opening up new opportunities for skilled workers, and then new markets, and our work offers increased security, predictability and economic resilience across the globe.

According to UNESCO, for every dollar invested into girls’ rights and education, developing nations could see a return of $2.80. Making sure all girls finish secondary education by 2030 could boost the gross domestic product (GDP) of developing countries by 10% on average over the next decade.

Think about it this way: if every Fortune 500 company would invest just $22 million into Education Cannot Wait, we could raise $11 billion and reach close to 50 million children with the power of an education. I can’t think of a better investment that they could make today that will positively impact their future, children’s futures, and the future of humanity.

ECW: UN Secretary-General António Guterres is convening a summit on Transforming Education in September 2022. From your global vantage point as the United Nations’ Special Envoy for Global Education, what issues must be addressed to even more effectively transform the delivery of quality education in emergencies and protracted crises to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: We must invest in the education of those left furthest behind – refugees, internally displaced people, children with disabilities, and girls. And we need to invest not just in one-off responses, but systematic changes. This means ensuring we have the resources, plans, policies, training, education, infrastructure and human power needed to connect all the parts to deliver on our promise of universal, equitable education.

Continuity is also key. Our investment in education in emergencies is an investment in an end to poverty, an end to hunger, and a more peaceful, more stable world. If children are not able to complete a minimum of 12 years of quality education, we will fall short of every target.

And what happens to the best and the brightest in countries torn apart by armed conflicts and protracted crises? All too often, they leave their country and seek asylum in the developed world. This perpetuates negative cycles of poverty and derails concerted sustainable development efforts.

We need a global scholarship fund akin to the Fulbright, Kennedy and Mandela scholarships – but for refugees this time – a fund that is big enough to cope with the higher education needs of these refugees and displaced persons. We need to invest more in early childhood education and accompany children from the minute they are born to the moment they enter the workforce as strong, capable and powerful agents of change.

ECW: Humanitarian crises are lasting longer, children are forcibly displaced for years (even lifetimes), we are witnessing unprecedented global movements of people, schools are under attack, COVID-19 has disrupted education worldwide, and climate change is an existential risk to humanity. What are among the top 3 countries facing education crises today and how can we come together to address them?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: Afghanistan is by far the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world today. The world must come together with $4.4 billion in urgent funding. This includes a substantial investment in ECW’s multi-year resilience programme in Afghanistan, along with other global responses.

For the education response in Afghanistan, we must set tight guardrails that ensure girls have unrestricted access to education. Through the UN’s direct execution modality, we have the opportunity to fund girls’ education without funding the de-facto authorities. ECW’s partners on the ground such as UNICEF, UNESCO and Save the Children are ready to deliver. Now is the time to build back better, and make sure an entire generation of Afghan girls and boys is not forgotten.

Displacement, climate change, attacks on schools and other factors are pushing children and families across borders. ECW’s regional responses in the Sahel and in South America (in response to the Venezuela Regional Crisis), provide strong examples of how we can look at the big picture to deliver education not just at the country level, but across vast geographies and vast demographics.

No one crisis or country should take precedent. It is our humanitarian and moral imperative to reach every child in every country with the safety and hope a quality education provides.

ECW: Your latest book, Seven Ways to Change the World, provides a visionary look at the future of planet Earth. Why and how can we best break down the barriers to education, and better connect the dots to address the challenges of global health, climate change, nuclear proliferation, global financial instability, the humanitarian crisis and global inequality?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: This is about investing in public goods. Investments in climate action, global health, and education benefit every person on the planet. We need to replicate the system we have for UN peacekeeping, the IMF and World Bank to create a burden sharing formula for global public goods, including education.

Think about our promise through the Paris Agreement to transfer billions of resources, technology and know-how from developed countries to developing countries through funds such as the Green Climate Fund. We know that if we are going to address the climate crisis, we need to bring all our collective resources together to address this existential challenge.

The same should be true for education. Investing in education is investing in peace, global financial stability, and a more equal world. It’s investing in a public good that benefits both rich and poor alike. My question isn’t why should we invest in education now, but why we haven’t already put education at the top of the global agenda?

ECW: Finally, you are clearly an inspiring, tireless and compassionate man – former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a UN Special Envoy, a best-selling author, a global humanitarian and true visionary. Why have you chosen to focus so much of your time and energy on education and why are you so passionately supportive of ECW’s mandate for crisis-affected children and youth?

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown: A few years ago, I and others saw a gap which was not being properly filled, hence Education Cannot Wait, and we were lucky to find as our first Director Yasmine Sherif. We had development aid which came in long-term programmes but could not deal with the immediate crisis faced by refugees. On the other side, we found that humanitarian aid was excluding education because it was focused on food, shelter and health. So, we had to fill the gap and did so by creating Education Cannot Wait – the UN’s global billion-dollar fund for education and emergencies.

ECW, led by Yasmine Sherif with her dynamic and diverse team of experts, is taking this crucial issue forward by not just providing aid for crisis-affected children, youth and refugees to get them the education that is their inherent human right, but also by coordinating and acting as a catalyst for other organizations to do more.

ECW is already delivering real education results for crisis-affected children and youth and can do even more with additional, urgent funding. I encourage donors to get involved without delay. Thank you.

About Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown is the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Since September 2021, he also serves as WHO Ambassador for Global Health Financing.

He served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2010 and is widely credited with preventing a second Great Depression through his stewardship of the 2009 London G20 summit. He was one of the first leaders during the global crisis to initiate calls for global financial action, while introducing a range of rescue measures in the UK. In April 2009, he hosted the G20 Summit in London where world leaders committed to make an additional $1.1 trillion available to help the world economy through the crisis and restore credit, growth and jobs. They also pledged to strengthen financial supervision and regulation.

Previously, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1997 to 2007, making him the longest-serving Chancellor in modern history. During ten years at the Treasury, Gordon masterminded many of Labour’s proudest achievements including the Minimum Wage, Sure Start, the Winter Fuel Allowance, the Child Trust Fund, the Child Tax Credit and paid paternity leave. His record on global justice includes his negotiation of debt cancellation for the world’s poorest nations and the tripling of the budget for life-saving aid. His time as Chancellor was also marked by major reform of Britain’s monetary and fiscal policy as well as the sustained investment in health, education and overseas aid.

His role in government continued to shape his views on the importance of education as a fundamental right of every child in the world and the key to unlocking better health, greater social stability, more rights and opportunities for women and a higher standard of living. He is a passionate advocate for global action to ensure education for all. In his role as UN Special Envoy for Global Education, he works closely with key partners to help galvanize support for global education investment and the use of innovative financing to reach the UN’s global goals. He is Chair of the High-Level Steering Group for Education Cannot Wait, Chair of the Inquiry on Protecting Children in Conflict; and Chair of the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity.

In 2020, he played a key role leading a group of 275 former world leaders, economists and educationalists calling for international action to prevent the global health crisis creating a “COVID generation” to avoid the reality of tens of millions of children with no hope of an education.

In his role as WHO Ambassador, Gordon has been invited by WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to raise awareness internationally on the great need for sustained global health financing, particularly from G20 and G7 countries, and the immediate task is to work together to finance the vaccination of the whole world and protect the poorest countries from the terrible effects of COVID-19 and other diseases.

In addition to his global education work Gordon is an advisor to the Graça Machel Trust, a Senior Panel Member at the Kofi Annan Foundation initiative on Electoral Integrity, and he is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Within the United Kingdom, Gordon is also the founder of Our Scottish Future, and the Alliance for Full Employment.

Gordon is the author of several books including Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalisation, My Scotland, Our Britain and My Life, Our Times and most recently, Seven Ways to Change the World (Simon & Schuster, June 2021).

Gordon has a PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh and spent his early career working as a lecturer and in television production. He has been awarded several honorary doctorates, most recently Doctor of the University from The Open University.

He is married to Sarah Brown, the Chair of global children’s charity, Theirworld and Executive Chair of the Global Business Coalition for Education, and the couple live in Fife, Scotland with their two teenagers.

The African Storybook Project has developed writing and publishing apps that are promoting literacy. Credit: Saide

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Feb 10 2022 (IPS)

Suwaiba Hassan published an engrossing story. She used digital apps that are giving literacy a boost.

The student from Katsina State in Nigeria, Hassan, won a National Reading Competition for a story she created using the African Storybook reader app and the African Storybook maker app. Saide, an education NGO, developed the apps through its African Storybook (ASb) project.

The apps are easy-to-use storybook development tools allowing children to write and publish their own stories, which can be read and shared without internet connectivity.

Titi and Donkey was written by Suwaiba Hassan a student from Katsina State in Nigeria. Credit: ASB

Hassan turned to the online apps to help her write and publish her award-winning story – Titi and Donkey. The story is about a girl who narrowly escaped losing her grandmother’s money to a cunning donkey. Hassan wanted to inspire other girls to write and read in writing it. She did more. Her story motivated parents in her home state to encourage more girls to go to school after Hassan won a National Reading Competition and all expenses paid scholarships to cover all her education levels. Northern Nigeria has a high number of out-of-school children.

Conquering literacy one story at a time

The African Storybook Project has created a digital library of open license African storybooks to address the challenge of education inclusion and access to appropriate reading materials for young African children. It has been piloted in 15 African countries.

The applications are helping conquer illiteracy one story at a time by providing reading material in home languages that reflect local content for children to read, says Jenny Glennie, Saide Executive Director.

Saide contributes to the development of new open learning models, including the use of educational technology and open education resources in Sub Saharan Africa.

“We are promoting the idea that you have a publisher in your pocket and a library on your phone,” Glennie tells IPS.

On average, 2000 unique storybooks in 222 African languages have been published online, created mainly by students, teachers and librarians. More than 1.5 million children in Africa benefitted from the storybooks downloaded from the ASb website, especially after COVID-19 hit leading to the close of many schools.

The ASb project works with local educators and illustrators, including children, to develop, publish, and use relevant storybooks in children’s language.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), some 40 per cent of the global population does not access education in a language they understand.

UNESCO cautions that literacy promotion should be looked at from a perspective of multilingualism because several international and regional languages have expanded as lingua franca. In contrast, numerous minority and indigenous languages are endangered.

Literacy in local languages encourages reading and writing among learners because they use the material in their mother tongue every day, noted Belina Simushi, Education Programme Officer with the Impact Network Zambia, an education service provider operating schools in Zambia.

In Zambia, she said learners are taught in English, a foreign language.

“Our learners need books to be written in a local language, which I believe can act as a stepping stone for learning how to read and write,” said Simushi. She led a story-writing project in which teachers wrote over 300 storybooks they uploaded online using the ASb Storybook Maker and guide.

“I also believe that by accessing books written in Cinyanja [a language widely spoken in Zambia and Malawi], our learners can read about stories, cultures and other topics that can help them enjoy reading books and develop a love for reading books,”.

Righting illiteracy

Reading is an important skill in the development of young learners. Pupils at a primary school in Gwanda, Zimbabwe, enjoy a reading moment. Credit, Busani Bafana/IPS

According to the Lost Potential Tracker, nine out of 10 children in Sub Saharan Africa miss the age ten basic literacy milestones, according to the Lost Potential Tracker, an interactive analysis tool measuring the scale of the global learning crisis. The tool jointly created by the One Campaign, the Global Partnership for Education and Save the Children in 2021, shows the depth of the global learning crisis.

Alice Albright, CEO of the Global Partnership for Education, says reading and writing are essential building blocks for children to succeed.

“This tool shows the depth of the global learning crisis – and what a critical situation the world faces if we do not prioritise education.”

While Inger Ashing, CEO of Save the Children International, warned that the world faces an unprecedented education emergency worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Children in some of the poorest and conflict-affected countries are the most badly affected.

“If we are to live up to our commitments to achieving the full range of Sustainable Development Goals and the children’s right to education, then improving literacy levels is a must,” Ashing noted, emphasising that being able to read was a foundation skill that enabled children to realise their full potential.

The ASb apps have also opened new opportunities to promote and preserve some of Africa’s least spoken languages, which are on the verge of dying off because they are not written down, said Dorcas Wepukhulu, the East and West African Storybook Partner Development Coordinator at Saide.

“The apps have enabled a different learning process that goes beyond the usual stringing of words. It is motivating. The fact that the stories they have written can be published and read by others is something children are very proud of and want to do,” said Wepukhulu. She explained that they are encouraging many people across Sub Saharan Africa to use the apps while helping the marginalised talk about their experiences and boost languages that have not been published in creating reading materials.

Smangele Mathebula, African Storybook Partner Development Coordinator for Southern Africa,  noted that the apps had given children a chance to be fully present as they interact with technology in sharing their experiences.

The African Storybook Story Maker App won the 2021 Tech4Good Awards in Education given by UK-based Tech4Good Awards. The awards celebrate fantastic businesses, individuals and initiatives that use digital technologies to improve the lives of others and make the world a better place. Saide was also voted the Winner of Winners in the virtual awards ceremony.

“Emerging as the Winner of Winners in this year’s awards reinforces our efforts to continue promoting the use of the Story Maker across Sub-Saharan Africa as a way of empowering children to tell their own stories and for communities to self-publish,” Glennie said.

 

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By Simone Galimberti
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Feb 10 2022 (IPS)

The global consensus about an international treaty on pandemic prevention is certainly a milestone towards the creation of a global health security framework.

A new treaty is likely to bind the member states to higher standards of compliance, especially if a global accountability mechanism is also enforced.

Consider the disregard towards the International Health Regulations (2005), IHRs, the only tool available to control what in jargon is referred as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

Despite numerous review exercises, some of which taken more than a decade ago in the aftermath of the first SARS outbreak in Asia and again after EBOLA hit Western Africa, the vast majorities of these regulations were not enforced in the following years.

The consequence is that we are still paying the price and very dearly.

Though the negotiations on the treaty details, especially the complex aspects of its binding legality, won’t be a cakewalk, such tool can offer a strong bulwark against future lethal cross border infections.

Yet a global treaty won’t be nearly enough alone to guarantee a pandemics free future.

What missing is the willpower to truly link preparedness and basic health care, something that is complex and very expensive at the same time.

A real breakthrough in the global health system will be seen when a new willingness is found unprecedented levels of basic health financing around the world, especially in the developing nations.

We need massive investments in building national health systems able to provide what it is normally referred as Universal Health Coverage, defined by the WHO, as access to a broad range of services, which would include the services that contribute to preparedness to future pandemic

If new resources are essential, the capacity of managing them properly is equally important so that the weakest member nations of the United Nations can strengthen their health system.

Unfortunately, for most of them, there is still a long way to go.

The WHO has a huge responsibility and duty to support such process but so far it failed and with it, the international community.

A different organization, starting from its governance, might instead radically change the status quo and enable the creation of trust that essential if we want more money to build national public health system based on equity.

In the case of the IHRs, it is true that primary responsibility of enforcing them lays with the member states, the WHO is the guardian and at the same time a key enabler in their implementation.

A stronger WHO could have done more not only to compel governments towards the implantation of the IHRs but also to be more effective in partnering with developing countries in rebooting their national primary health care centers and hospitals.

Instead, the agency’s reputed failures since the first outbreak of SARS in early 2000s showed the inability of a too complex and too political organization without adequate means.

That’s why we need to ensure that the WHO can play a much bigger role: not in replacing the ministries of health in the developing world but in supporting them in building equitable health systems.

For this to happen we do not need the WHO to be re-tooled and re-purposed but also re-founded.

The focus on the new treaty should not prevent drastic changes in how public health services are delivered in the developing nations and a lifting any “red line” in re-thinking the WHO.

Since 2017, Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, its current Director General, embarked the organization into a process of key changes but these improvements, important as they are, do not go far enough.

What we need is a radical turnaround.

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, again new proposals have been made to strengthen the organization.

A lot of emphasis has been laid on increasing the predictability and availability of unmarked resources, so called of “Assessed Contributions”, rather than having, as happens now, a WHO totally relying on voluntary contributions from donors that so far constitute the vast majority of the resources it manages.

Such contributions are driven by interests and priorities of the donors rather than those of the agency.

A balancing in the budget contributions of the organization might surely help but at the same time it might be worthy reflecting that some of the most results-oriented agencies within the UN System are entirely dependent on such voluntary contribution.

This for example is the case of UNDP and UNICEF, the strongest and richest agencies within the UN System. Perhaps the real problem is not the lack of resources in itself but the politicization of an organization that is basically owned by its member states, the governments.

The same could be said for UNESCO.

It is not a coincidence that both agencies share low budgets and are among the weakest among their peers.

At UNICEF, for example there is nothing akin to the role played by the World Health Assembly that effectively controls the WHO.

The governance there is totally different and it is led by an Executive Board representing the member states that though, have considerable sway over the management of the agency (that’s why the Executive Director is always an American), it is less politicized and less controlling than an assembly of member states.

Perhaps what we should have is a global fund for public health more similar in its governance and delivery to UNICEF.

Such radical transformation, improbable at the moment, might be instrumental in truly rebuilding from scratch the WHO and instrumental in turning it into a much more effective agency with less competing centers of powers like is happening now with what are de-facto semi-independent regional offices.

As consequence a new organization branded as the Global Fund for Public Health could attract the huge investments that developing countries need to build strong and resilient health system, insuring Universal Health Coverage for all their citizens.

So far donors have been too narrow and selective when focusing on public health.

For example, the focus has been on prenatal and postnatal care, reproductive health, all very important domains of public health.

Yet such narrow focus on these areas through a silos approach prevented investing into creating, in partnership with the developing countries, reliable and equity-based health systems at disposal of the public.

Let’s not forget what the Secretary General said back in 2016 Seventieth session Agenda entitled “Strengthening the global health architecture” dedicated on strengthening of implementation of the recommendations of the High-level Panel on the Global Response to Health Crises Report, one of the several published so far to retrofit the health system to deal with global pandemics.

“I believe that WHO needs to reposition itself as an operational organization, clarifying its reporting lines and adjusting its business processes so that it can perform its operational role most effectively during times of health crises”.

Moreover in 2016 the Commission on a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future argued that “public health is the foundation of the health system and its first line of defense”.

For this to happen we need a new WHO and such a new organization could create the trust for an unprecedented mobilization of funding in public health, resources that World Bank and other regional banks and donor agencies should disburse.

Both Indonesia and Germany, respectively guiding this year the G 20 and the G 7, expressed a strong commitment to reform the global health system.

A narrow focus on a pandemic preparedness treaty would be a miss opportunity to truly revolutionize global health governance and with it, reset and transform the WHO.

Simone Galimberti is the Co-Founder of ENGAGE, an NGO partnering with youths living with disabilities. Opinions expressed are personal.

 

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Pulses provide nutrients and energy and they help prevent diseases like diabetes and coronary conditions. The United Nations declared 10 February World Pulses Day.

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Feb 9 2022 (IPS)

Pulses and meat are both needed as part of your diet, however… While the total emissions of greenhouse gases from global livestock amount to 7.1 Gigatonnes of Co2-equivalent per year, representing 14.5% of all anthropogenic emissions, pulses have root nodules that absorb inert nitrogen from soil air and convert it into biologically useful ammonia, a process referred to as biological nitrogen fixation.

Moreover, cattle (raised for both beef and milk, as well as for inedible outputs like manure and draft power) are the animal species responsible for the most emissions, representing about 65% of the livestock sector’s emissions, according to a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Pulses, instead, provide nutrients and energy and they help prevent diseases like diabetes and coronary conditions.

“They are rich in proteins and minerals, have high fiber content and low-fat content, and no cholesterol. The carbohydrates in pulses are absorbed and digested slowly, and thus help control diabetes and obesity.”

 

Meat, instead…

Back to livestock, the Organisation says that, in terms of activities, feed production and processing (this includes land use change) and enteric fermentation from ruminants are the two main sources of emissions, representing 45% and 39% of total emissions, respectively.

And that manure storage and processing represent 10%. The remainder is attributable to the processing and transportation of animal products.

 

Pulses on display at a farmer’s market in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

 

Protein for the poor

In many cultures, pulses are considered as ‘protein for the poor’ and their high nutrient content makes them ideal for vegetarians and vegans to ensure adequate intakes of protein, minerals and vitamins, says FAO.

In addition to their function and role in reducing greenhouse gases emission, the world body highlights the following ten great benefits:

1. Pulses are naturally low in fat and contain no cholesterol, which can contribute to reducing the risk of cardiovascular diseases.
2. Pulses are also low in sodium. Sodium chloride – or salt – is a contributor to hypertension and can be avoided by consuming foods with lower sodium levels such as pulses.
3. They are a great source of plant-based protein. Surprisingly, 100 grams of dry lentils contain a remarkable 25 grams of protein! During cooking, pulses absorb considerable amounts of water thus reducing their protein content to around 8 percent.

Yet, you can still increase the protein quality of cooked pulses by simply combining them with cereals in your meal, for example, lentils with rice.

4. Pulses are a good source of iron. Iron deficiency is considered one of the most prevalent forms of malnutrition and is one of the most common types of anaemia. To help optimise the absorption of iron in our bodies from pulses, combine them with foods containing vitamin C (lemon juice on lentil curry for example).
5. Pulses are high in potassium, which supports heart health and plays an important role for digestive and muscular functions.
6. Pulses are often quoted among the top high fiber foods, necessary for supporting digestive health and helping to reduce the risks of cardiovascular diseases.
7. Pulses are an excellent source of folate – a B-vitamin naturally present in many foods – that is essential to the nervous system function and especially important during pregnancy to prevent fetal defects.
8. Pulses can be stored for a long time and therefore can help to increase the diversity of diets, especially in developing countries.
9. Pulses are low glycaemic index foods. They help to stabilize blood sugar and insulin levels, making them suitable for people with diabetes and ideal for weight management.
10. Finally, pulses are naturally gluten-free. This makes them an ideal option for coeliacs.

 

A full World Day for pulses

The United Nations declared 10 February World Pulses Day, keeping alive the positive momentum surrounding these healthy, nutritious and protein-rich legumes after FAO’s successful International Year of Pulses Campaign in 2016.

“They are our delicious ally in achieving food security, reducing malnutrition and creating a #ZeroHunger world.”

 

Love for pulses

“There is a lot to love about pulses! They are inexpensive, healthy, environmentally-friendly and, last but not least, tasty!”

“Red, green, white, black, brown… name a colour and we can give you a pulse! And what exactly is a pulse, you might ask? Well, pulses are a sub-group of legumes that are harvested for their dry seeds. Beans, lentils and peas are commonly known pulses.”

“But the world of pulses is much more than that! From lupins to lentils or cowpeas to chickpeas, pulses can surprise you with their breadth and depth,” explains the Food and Agriculture Organisation.

No matter whether they have an alluring name like velvet beans or a curious one like winged beans, pulses are wonderful foods for both human and environmental health, FAO underlines.

 

Vital and inexpensive

“They are a vital and generally inexpensive source of protein. They are full of vitamins and minerals that can help prevent diseases like diabetes and coronary conditions.”

Planet-wise, it adds, pulses are good for soil health, and many are also drought resistant and climate-resilient, their genetic diversity helping them adapt to changes in climate.

 

Less popular now!

Despite the many benefits, these extraordinary foods have lost popularity in recent years and worldwide consumption has decreased because of rising incomes and related consumer preferences, reports the world body.

Anyway, you surely know how to cook pulses. However, should you want to learn more, please click here: Pulses recipes from around the world!

Fostina Kachimera in her maize garden that she planted under irrigation. Since she has started to use irrigation she no longer lives in fear of dry spells. Credit: Esmie Komwa Eneya/IPS

By Esmie Komwa Eneya
BLANTYRE, MALAWI, Feb 9 2022 (IPS)

In the past, the people of Sande Village in Chikwawa district, Malawi, would go to bed with empty stomachs even when the rest of the country harvested bumper yields.

This is because the area in southern Malawi is prone to both floods and drought – making rain-fed agriculture difficult.

One woman farmer, Fostina Kachimera, said that after practising rain-fed agriculture over several years without results, she stopped farming and was just sitting idle because agriculture was her only option for employment.

“When we try to do rain-fed agriculture is either the crops will be swept away by floods or burnt by drought before they even start to produce fruits,” she said.

Chikwawa and Nsanje districts are situated in the Shire River valley.

According to Shire Valley Agriculture Development Division (Shivadd) programme manager Francis Mlewah, the valley has 313 215 hectares of land, but almost half experiences prolonged dry spells.

“In addition to that, its annual rainfall falls between 400 to 1000 mm, and this is below the average annual rainfall needed by most of the crops grown in the country,”  Mlewah says, explaining that optimal rainfall was above 1 200mm.

Then there is flooding.

“One-third of the land is situated along the country’s biggest river, and indeed farmers who cultivate their crops in these areas face floods almost every year,” he explained.

Now, this has become a song of the past because Kachimera and her fellow 259 farmers can now harvest three crops a year through irrigation. This has enabled them to produce enough food for the year and a surplus to sell.

All the farmers had also managed to build substantial houses which withstand floods – unlike in the past when floods often damaged their homes.

The Evangelical Association of Malawi came to their rescue in 2007 and introduced irrigation farming.

“We started as a club, but by 2010 we transformed into a scheme known as Sande.

“When we were starting, we were using water canes to irrigate our crops, but right now we are using water pumps which we purchased through the profits from irrigation farming, and almost every one of us has managed to buy one,” said the scheme’s chairperson Samuel Wise.

Apart from growing maize, the country’s staple food, Wise explained that the system produces different crops such as legumes, tubers, and vegetables.

According to him, the idea is to have diverse foods available to combat malnutrition and fetch reasonable prices on the market.

Once the irrigation started, the families started to live healthy lives.

They no longer lack necessities such as clothes, soap and can pay school fees for their children.

“In the past, transportation was so difficult for us since we could not afford even the cheapest bicycle, but now we have motorbikes that we bought with the farm proceeds,” he said.

Malawi’s Deputy Agriculture Minister Agnes Nkusankhoma recently visited the scheme and praised it.

“Finding the big area like this green is rare especially considering that this is the dry season, and these farmers made this place look like we are in the rainy season.”

Nkusankhoma encouraged them to register in the livestock subsidy program to add to what they are already doing because livestock production does well in these districts.

While the farmers relish their success, they lament the rising fuel prices. The water pumps are reliant on fuel – shrinking their profits.

The community will benefit from the Shire Valley Transformation Programme – a government-led project financed by World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the Global Environment Facility.

According to the project’s coordinator, Stanly Chakhumbira, the project put 43 370 hectares under irrigation using gravity to divert water from the river to the canals. Once this is completed, farmers will no longer need to rely on fuel.

 

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A woman holding a child begs at an intersection in New Delhi. Credit: Ranjit Devraj/IPS.

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Feb 9 2022 (IPS)

If India ranks among the world’s fastest growing economies it is also where inequity is growing the fastest, thanks to endemic features unique to the country such as the caste system.

“It is not widely understood but India does not have a working class — instead it has large labouring castes that are trapped in an inherently iniquitous system,” says Manas Ray, professor in cultural studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata.

According to Ray, the labouring castes and their interests are poorly represented where it matters and they also have little guidance or support from voluntary agencies. “There’s no capable voluntary sector of the type that works to empower the marginalised in other countries in the region. In fact, hundreds of NGOs, including Amnesty International and Greenpeace, have been forced to shut down operations in India in recent years.”

“It is not widely understood but India does not have a working class — instead it has large labouring castes that are trapped in an inherently iniquitous system,”

Manas Ray, professor in cultural studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata

“A contrasting situation can be seen in Bangladesh, where powerful NGOs reach down to people at the grassroots and guide them on how to generate and manage surpluses,” says Ray. “It helps immensely that Bangladesh is not burdened by a caste system.”

Last year, Bangladesh posted a per capita income of $2,227 or $280 higher than that of its larger neighbour. “Bangladesh, once regarded as a ‘basket case,’ can now be expected to maintain this lead in the foreseeable future because of investments in the social sectors, especially education and health,” says Ray.

In a global report released in January, the British charity Oxfam describes India as ‘very unequal,’ with the top 10 percent of its 1.4 billion population having cornered 77 percent of the total national wealth. The report, Inequality Kills, estimates that inequality has been rising over the last three decades.

Oxfam calculates that it would take 941 years for a minimum wage worker in rural India to earn what a top paid executive at a leading Indian garment company earns in a year. India’s stark wealth inequality is attributed by Oxfam to “an economic system rigged in favour of the super-rich over the poor and marginalised.”

The report said that during 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused 84 percent of Indian households to suffer a drop in income, the number of billionaires in the country grew from 102 to 142. During the worst months of the pandemic (March 2020 to November 2021), the wealth of India’s billionaires more than doubled, from $313 billion to $719 billion.

“The pandemic proved to be a crunch point which exposed the country’s uncaringly iniquitous system,” says Ray, referring to how a suddenly imposed lockdown left millions of internal migrant workers stranded in the cities with no jobs, food or shelter and with little choice but to trek to their distant homes in the rural hinterland, often hundreds of kilometres away.

It took petitions in the Supreme Court for government to admit that more than half a million people were walking down the highways trying to get home, often braving assaults by police charged with enforcing lockdown rules. Trade unions said the bulk of an estimated 200 million migrant workers in India’s different cities and towns lost their jobs.

In contrast to the callous treatment meted out to internal migrant workers, the government spared no costs in arranging special flights to fetch students and privileged people who found themselves stuck in foreign countries that had also imposed lockdowns to stop the spread of the highly contagious COVID-19 virus.

The Supreme Court has had to intervene on behalf of the poor and marginalised on other occasions where inequity has been glaring. For example, the court stepped in to order the distribution to poor and starving people of vast quantities of surplus grain rotting in state-run godowns.

On 7 January the apex court dismissed petitions challenging the government policy of reserving a quota of coveted post-graduate seats in India’s medical colleges for socially backward castes on the plea that it went against the principle of merit. The court did not buy that argument and pointed to India’s iniquitous system, which it said impacts on merit.

“Widespread inequalities in the availability of and access to educational facilities will result in the deprivation of certain classes of people who would be unable to effectively compete in such a system,” said Y. Chandrachud, handing down the judgement. “Special provisions enable such disadvantaged classes to overcome the barriers they face in effectively competing with forward classes and thus ensuring substantive equality.”

“Merit should be socially contextualised and re-conceptualised as an instrument that advances social goods like equality that we, as a society, value,” Chandrachud said, pointing to provisions in India’s constitution to award reserved quotas in jobs and educational opportunities to “remedy the structural disadvantages that certain groups suffer.”

Reserved quotas have, however, barely scratched the problem. Since 1983, the government has implemented a policy of reserving 50 percent of jobs in the coveted civil service for socially under privileged castes, but by 2019 only four individuals from these categories had made it to a list of 89 secretary-level positions.

How may such ingrained inequities be remedied? The Oxfam report called for higher taxes to be imposed on the richest 10 percent of the Indian population to help fund measures to reduce inequality. That’s easier than done because only one percent of Indians declare earnings sufficient to attract taxation.

In 2021 only 50.89 million individuals in a population of 1.4 billion people filed income tax returns, and only half that number paid any worthwhile tax.

Prabhat Patnaik, former professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, agrees that that the solution to gross inequity lies in “taxing the rich and investing the proceeds for the neglected social sectors — it is shame that large numbers of people continue to have no access to health or education.”

The Oxfam report says that 63 million Indians are pushed into poverty each year because of unaffordable healthcare costs. Public spending on healthcare ranks among the lowest in the world — 1.8 percent of GDP in 2021. Although India is a major destination for medical tourism because of its fine specialty hospitals, several of its poorest states have infant mortality rates higher than those in sub-Saharan Africa.

Patnaik pointed to how government policies have consistently favoured the rich since the country embarked on economic liberalisation in the early 1980s. Inheritance tax was abolished in 1985 and in 2017 the government abolished wealth tax, allowing the concentration of wealth in rich families. In September 2019, corporate tax was slashed from 35 percent to 26 percent.

“In contrast to India’s policy of providing tax concessions to the rich the international trend is for the wealthy to ask that they be taxed more,” said Patnaik referring to the open letter from the Patriotic Millionaires group to the World Economic Forum’s virtual Davos in January asking to be taxed more to help economic recovery after the pandemic.

“As millionaires, we know that the current tax system is not fair. Most of us can say that while the world has gone through an immense amount of suffering in the last two years, we have actually seen our wealth rise during the pandemic — yet few if any of us can honestly say that we pay our fair share in taxes,” reads the letter, which was prompted by the Oxfam report.

Predictably there were no Indians among the list of 102 Patriotic Millionaires and there has been no statement on it from any quarter in India.

Ending poverty and hunger once and for all – is it possible? Credit: United Nations

By Andy Sumner and Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez
LONDON, Feb 9 2022 (IPS)

In 2010 and the following years, there was attention to the fact that much of global poverty had shifted to middle-income countries (for example here, here, and here).

The world’s poor hadn’t moved of course, but the countries that are home to large numbers of poor people had got better off on average and poverty hadn’t fallen as much as one might expect with economic growth in those countries moving from low-income to middle-income.

There were also some big questions over the country categories themselves. One could say the world’s poor live not in the world’s poorest countries but in fast growing countries and countries with burgeoning domestic resources to address poverty albeit ‘locked’ by domestic political economy (who doesn’t want cheap petrol?)

This idea of the distribution of global poverty has more recently been revisited (here and here), just as it seems that global poverty has shifted back to low-income countries (LICs). Or has it? To get a better picture of global poverty trends, locations, and to understand the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to understand the limitations of the data.

What can’t the data tell us?

We are facing one big, and one monumental, data problem. First, there are no real data for poverty in India over the last decade—a country with a substantial impact on global poverty counts given its large population.

Instead, the World Bank’s PovcalNet database extrapolates households’ consumption to compute poverty in India from 2011 to 2017 (not 2019, though why is not clear). Extrapolation is not unique to India’s data; the World Bank also infers poverty estimates of other countries if data for the reference year are not available. And there’s the rub. There is an underlying monumental problem.

The World Bank has over 6,000 distributions in its database but only a third—about 2,000—are real survey data, so interpolation/extrapolation is endemic (see Figure 1 for details).

All the figures in this blog post are based on that World Bank’s PovcalNet database (one difference: we take the 2017 World Bank estimate of poverty in India and apply it to 2019). So, everything here is based on the ‘official’ database used by the Bank who to their credit make publicly available.

Can we objectively say how many people live in poverty?

The World Bank uses the $1.90-a-day poverty line whose determination relies heavily on two decades worth of Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for some of the world’s poorest countries. This is contentious since errors could change the overall value of the poverty line and change the poverty headcount.

Every dime above the World Bank’s line adds on average almost 70 million more poor people. So, the global poverty count at $1.90 a day— almost 700 million people—rises by another 500 million people by the time one gets to $2.50 a day, which is the average poverty line of all developing countries (see Figure 2).

Further, the headcount increases by a billion people moving from the $1.90 to the World Bank’s ‘moderate’ poverty line of $3.20 a day. This $3.20 threshold is important as it is also the poverty line closely associated with headcounts of multidimensional poverty and the average poverty line among lower middle-income countries (LMICs), where most of the world’s multidimensionally poor live.

In Figure 2 we also include $5.50, the average poverty line of upper middle-income countries (UMICs), and $13 a day, as this is the line associated with ‘permanent’ escape from poverty used by the World Bank in Latin America.

So where do the world’s poor live? Hint: it depends on who you count as ‘poor’

Mostly in Africa and, now in contrast to a decade ago, low-income countries once more, right? Well again, it depends on where you draw the line. Around the income/consumption poverty line correlated with multidimensional poverty counts ($3.20 a day), the world’s poor live in South Asia as much as in sub-Saharan Africa (see Figure 3).

At the same time, if we use the World Bank’s moderate poverty line of $3.20, three quarters of the world’s poor remain in MICs (see Figure 4).

Then there’s the pandemic. We’ll never know for sure the impact of the pandemic on poverty, as we’d need surveys for a large number of developing countries before as well as after, and those just don’t exist.

Moreover, the pandemic is ongoing and could shape the prospects for growth and poverty reduction in developing countries for the next five to ten years given the slow and unequal global distribution of vaccines.

Figure 5 shows various scenarios of how much the poverty count in middle-income countries could have risen due to the pandemic. Our purpose is not to predict one precise poverty outcome but to show what different income shocks to those near the poverty line imply in terms of potential poverty impact in the absence of compensatory policy intervention. We thus use a set of universal, arbitrary shocks to estimate the extent of precarity.

In short, we are highlighting the fragility of progress on poverty reduction in the current pandemic context given the characteristics of the responses to the pandemic—i.e. lockdowns—combined with pre-existing conditions of high levels of informality of employment and the weaker coverage of social protection in the informal sector.

Our study illustrates the following: if the income shock is of this magnitude, the effect on poverty could be dramatic. What is evident is that millions of people in MICs live not that far above the $1.90-a-day poverty line (and the $3.20 poverty line) and thus could easily fall (back) into poverty as a result of disrupted economic activity due to lockdowns or ill health.

Why does this all matter? There are three reasons why

First, shockingly, we don’t really know how much income poverty there is in the world due to the missing India data. Of course, we do have multidimensional poverty estimates (at a global level the headcount could be double that of $1.90-a-day poverty).

Second, just because the data tells us that extreme poverty, at $1.90 a day, has moved back to LICs (at least prior to the pandemic), much of the global poverty remains in MICs. In fact, three quarters of the global poor at the $3.20 line are living in MICs, even if measured before the pandemic.

Third, the pandemic itself has rendered millions of people in MICs who are living just above the $1.90-a-day poverty line at risk of falling back, meaning the global poverty headcount could rise, and stop-start economic growth in the next few years could leave poverty rates higher.

What is clear from the pandemic is that every country will need a universal (probably annual) vaccination programme. And yet the Global South—with some exceptions, notably India and China as vaccine producers—is unlikely to have fair and equal access to the global supply of vaccines to achieve universal coverage.

Consequentially, economic growth and poverty reduction will likely proceed in starts and stops as infection waves peak and trough. Even the vaccines that do reach the Global South will need to be paid for and require state capacity to deliver.

That could mean the diversion of public spending and state capacity away from social spending and poverty reduction. The immediate impact of the pandemic has led to an expansion of social safety nets and policies, these need to become permanent and universal in the years ahead beyond the impact of the pandemic’s first phase on poverty is to be reduced and the Sustainable Development Goals ever met.

Andy Sumner is a Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER. He is also a Professor of International Development at King’s College London, and Director of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Global Challenges Strategic Research Network on Global Poverty and Inequality Dynamics.

Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez is a Lecturer in Development Economics in the Department of International Development at King’s College London, with a particular interest in the study of poverty dynamics, inequalities, social policy, and green development.

 

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By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, India, Feb 8 2022 (IPS)

The Covid-19 pandemic affected countries and people globally, at the same time exacerbated vulnerabilities such as modern-day slavery. There are over 40.3 million people estimated to be in modern-day slavery, and certain population groups, sectors and geographies such as children, migrant workers, women and girls that were already vulnerable, became more vulnerable to recruitment and exploitation during the pandemic. The United Nations has called the pandemic more than a health crisis, “it is an economic crisis, a humanitarian crisis, and a human rights crisis.”

Romy Hawatt

UN Secretary- General António Guterres called the world to go into emergency mode in the COVID-19 battle, stating the global economy which continues to be uncertain, health systems which are overwhelmed and millions of more people being pushed into poverty.

“The world has slipped backwards”, said Romy Hawatt, founding member of the Global Sustainability Network (GSN) in an exclusive interview given to IPS News. “The modern-day abuses of human rights and dignity are completely abhorrent and unacceptable in all its forms and at all levels. Governments everywhere are falling short on their responsibilities to protect their citizens (especially children) and are not putting in the proportionate focus, attention and resources into fighting these crimes against humanity,” Hawatt said.

As a ‘social entrepreneur’ he has used his business success and platforms to directly develop, fund and implement solutions for social, cultural and environmental issues. What started many years ago as informal charity work, eventually turned him into becoming a philanthropist, supporter and benefactor of various charities and organizations, GSN being one of them.

Earlier in 2020, more than 50 independent UN human rights experts warned that the COVID-19 pandemic played into the hands of slavers and traffickers, and it required stronger government measures to prevent exploitation of vulnerable people. The statement urged governments and businesses to recognize how the loss of jobs, income or land could put vulnerable groups at great risk and that exploitation could mean forced labor, including the worst forms of child labor, or being sold, trafficked and sexually exploited.

This report states more than 70% of the 4.8 million sex exploitation victims are in the Asia and Pacific region. 1.5 million victims are living in developed countries, with an estimated 13,000 enslaved in the UK.

Romy Hawatt became a founding member of GSN a network organization which was founded in 2014 by Raza Jafar, The RT Rev Lord Bishop Alastair Redfern and S. E. Mons. Marcelo Sanchez got together with a vision for a world free of slavery, child labor and human trafficking. This was initiated after the signing of a Joint Declaration Against Modern Slavery by Pope Francis, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew from Greece and senior representatives of the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhists faiths.

With a rapidly growing number of change makers, and influencers joining GSN, Hawatt says, “each one of them play a prominent role in creating awareness, educating, articulating and lobbying the powers to be at the faith, government, academia, business, media and sports levels to harness the power of connections and collaborations to help achieve the United Nations Sustainability Development (SDG) Goal 8 and 8.7 objectives which focuses on ending modern-day slavery, human and human organ trafficking. The plan going forward is to get further on to the front foot and make as much of a sustainable impact as possible, by utilizing all mediums and platforms available to articulate, inspire, invigorate and support a plethora of influencers and collaborators like those associated with the GSN to undercover and expose all forms of human exploitation”.

As governments around the world from the time when the pandemic began in 2020, mandated lockdowns and worked with limited pandemic response opportunities, traffickers adapted their methods to the pandemic, including social media and other online platforms to recruit new victims.

“Women and girls have been recruited, often locally or online, for sexual exploitation, especially in private apartments. Children have been particularly affected – out of school and needing to support parents who have lost their livelihoods, increasingly targeted by traffickers at the local level and online, says this report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

“Traffickers responded to the closure of bars, clubs and massage parlours (due to lockdowns, curfews and other measures to control the spread of COVID-19) by moving the sexual exploitation of adults and children to private homes and apartments. In some countries traffickers have also capitalized on social distancing measures to transport victims across national borders, knowing that law enforcement has, at times, been unable to carefully inspect vehicles,” the report states.

According to this report, there are at least three ways in which COVID-19 impacts efforts to end modern day slavery: 1) heightening risks for those already exploited; 2) increasing the risks of exploitation, including child labour and child marriage; and 3) disrupting response efforts.

“Very simply put, traffickers target the most vulnerable and it is the women and children that fit this category, and especially those that are from poorer communities, perhaps are refugees, and those who lack education fall into the highest risk category of those who are trafficked.

“This is not just a third world problem; human trafficking is happening literally everywhere. Wittingly or unwittingly, we are all consumers that create demand and work in or drive supply chains that use and abuse fellow human beings. We therefore have an obligation to help fix it,” said Hawatt.

 

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The UN commemorates Safe Internet Day annually on February 8. Credit: International Telecommunication Union (ITU)

By Amanda Manyame
JOHANNESBURG, Feb 8 2022 (IPS)

The internet and digital technology have allowed children and young people to connect, exchange knowledge and information, and truly turn the world into a global village.

Although a lot of good has come from this level of connectivity, the ability to reach millions of people at the click of a button has also allowed bad actors access to a wider potential victim pool.

Most critically, increased accessibility to the internet has exacerbated the sexual exploitation and abuse of children and young people.

What happens offline has found its way online. Children and young people are repeatedly victimised as these crimes are usually captured in permanent digital images that are perpetually reshared online resulting in long-term impact that often lasts into adulthood.

There is an urgent need to develop adequate and future-proof laws that ensure safe, responsible, and positive use of the internet and digital technology to guarantee children and young people are able to safely enjoy online spaces.

While online sexual exploitation and abuse (OSEA) occurs in digital spaces, the roots of this form of violence are fundamentally the same as those that occur in the physical world. Sexism, gender-based discrimination, intersecting inequalities, cultural beliefs, and social norms underpin sexual abuse and exploitation that occurs “in the real world” as well as online.

The factors that make children and young people vulnerable to OSEA were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic prompted the closure of schools, recreational centers, after school activities and other places where children and young people tend to spend a majority of their time.

These necessary public health measures led to an unprecedented number of children and young people going online and using digital technologies, some for the first time and many with little or no supervision.

Many children are attending online school from home during the coronavirus outbreak. Credit: UNICEF/Lisa Adelson

Regulation of online sexual exploitation and abuse

At Equality Now, we believe that one of the ways to end OSEA and create secure and respectful online spaces is to have laws, policies, and measures that adopt a human rights-based approach and are informed by the needs and experiences of OSEA survivors.

OSEA is global and multi-jurisdictional because offenders, victims, and digital platforms are often located in different countries which presents legal challenges when prosecuting offenders. As such, legal remedies for survivors need to be multi-jurisdictional and enforceable internationally.

OSEA is not only found on the dark web but on the surface web where children and young people frequently socialise and create and share content. In Equality Now’s latest report, Ending Online Sexual Exploitation And Abuse Of Women And Girls: A Call For International Standards, we examined legal responses to this global problem.

Adolescent girls and legal experts in India, Kenya, Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States informed us of their experiences of OSEA on social media apps, which are easily accessible to children and young people and require very little data to access.

For instance, many girls shared that request for intimate images were a common occurrence and that reporting these incidents to the police was extremely difficult. They reported that they were afraid that the authorities and their community would shame them and that their reports would not be taken seriously.

In some instances, girls simply blocked the offenders and did not report the abuse to the police or the social media platform. The stigma associated with experiencing OSEA prevents victims from reporting, which only contributes to the vicious cycle of abuse.

Children and young people are going online without information on how to protect themselves or identify and report offenders. Their caregivers are also not always well equipped to manage these challenges.

Digital platforms need to improve their systems for reporting OSEA by making it easier for children, young people, and their caregivers to report abuse and exploitation and track the progress of their reports.

They must also ensure that they have systems in place to respond in a timely manner to complaints and inform users of the decisions and actions they have taken.

It has become clear that relying on digital platforms to self-regulate has not been sufficient in preventing OSEA, thus governments and international bodies must take a more proactive approach and develop and implement laws that regulate the policies and practices adopted and applied by digital platforms.

National laws should require that these reports are also passed on to national authorities and monitoring bodies, not only when the incidents are criminal, as is currently the case. This will enable authorities and monitoring bodies to understand offending pathways better and be better equipped to detect OSEA.

Balancing digital rights with preventing online sexual exploitation and abuse

A critical and often contentious issue is how to effectively balance between users’ various digital rights and interests — freedom of expression online and online privacy with protection from online harms, such as OSEA.

For instance, there are concerns that regulating what users post online and holding digital platforms liable for user-generated content online could lead to self-censorship and/or digital platforms erring on the side of caution and removing content which would, in turn, infringe on users’ freedom of expression.

An approach that can be adopted is a principle established under international human rights law, that in the event of a violation of the rights of others, the freedom of expression of alleged offenders can be limited if the limitations are legal, legitimate, necessary and proportionate.

But for this approach to be effective, there must first be legal clarity on what constitutes OSEA. Laws should define OSEA, and exclude speech or expression that is in fact OSEA from freedom of expression protection.

This would be similar to the case of children, where many countries categorically exclude offers or requests to obtain Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) from freedom of expression protections.

Still with this protection provided for CSAM, the detection of adolescents in CSAM on the internet is a challenge for law enforcement and digital platforms. Human reviewers and automated tools that detect CSAM online cannot always be sure that images of young people who have reached puberty are not images of adults.

Technology companies have made great strides in developing tools to detect CSAM on their platforms and we call on them to use these capabilities to address this gap in technological tools and work with law enforcement and child protection specialists who can bring their skills to improve detection of adolescent victims.

Our report found that laws at the international and national levels are currently inadequate to deal with the global and multi-jurisdictional nature of OSEA and the legal complexities this brings.

The existence of gaps and lacunae in the law due to the rapid evolution of technology and the law’s failure to keep pace has created patchwork offences and a lack of coherence in the law which has made reporting, prosecution, and online content moderation difficult.

Across many countries, this leaves children and young people with inadequate or no safeguards from OSEA.

Equality Now calls on the international community to develop and adopt legally binding international standards that provide for protection of all vulnerable people from all forms of OSEA. The international standards would demonstrate consensus on the severity of OSEA and provide a framework for legal implementation, policies, programs, and international cooperation.

Amanda Manyame is Digital Law and Rights Advisor at Equality Now

 

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Disseminating science via social media entails a public service. Throughout the pandemic, for instance, the value of science communication to the public has been instrumental with many scientists being called upon to provide accurate information about the latest scientific advancements. Credit: Bigstock

By Esther Ngumbi
URBANA, Illinois, Feb 8 2022 (IPS)

In the spirit of science communication, I posted via twitter a video clip of a bee that had taken a little too much of pollen. It received over 30,000 views and had over 100,000 impressions. Over the years, before the pandemic, thanks to several science communication workshops and trainings about various ways to communicate science, I have continued to grow as a science communicator.

The appreciation and appetite for science communication was on the rise among institutions of higher learning, professional societies and early career and junior scientists prior to the pandemic was equally growing. The National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine published a report on best practices while pointing out potential research areas to advance science communication.

Throughout the literature, there was a proliferation in journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports and web resources by Professional societies such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Workshops on science communication were routinely embedded in Professional Society annual meetings.

Science communication will continue to be important into the future. Social media and other avenues of communicating science are here to stay and they are shaping present day and potentially future academic cultures

It is critical to keep nurturing this emerging appreciation of science communication, particularly as institutions of higher learning and professional societies regain the momentum and begin rebuilding after COVID-19.

Thanks to science communications, many large-scale science related challenges and great advances in scientific discoveries with major implications to humanity have been translated into solutions and communicated effectively with the public. With on-going science-related challenges like COVID-19 and the climate crisis, science communication is more crucial than ever.

But, with no major incentives, it may be difficult to convince graduate students, postdocs, and tenured and untenured professors to partake of science communication. This is understandable because of the many demands in academia.

New graduate students, newly minted PhDs who may have transitioned to post-Doctoral fellowships and newly recruited Assistant Professors may have a hard time deciding if it is worth parking in science communication. However, as I know firsthand, it can be very beneficial to people’s careers to engage in it.

Oftentimes, when scientists publish in scientific journals, the audience is small. This is because, scientific articles can only be accessed by far fewer people, since journals require expensive subscriptions. But if they take the extra step of communicating their research, and disseminating it widely via blog, op-eds and social media, they can reach a much bigger audience.

Indeed, disseminating science via social media entails a public service. Throughout the pandemic, for instance, the value of science communication to the public has been instrumental with many scientists being called upon to provide accurate information about the latest scientific advancements.

This has led to vast increases in their followings on Twitter and Instagram from people outside academic circles. Sharing our scientific findings with the public allows us to practice speaking and writing in non-scientific language in a timely manner while reaching more diverse audiences. This can also build trust among various communities and the public.

Science communication can also help advance one’s career. For instance, since external reputation is a key metric that is used by universities to evaluate and promote professors, being active and disseminating your science via social media can help establish that reputation that would benefit you professionally. This is something that’s happened in my own career.

Being active online can help you build your professional network, which can lead to peers recommending you awards, inviting you to give talks and participate on panels, or asking you to judge to conference presentations and other competitions.

Newly formed networks may also lead to the birth of new collaborations and co-writing grant proposals. I can attest to this too as I built my professional network through Twitter. For example, I’ve received invitations to present in university departments and opportunities to present my work at the Entomological Society of America.

Moreover, the social media platforms offer ways to track impact. In Twitter, for example, you can track how many people re-tweeted the tweet, how many people interacted with the tweet, how many people accessed the links, and from what geographical location where they from.

All these data can help science communicators to better understand their audience while finding creative ways to continue engaging audiences. It can also be included in portfolio for academic promotion.

Of course, there are negatives that can come about with science communication on social media. The large volumes of science and other information shared can come at the expense of quality, and people with enough followers, but no expertise can have influence over science conversations and easily spread misinformation.

At the same time, science is continuously evolving, and the results today may improve in the future, and that is always a difficult point to communicate to non-scientists. It is also possible that those with followers can be sponsored by companies or organizations to share certain opinions and specific content. But the benefits outweigh the negatives.

So, if you want to start engaging in science communication, first, find out what already exists in your department, institution, region, and professional society. Explore what opportunities are available to begin your science communication efforts. In addition, inquire from your department if there are science communication classes you can attend.

Science communication will continue to be important into the future. Social media and other avenues of communicating science are here to stay and they are shaping present day and potentially future academic cultures.

Newbies and those who have not tried to partake of science communication can take their first steps. In the end, both the academic community and the public benefit when scientists share their discoveries with the public.

 

Dr. Esther Ngumbi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and a Senior Food Security Fellow with the Aspen Institute, New Voices.

Managing the life cycle of plastics, from production to end-of-life management is crucial to solving plastic pollution crisis. Credit: Antoine Giret/Unsplash

By Samira Sadeque
New York, Feb 8 2022 (IPS)

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected plastic waste management, as the world saw a rise in single-use sanitary products, and many cities abandoned their recycling and waste management efforts in the first few months, Eirik Lindebjerg of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) told IPS.

“For example, in March 2020, amid potential hygiene concerns, some major coffee chains paused filling reusable containers in favour of single-use receptacles,” he said. “We also saw many regulators around the world pausing or delaying bans, taxes, or fees on plastic items as well as recycling initiatives in response to sanitary and hygiene concerns.”

He added that some such measures included a pushback against the use of single-use plastic straws, stirrers, and cotton buds in the United Kingdom; meanwhile, the United States saw more than 100 cities halting curbside recycling programmes.

Lindebjerg, WWF’s Global Plastics Policy Manager, spoke with IPS as more than 70 business and financial institutions produced a statement demanding a legally binding treaty to address plastic pollution, ahead of February’s UNEA-5.2, which will be a continuation of UNEA-5.1, which took place in February 2021.

“We need to create proper systems for controlling and regulating plastic pollution, at local, national and global levels,” Lindebjerg said. “Governments need to cooperate and step up their game drastically.”

Excerpts of the interview:

Inter Press Service (IPS): A part of the statement reads: ‘This requires governments to align on regulatory measures that cover the whole life cycle of plastics, not limiting the scope of negotiations to address waste management challenges only.’ What would an approach that considers the ‘whole life cycle of plastics’ entail?

Eirik Lindebjerg (EL): A “whole life cycle of plastics” approach addresses all the potential risks of plastic pollution at each life cycle stage, from the extraction of raw materials to processing materials into plastic and its end-of-life management. Essentially, it is about introducing measures to stop plastic pollution at the stages where it is most efficient, instead of only focusing on high-cost infrastructure to clean up the problem afterwards.

A lifecycle approach would entail a mix of the measures, such as banning certain unnecessary and highly damaging product categories (like certain types of single-use plastics and intentionally added microplastics), product and design standards (to make sure a product produced in one country can be safely reused or recycled in another), as well as global requirements on waste management. Essentially, enabling better regulation of how we make, use and reuse plastic.

A new treaty should include all relevant measures necessary to solve the problem along the entire lifecycle and prioritise those most effective and least costly measures.

Categories of measure in the treaty could be:

• Harmonised regulatory standards and common definitions across markets;
• Clear national targets and action plans for tackling plastic pollution;
• Common reporting metrics and methodologies across the plastic value chain that can calculate discharge rates of plastics by country;
• Coordinated investment approaches toward infrastructure development in key markets and innovation.

IPS: How would a ‘circular economy for plastics’, as mentioned in the statement, add to the efforts to tackle climate change?

EL: Plastic is responsible for generating 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions a year across its lifecycle. That is more than the annual emissions from aviation and shipping combined. A circular economy for plastics would mean significant GHG emission reduction related to plastic pollution and virgin plastic production.

It would ultimately mean that all plastics used stays within the economy. It would mean zero virgin fossil fuel plastic production and zero leakage to the environment. It would most likely entail a reduction of plastics consumption, especially the unnecessary uses that are so common today. It would be built around reuse and recycling. New business models would create new job opportunities. Biodiversity would benefit both from eliminating pollution and reducing the footprint from production and consumption.

Such an approach can potentially reduce the costs and tackle the negative impacts of the plastics system. Research has shown that this approach could reduce the annual volume of plastic entering the oceans by 80 percent and GHG emissions from plastic by 25 percent, while promoting job creation and better working conditions. By one estimate, a circular economy approach could create 700,000 quality jobs across the plastic value chain by 2040. An increase in plastic material value through design for recycling can also lead to significant improvements in waste pickers’ working conditions and earnings.

IPS: Could you share in detail how to ‘keep plastics in the economy and out of the environment’?

EL: The Reduce-Reuse-Recycle hierarchy must guide policies, production, and consumption practices. We must stop producing and consuming unnecessary plastic products and packaging. Plastic products must be designed for being reused or recycled. And producers must be made accountable for the end of life of the products.

Today, most plastic products are being designed with the intention of becoming waste at the end of life. But when the right incentives are put in place, there are a lot of examples demonstrating that it is perfectly possible to have a more circular system, such as deposit return systems for PET bottles in many countries.

Several comprehensive interventions which can support the transition to a circular economy have already been identified. For example, the Pew Charitable Trusts has proposed nine systemic interventions in line with circular economy principles:

1. Reduce growth in plastic production and consumption;
2. Substitute plastic with paper and compostable materials;
3. Design products and packaging for recycling;
4. Expand waste collection rates in the middle- to low-income countries;
5. Double mechanical recycling capacity globally;
6. Develop plastic-to-plastic conversion;
7. Build facilities to dispose of the plastic that cannot be recycled economically;
8. Reduce plastic waste exports by 90%;
9. Roll out known solutions for four microplastic sources.

IPS: There is considerable evidence that climate change and environmental pollution disproportionately affect marginalised communities. How does it work for communities where plastic is just a cost-effective alternative for many objects?

EL: Unfortunately, this is true for plastic as well. Marginalised communities disproportionately bear the cost of plastic pollution: pen burning, open dumpsites, polluted drinking water, soil pollution, damages to marine ecosystems and fish stocks are all implications that disproportionately affect low income and marginalised communities.

Incineration plants and oil and gas refineries are built predominantly in low-income and marginalised communities exposing them to health and economic risks. In addition, incinerators and landfills are disproportionately situated in indigenous communities because their lands have unclear tenure status. Crude oil and gas refineries are also disproportionately built in low-income and marginalised communities. This exposes these communities to chemical pollutants released during the incineration and refining processes.

IPS: Of the countries that have not yet backed this new treaty, which ones are crucial in the global economy? How do you plan to get them to participate?

EL: China is the largest economic actor that has not yet formally expressed support for the treaty but has expressed an openness to engage in negotiations through a recent declaration from trade ministers at the World Trade Organisation and has engaged progressively on the issue at a global level regarding plastic waste trade. Therefore, it is likely that China will support a mandate decision at UNEA and play an essential role in the treaty negotiations.

 

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By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 8 2022 (IPS)

Calls, even screams, to fight inflation above all else are getting shriller. Thankfully, even The Economist (5 Feb. 2022) reminds all, Fighting inflation could put the world in a slump.

No inflation consensus
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva doubts the world faces a runaway inflation threat. She urges policymakers to carefully calibrate fiscal and monetary policies, with more “specificity”, as not ‘one size fits all’.

Anis Chowdhury

Widespread reversal of COVID-19 spending and low interest rates threaten recovery. Similarly, Bank of England chief economist Huw Pill stressed the central bank was not going all out to tighten monetary policy.

Instead, like Georgieva, he advocates a more nuanced approach, reasoning, “As the pandemic recedes and the level and composition of global demand and supply normalise, these inflationary pressures should subside”.

US inflation phobia
Inflation hawk Larry Summers – Clinton’s last Treasury Secretary and Director of the National Economic Council during Obama’s first two years – claims it is “wishful thinking” that current inflationary pressures will subside.

He insists, “The painful lesson of the 1960s, 1970s and the 1982 recession is that excessive demand stimulus leads not just to inflation, but to stagflation and ultimately recession, as inflation must eventually be brought under control”. But Summers’ economic history is partial, tendentious and misleading.

Draconian policy prescriptions supposedly inflict ‘short-term pain for long-term gain’, but care little for their ramifications. Summers has nothing to say about how the early 1980s’ interest rate hikes pushed nations into default, triggering debt crises, and over a decade of stagnation in much of the global South.

Most governments can do little to tackle rising commodity, especially fuel and food prices. Conventional monetary tightening reduces overall inflation, typically by inflicting much unemployment, without affecting international sources of inflation.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Recent US wage growth
The recent US wages growth that Summers is obsessed with is actually very different in cause and consequence from the pay rises in the decades he decries. Europeans have also been quick to point out how different inflation on their continent has been.

First, recent wages growth is not due to workers’ collective bargaining, as in the 1960s. Or ‘wage-indexation’, linking wage growth to inflation during the 1970s.

Workers’ bargaining power has declined greatly since the 1980s, with labour market deregulation increasing casualization.

Meanwhile, foreign direct investment has accelerated offshoring, while technological changes have reduced labour needs. Many have changed to self-employment, informal work and other ‘off-the-books labour’. By 2020, there were more than two billion in informal work, mostly in developing countries.

The pandemic has greatly increased ‘gig work’, especially in higher income countries. More piecework remuneration and illusions of independence barely compensate for less bargaining power, and greater labour, work and income insecurity. Working from home increases unpaid overtime work as ‘wage theft’ becomes more widespread.

Second, apparent wage rises may be a statistical anomaly. An estimated third of the total US non-farm workforce, many low-paid – quit their jobs in 2021 for health and safety reasons while better paid workers remained in employment.

IMF research also found labour supply declined in the US and the UK as older workers and mothers with young children quit due to pandemic related challenges. This changing composition of employment has raised the average wage.

Consider a job market with three workers – A, B and C, with hourly wages of $10, $20 and $60 respectively. The average hourly wage is $30. If worker A quits, the average hourly wage – for workers B and C – will be $40. This raises the average hourly wage by $10 – not due to wage growth, but the changing workforce composition.

The higher reported US wages reflect the one-time impact of increased minimum pay, especially when paid by major employers with a nationwide presence such as Target, Southwest Airlines, CVS Health and Walgreens.

Bleak prospects
The IMF’s October 2021 World Economic Outlook saw bleak prospects for low-skilled and young workers. This seems consistent with why low paid workers are reluctant to work for a pittance at great personal risk to themselves.

Many younger workers face special difficulties, e.g., parents of young children due to inadequate childcare facilities and pandemic school disruptions. The mismatch between available jobs and what people want has also grown.

Current inflationary pressure resembles the post-World War Two situation, with pent-up demand for consumer goods unleashed before war-disrupted supplies were restored. Inflation reached nearly 20% in 1947 before collapsing.

Current consumption demand still faces supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic. But such situations are very unlike the episodes Summers cites to make his alarmist case for prioritizing inflation.

Conventional anti-inflationary policies – e.g., fiscal austerity, raising interest rates and credit tightening – are not only inappropriate for dealing with current inflationary pressures, but can be very harmful – as the IMF chief warns.

Understanding inflation
The pandemic has triggered large price increases – notably for food, clothing, fuel and communications. The mismatch between labour supply and demand in some sectors has also become more acute.

Meanwhile, US government data show US non-financial corporations raked in their largest profits ever since 1950 in the second half of 2021 despite rising labour costs. But Summers denies that monopolistic corporate behaviour has contributed to price increases.

Overall corporate profits rose 37% from the previous year while employee compensation only increased 12%, despite “the second year of a pandemic which began by wiping out 20 million jobs”.

US Senator Sherrod Brown (Democrat-Ohio) has asserted that “prices are high because corporations are raising them – so they can keep paying themselves with ever-larger executive bonuses and stock buybacks”.

Rising house prices and accommodation rentals are also raising living costs. Following the 2008-2009 global financial crisis (GFC), governments ill-advisedly abandoned fiscal recovery efforts early. Unconventional monetary policies became the main policy tool since.

This has encouraged real estate and financial asset speculation, instead of investing in productive capacity. Fiscal austerity and continued reliance on market solutions also deter government actions to address key supply chain bottlenecks.

Lack of effective coordination between fiscal and monetary authorities – e.g., in responding to the pandemic – has exacerbated such situations. Instead, commodity and real estate speculation has been much enabled.

Such perverse incentives have undermined needed investments in information and communications technology (ICT), renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, healthcare and education. Businesses have even paid out dividends and bonuses with COVID relief funds. Thus, billionaires got billions more.

Nuance and specificity
Effective coordination between fiscal and monetary authorities is vital for a nuanced approach to ensure sustainable, inclusive and resilient recovery. Fiscal-monetary policy coordination is also needed for a range of long-overdue reforms to address structural factors exacerbating inflationary tendencies and pressures.

But earlier reforms to ensure central bank independence and strict ‘fiscal rules’ in favour of market solutions have undermined government fiscal and monetary capacities to act effectively. Thus, such policies and related ones – e.g., inflation-targeting – must be irreversibly consigned to the policy garbage bin.

Knee-jerk responses to fear mongering by inflation hawks will derail global recovery which the IMF deems “disruptive”. The Fund is also concerned about “divergent” recoveries between rich and poor nations.

Instead of the new Cold War preference for economic sanctions at the slightest pretext, much better and more sustained international cooperation and policy coordination are needed. They must address global supply chain disruptions, stabilize international commodity prices and minimize harmful policy spill overs.

 

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With a storage capacity of 580 million cubic meters and an irrigation target of 22,500 hectares, the Picachos dam in the state of Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico, will also generate 15 megawatts of electricity. CREDIT: Conagua

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Feb 7 2022 (IPS)

The Mexican government is prioritizing the construction and modernization of mega water projects, without considering their impacts and long-term viability, according to a number of experts and activists.

Dams, reservoirs, canals and aqueducts are part of the new infrastructure aimed at ensuring water supply in areas facing shortages, but without addressing underlying problems such as waste, leaks, pollution and the impact of the climate crisis, like droughts.

One of the flagship projects is Agua Saludable para la Laguna (ASL), which will serve five municipalities in the northern state of Coahuila and four in the neighboring region of Durango, benefiting 1.6 million people.

Gerardo Jiménez, a member of the non-governmental Encuentro Ciudadano Lagunero – an umbrella group made up of 12 organizations of people from local communities – said the ASL initiative launched in 2020 neglects the structural causes of the water crisis, water pollution and the overexploitation of water sources.

“It focuses on effects, shortages and pollution. It is designed for a 25-year period and is based on a vulnerable source. There is illegal water extraction and contraband. It does not provide alternative solutions,” he told IPS from the city of Torreón.

Five of the eight aquifers in the area that provide water are overexploited. The Principal-Región Lagunera is the most important, supplying four cities.

The reservoir becomes cyclically deficient, as its annual extraction exceeds its recharge. In addition, the water contains arsenic above the limits established by Mexican regulations and the World Health Organization (WHO).

ASL includes the construction of a water treatment plant, with a capacity of 6.34 cubic meters (m3) per second, a diversion channel and an aqueduct to transport 200 million m3 per year from the Nazas River.

At a cost of 485 million dollars, the project is part of a network of new water infrastructure promoted by the National Water Commission (Conagua), Mexico’s water regulatory agency, several of which are being challenged by social organizations and communities, in some cases through the courts.

The project also includes a diversion dam, a pumping plant, storage tanks and distribution branches.

It will start operations in 2023 and will also harness runoff from the Francisco Zarco reservoir, popularly known as Las Tórtolas, and the Lázaro Cárdenas reservoir, known as El Palmito.

These reservoirs could reduce their water supply due to the drought that has affected the area in recent years. The lack of rain is plaguing half of Coahuila, a situation set to worsen in the coming months with the arrival of the dry season.

Both dams are almost overflowing at present, but that level should change when the dry season starts.

Conagua’s budget has recovered from previous years, from 1.4 billion dollars in 2017 to 1.6 billion dollars in 2022, concentrated primarily in works to prevent floods, due to their high human and economic costs.

Mexico, a country of nearly 129 million people, is highly vulnerable to the effects of the climate emergency, such as droughts, intense storms, floods, and rising temperatures and sea levels. While the south and southeast have water in excess, people in the center to the north face water shortages.

This Latin American nation has a high risk of water stress, according to the Aqueduct water risk atlas of the Aqueduct Alliance, a coalition of governments, companies and foundations. In fact, Mexico is the second most water-stressed country in the Americas, only behind Chile.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (C) visited in September 2021 the Santa María dam in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, intended to strengthen agricultural irrigation and generate electricity. CREDIT: Conagua

Conventional approach

Another key project is the Libertad Dam, whose construction began in 2020 and is scheduled to be completed in 2023, with 132 million dollars in financing. Designed to take advantage of runoff from the Potosí River, the reservoir will provide 1.5 m3/s to meet demand in 24 of the 51 municipalities in the northeastern state of Nuevo León, serving 4.8 million people.

Aldo Ramírez, a researcher at the private Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, said large infrastructure and environmentally friendly works should coexist, as they make different contributions, based on a vision of urban development with an adequate hydrological focus.

“Both approaches have their advantages in certain niches,” he told IPS from Monterrey, the state capital. “When we think about water management in cities, many years ago the focus was on removing the water as quickly as possible so that it wouldn’t cause problems. Green infrastructure can help a lot, it has great environmental value, in water management and aquifer recharge.”

Like other areas of the country, Monterrey and its outlying neighborhoods, made up of 13 municipalities and inhabited by more than five million people, depends on the supply of water from the El Cuchillo, Rodrigo Gómez or La Boca and Cerro Prieto dams. The first holds half of its capacity, while the other two barely store any water, according to Conagua data.

Through a presidential decree published in November, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador classified projects that he considers to be of public interest and of national security as high priority and/or strategic for national development.

Among them are hydraulic and water projects, which will receive provisional express permits, in a measure questioned by environmental organizations due to the violation of impact evaluation procedures.

ASL, for example, still faces a challenge filed by the Encuentro Ciudadano Lagunero, while five others were withdrawn after agreeing with the government to review the project. But if this agreement is not respected, the threat of legal action remains.

More and more water

Northwest Mexico faces a similar situation to the other regions in crisis and the government is building two reservoirs and a canal, and upgrading an aqueduct.

In the state of Sinaloa, construction of the Santa María dam on the Baluarte River is moving ahead and it should also be completed in 2023, to irrigate 24,250 hectares in two municipalities. In addition, it will generate 30 megawatts (MW) of electricity, with an investment of almost one billion dollars.

The Picachos dam is also undergoing modernization, with the installation of turbines to generate 15 MW of electricity and the irrigation of 22,500 hectares. With a storage capacity of 580 million m3, it holds 322 million m3 and will cost about 136 million dollars.

To the south, in the state of Nayarit, the 58-kilometer-long Centenario Canal, with a capacity of 60 m3/s, is being built to irrigate 43,105 hectares in four municipalities. With an investment of 437 million dollars, it will serve some 7,500 farmers with water from the El Jileño and Aguamilpa reservoirs, supplied by the Santiago River.

In addition, the government agreed with opponents of the El Zapotillo dam, in the western state of Jalisco, to leave the dam at a height of 80 meters and operate at 50 percent capacity, so as not to flood three towns, in order for the project, worth some 340 million dollars and with a capacity of 411 million m3, to start operating.

But the construction of new dams has ecological repercussions, such as the modification of the landscape, the generation of methane and the displacement of people, as evidenced by several recent scientific studies.

In the northern city of Tijuana, on the border with the United States, the government is upgrading the Río Colorado-Tijuana aqueduct, which transfers water from the Colorado River, shared by both countries, to meet urban and agricultural demand in the area, at a cost of 47 million dollars.

Jiménez, of the Encuentro Ciudadano Lagunero, calls for the regulation of the extraction of water from the Lázaro Cárdenas reservoir on the Nazas River, as well as from the wells, a more precise extraction measurement system, a fight against illegal concession trafficking and the maintenance of the urban water distribution network.

“An urgent measure must be taken so that in the medium term extraction equals the level of concessions and in the long term extraction equals recharge. We are talking about modifying agricultural production conditions and being more efficient in the use of water,” he said.

In his opinion, “this situation anticipates recurring crises. If it is not addressed, it will worsen, and it is not necessary to reach that crisis.”

But, in the midst of this complex scenario, he warned of the lack of political decision to change the country’s water policy. “The human right to water is not being fulfilled here,” he said.

Ramirez the researcher highlighted measures underway, such as pressure management to reduce leaks, the review of wells assigned to industry, the reuse of treated wastewater and demand management.

“We need to make more efficient use of water. We still have a margin of consumption, but we need to come up with more environmentally friendly solutions. We are heading towards a water crisis,” he said.