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By Daud Khan and Leila Yasmine Khan
ROME and AMSTERDAM, Jan 2 2024 (IPS)

The recent elections in the Netherlands signals the increasing power of the far right in Europe. The populist party of Geert Wilders, the Party for Freedom, won a decisive, albeit unexpected, victory taking 37 seats out the 150 seat in parliament. Wilders will likely be the head of the next Government. His policies include stopping all immigration into the Netherlands, holding a referendum on leaving the EU, and banning mosques and the Quran.

Daud Khan

Welder’s victory is part of a general shift to the far-right in Europe. It follows that of Giorgia Meloni in Italy who has been heading a coalition, headed by the strongly anti-immigrant Brother of Italy, for over a year. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been increasing its power at both national and regional level. In France there is already talk of the far-right, anti-immigrant leader, Marie Le Pen being the next president.

So what explains the success of far-right, anti-immigrant parties in countries that have a long history of being relatively liberal and inclusive. And, more importantly what will happen now that they are in power, or are increasingly influential.

A key factor in their rise to power is their ability to peddle the narrative that the problems of the Common People are largely due to immigrants, and to an ill-defined political and economic Elite that is only interested in maintaining their power and profits.

According to the populist right, Europe is being overrun by people of a different skin color, with different language or accents, and with a different culture or religion. These foreign people are taking our jobs and businesses, depriving us of housing and acting as a drain on the welfare system. They are also responsible for most of the crimes, in particular theft, drugs and violence against women.

This narrative had strong appeal in economically deprived areas, among the lesser educated, and among workers who has lost jobs due to the globalization, automation and outsourcing. These people form the core support group of the right wing populist parties. However, their recent successes have been largely due to their appeal to the middle classes that makes up the bulk of the population in Europe.

Leila Yasmine Khan

This middle class is increasingly fearful and apprehensive with regard to the future. The reasons include growing inequality and stagnant real wages; economic difficulties due to rising prices and high interest rates; anxieties about the impact of climate change, automation and AI; and uncertainties about the future due to rising international tensions and the fragmentation of global supply chains that had brought trillions of dollars of cheap consumer good into Europe. Many people in Europe now believe that the next generation may have a lower standard than this one.

This middle class has been disillusioned with the traditional parties of the left and of the right. They see little real difference between the two and are looking for what they consider real change. Initially the choice fell to parties that were new, but not too radical – parties such as Emmanuelle Macron’s En Marche! Party, or the Five Star Movement in Italy. However, as perceived problems deepened, the choice has shifted to the more radical right.

But now that the far-right parties have power and influence, what should one expect they will do particularly with regard to immigration which was a major aspect of their appeal. Will they really try to fulfill their election promises to stop or reduce immigration. The scope for maneuver is limited.

Due to slower population growth, there are fewer people of working age in most of Europe. Moreover, they tend to avoid jobs that imply long hours and hard physical effort, such as unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in agriculture, industry, construction and logistics. There is also little interest in jobs that require unsocial hours, such as home help, cleaning, care for the elderly and nursing. Immigrants are essential to fill these gaps.

In addition, immigrants are increasingly propping up the welfare state in most western European countries. Notwithstanding the rhetoric about “scroungers” on the welfare state, immigrants are net contributors to state coffers – they generally pay more in taxes than they draw in benefits. And, as low reproductive rates continue and populations continue to age, Governments expenditures on pensions and health care will rise. The tax contribution of immigrants will be critical to fund this.

For these reasons it is simply not possible to stop immigration or to send immigrants back. Given the limited space for maneuver, anti-immigrant parties will most likely not make any serious attempt to get rid of immigrants or even to reduce immigration. They may soften or even backtrack on their positions on immigration. Maybe they will come up with qualifiers such as “we are only against illegal immigrants; only immigrants involved in criminal activities will be expelled; and actually, all honest, hardworking immigrants are welcome”.

However, explicitly backtracking may be politically risky. It is more likely that these right wing parties will continue with their anti-immigrant rhetoric. This would serve several purposes. It will instill uncertainty and fear in the minds of immigrants; ensure that they do not organize and ask for higher wages or benefits; and that they stay in the shadows and not try to occupy political space.

These actions will very much appeal to unemployed workers and the apprehensive middle classes who voted in the right wing parties. More critically, it will also appeal to “big business” who are now caught between a tight domestic labor markets and rising costs.

If correct, does this mean that the swing to the far-right in Europe is here to stay? It would be such a pity as it would mean that one of the bastions of liberal values will transform into a classist society with a low wage sub-proletariat who have few rights and privileges.

Daud Khan a retired UN staff based in Rome. He has degrees in economics from the LSE and Oxford – where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a degree in Environmental Management from the Imperial College of Science and Technology.

Leila Yasmine Khan is an independent writer and editor based in the Netherlands. She has Master’s degrees in Philosophy and in Argumentation and Rhetoric from the University of Amsterdam, as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy from the University of Rome (Roma Tre). She assisted in the preparation on this article.

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Destruction in Gaza Strip. Credit: UNICEF/Hassan Islyeh

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 2 2024 (IPS)

When US President Joe Biden lambasted “the largest aerial assault,” which hit “a maternity hospital, a shopping mall and residential areas killing innocent people”, he was not talking of the devastating Israeli attacks on Gaza but criticizing the most recent Russian military assault on Ukraine.

Biden obviously has one yardstick for the Russians and another for the Israelis –displaying sheer hypocrisy and political double standards.

The statement that came out of the White House last week read: “It is a stark reminder to the world that, after nearly two years of this devastating war, Putin’s objective remains unchanged. He seeks to obliterate Ukraine and subjugate its people. He must be stopped.”

Perhaps from a more realistic angle, his statement could have read: “…Netanyahu’s objective remains unchanged. He seeks to obliterate Palestine and subjugate its people. He must be stopped.”

And the more contrasting picture are the 21,700 civilian killings in Gaza, including 8,697 children and 4,410 women, compared to the scores of civilians killed last week by the Russians. Still, the bottom line is there is no justification for either.

Destroyed buildings in Odesa, a port city in southern Ukraine. Credit: UNOCHA/Alina Basiuk

Norman Solomon, Executive Director, Institute for Public Accuracy and National Director, RootsAction.org, told IPS Biden’s rhetorical steps have landed with both feet in an Orwellian zone that is inadequately described as “hypocrisy.”

He gets it only half-right when condemning Russia while supporting Israel.

“In reality, the president has plunged the USA into an immoral abyss so deep that he has created huge revulsion and disgust inside the United States and in much of the rest of the world”.

Biden is so eager to help the Israeli military continue to kill Palestinians en masse in Gaza that he has twice bypassed Congress to authorize large shipments of weaponry to Israel, while knowing full well that the U.S. government is thus directly aiding and abetting the systematic large-scale killing of children, women and other civilians, said Solomon, author of “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine”

Last month, Biden’s fleeting comment that Israel should stop its “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza was swiftly walked back by the White House. And the U.S. has notably assisted with that indiscriminate bombing by shipping 5,000 2,000-pound bombs to Israel since October.

In short, said Solomon, Biden’s condemnations of Russia fully apply to Israel and also to the U.S. as a direct participant in carnage that has already taken upwards of 20,000 civilian lives in Gaza during the last three months.

“The world desperately needs a single standard of human rights and actual adherence to international law. Biden makes a mockery of both concepts as he justifiably denounces Russia’s war on Ukrainians but powerfully helps Israel to engage in genocidal warfare on Palestinian people in Gaza”.

“All over the world, we need sustained outcries and intense diplomatic pressure for an end to the carnage, beginning with an immediate and permanent ceasefire”, he declared.

In an analytical piece published in Common Dreams, a US website, Jessica Corbett, a senior editor and staff writer, says while the wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip are different for myriad reasons, Western leaders have been called hypocrites for opposing the Russian invasion but backing what global experts warn is a “genocidal” Israeli operation—criticism that was renewed last Friday in response to a statement from U.S. President Joe Biden.

Biden’s statement came after Russia launched its “most massive aerial attack” since invading Ukraine in February 2022, killing dozens, injuring more than 150, and hitting “over 100… private houses, 45 multistory residential buildings, schools, two churches, hospitals, a maternity ward, and many commercial and storage facilities,” according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

After noting the impact of the “massive bombardment,” Biden took aim at Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that his “objective remains unchanged. He seeks to obliterate Ukraine and subjugate its people. He must be stopped.”

Journalist Mehdi Hasan—whose MSNBC show was just canceled after offering rare critical coverage of the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on civilians in Gaza—shared that portion of the president’s remarks on social media with a suggestion, writes Corbett.

“I challenge you to read this statement from the White House today… but… change the words Russia, Ukraine, and Putin to Israel, Gaza, and Netanyahu,” he said, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Go on. Do it. See for yourself.”

In an interview with Connor Echols, a reporter for Responsible Statecraft, Kenneth Roth, the former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the Biden administration has been far too deferential to the Israeli Government, despite the pretty clear commission of war crimes in Gaza.

“And while the administration has pushed to ameliorate some of those war crimes — by pressing for humanitarian access, by urging greater attention to avoiding civilian casualties — that rhetorical push has not been backed by the use of the leverage that the administration has that might have really put pressure on the Israeli government to stop– whether that would be withholding or conditioning ongoing arm sales or military assistance, or even allowing a Security Council resolution to go forward.”

Asked what a better approach would look like, Roth said the initial problem was that Biden pretty unconditionally wrapped himself in the Israeli government’s response to the horrible October 7 attacks by Hamas. If you look at his initial comments, while there were caveats written in about the need to respect humanitarian law, there was no emotional punch behind them.

“It was pretty clear that Biden simply stood with Israel and was giving it a green light to proceed with its military response to Hamas without much effort, at least during the first few weeks, to ensure that that response really did comply with humanitarian law.”

“So, I think the Israeli government got the message that the references to humanitarian law were necessary for certain audiences, but that the administration’s heart was not in them,” he pointed out.

Asked if U.S. officials could be legally complicit if Israel is found to have committed war crimes in Gaza, Roth said: “Well, they could be. Biden’s references to the Israeli military conducting indiscriminate bombing were clearly not just a verbal slip. It probably reflected the internal conversations that the administration has. The second one even seems to have been somewhat deliberate.

And the significance of that is that indiscriminate bombardment is a war crime. As any administration lawyer would know, continuing to provide weapons to a force that is engaged in war crimes can make the sender guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes.

“That is not some crazy, wacko theory. That was the basis on which former Liberian President Charles Taylor was convicted by an internationally backed tribunal, the so-called Special Court for Sierra Leone, for providing weapons to the Sierra Leonean rebel group known as the Revolutionary United Front, a group that was notorious for chopping off the limbs of its victims,” Roth said.

Because Taylor kept providing arms in return for the RUF’s diamonds while he knew the RUF was committing these war crimes, this internationally-backed tribunal found him guilty of aiding and abetting, convicted him, and sentenced him to 50 years in prison, which he is currently serving in a British prison, he declared.

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By Farhana Haque Rahman
TORONTO, Canada, Dec 22 2023 (IPS)

The year 2023 has brought so much tragedy, with incomprehensible loss of lives, whether from wars or devastating ‘natural’ disasters, while our planet has seen yet more records broken as our climate catastrophe worsens.

And so as the clock ticks towards the (mostly western) New Year, readers are traditionally subjected by media outlets like ours to the ‘yearender’ – usually a roundup of main events over the previous 12 months, one horror often overshadowed by the next.

Farhana Haque Rahman

So forgive us if for 2023 IPS takes a somewhat different approach, highlighting how humanity can do better, and how the big depressing picture should not obscure the myriad small but positive steps being taken out there.

COP28, the global climate conference held this month in Dubai, could neatly fit the ‘big depressing’ category. Hosted by a petrostate with nearly 100,000 people registered to attend, many of them lobbyists for fossil fuels and other polluters, it would be natural to address its outcomes with scepticism.

However, while Yamide Dagnet, Director for Climate Justice at the Open Society Foundations, described COP28 as “imperfect”, she said it also marked “an important and unprecedented step forward in our ‘course correction’ for a just transition towards resilient and greener economies.”

UN climate chief Simon Stiell acknowledged shortcomings in the compromise resolutions on fossil fuels and the level of funding for the Loss and Damages Fund. But the outcome, he said, was also the “beginning of the end” for the fossil fuel era.

Imperfect as it was and still based on old structures, COP28 hinted at the possible: a planetary approach to governance where common interests spanning climate, biodiversity and the whole health of Earth outweigh and supersede the current dominant global system of rule by nation states.

As we have tragically witnessed in 2023, the existing system – as vividly reflected in the repetitive stalemate among the five veto-bearing members of the UN Security Council – is failing to find resolution to the major conflicts of this year, Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza. Not to mention older and half-forgotten conflicts in places like Myanmar (18.6 million people in need of humanitarian aid) and in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (seven million displaced).

The unrestrained destruction of Gaza and the disproportionate killings of over 17,000, (now the death toll is “at least 20,000 people” according to Palestinian officials) mostly civilians– in retaliation for 1,200 killings by Hamas and 120 hostages in captivity– have left the Palestinians in a state of deep isolation and weighed down by a feeling of being deserted by the world at large.

The United Nations and the international community have remained helpless– with UN resolutions having no impact– while American pleas for restrained aerial bombings continue to be ignored by the Israelis in an act of defiance, wrote IPS senior journalist Thalif Deen.

The hegemony of the nation-state system is surely not going to disappear soon but – without wanting to sound too idealistic — its foundations are being chipped away by civil society where interdependence prevails over the divide and rule of the existing order. And so for a few examples encountered in our reporting:

CIVICUS Lens, standing for social justice and rooted in the global south, offers analysis of major events from a civil society perspective, such as its report on the security crisis gripping Haiti casting doubt over the viability of an international plan to dispatch a Kenya-led police contingent.

Education Cannot Wait, a global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, lobbied at COP28 for a $150 million appeal to support school-aged children facing climate shocks, such as the devastating drought in Somalia and Ethiopia, and floods in Pakistan where many of the 26,000 schools hit in 2022 remain closed.

Leprosy, an ancient but curable disease, had been pegged back in terms of new case numbers but the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 made it harder for patients to get treatment and for new cases to be reported. Groups such as the Sasakawa Health Foundation are redoubling efforts to promote early detection and treatment.

With 80 percent of the world’s poorest living closer to the epicenters of climate-induced disasters, civil society is hammering at the doors of global institutions to address the challenges of adaptation and mitigation.

Lobbying on the sidelines of COP28 in Dubai was activist Joshua Amponsem, co-director of the Youth Climate Justice Fund who questioned why weather-resilient housing was not yet a reality in Mozambique’s coastal regions despite the increasing ferocity of tropical cyclones.

“My key message is really simple. The clock is ticking for food security in Africa,” Dr Simeon Ehui told IPS as the newly appointed Director General of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture which works with partners across sub-Saharan Africa to tackle hunger, poverty and natural resource degradation.

Dr Alvaro Lario, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which has received record-breaking pledges in support of its largest ever replenishment, warns that under current trends 575 million people will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030.

“Hunger remains a political issue, mostly caused by poverty, inequality, conflict, corruption and overall lack of access to food and resources. In a world of plenty, which produces enough food to feed everyone, how can there be hundreds of millions going hungry?” he asked.

Empowering communities in a bid to protect and rejuvenate the ecosystems of Pacific communities is the aim of the Unlocking Blue Pacific Prosperity conservation effort launched at COP28 by Palau’s President Surangel Whipps who noted that the world was not on track to meet any of the 17 sustainable development goals or climate goals by 2030.

A scientist with a life-long career studying coral reefs, David Obura was appointed this year as the new chair of IPBES, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

“We really have reached planetary limits and I think interest in oceans is rising because we have very dramatically reached the limits of land,” says Dr Obura, “What the world needs to understand is how strongly nature and natural systems, even when highly altered such as agricultural systems, support people and economies very tangibly. It’s the same with the ocean.”

An ocean-first approach to the fight against climate change is also the pillar of a Dalhousie University research program, Transforming Climate Action, launched last May and funded by the Canadian government. Traditional knowledges of Indigenous People will be a focus.

As Max Roser, an economist making academic research accessible to all, reminds us: for more people to devote their energy to making progress tackling large global problems, we should ensure that more people know that it is possible.

Focusing on the efforts of civil society and projecting hope amidst all the heartbreak of 2023 might come across as futile and wasted, but in its coverage IPS will continue to highlight efforts and successes, big and small, that deserve to be celebrated.

Farhana Haque Rahman is the Executive Director of IPS Inter Press Service Noram and Senior Vice President of IPS; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015 to 2019. A journalist and communications expert who lived and worked in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization FAO and the International Fund for Agricultural Development IFAD.

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The Israeli Prime Minister at the UN General Assembly sessions, September 2023. Credit: United Nations

By David L. Phillips
NEW YORK, Dec 22 2023 (IPS)

Benjamin Netanyahu must go. Under the guise of judicial reform, Netanyahu has undermined the rule of law and divided the country. He is toxic to Arab states, even those which have signed the Abraham Accords. Netanyahu has become an impediment to Israel’s democratic development and regional relations.

Israel needs a new government committed to peace and a cabinet that champions reconciliation. Perpetual war plays into the hands of Hamas. It placates Jewish hardliners who oppose the national aspirations of Palestinians. War also serves Netanyahu by distracting voters and delaying accountability for his government’s intelligence failures on October 7.

It took up to ten hours for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to react to Hamas’ invasion. Known for its security and intelligence services, Israel was caught flat-footed. Panicked residents of kibbutzim cowered in safe rooms, while 1,200 Israelis were killed, butchered in their homes and on the grounds of the Nova Music Festival. Hundreds were taken hostage by Hamas, gang-raped and turned into sexual slaves. One hundred and thirty remain in captivity.

It is impossible to reconcile Israel’s objectives. Israel cannot eradicate Hamas and free hostages captive in the subterranean world of Gaza’s tunnel network. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin just visited Jerusalem to discuss priorities and scaling back Israel’s offensive.

In the fog of war, the IDF killed three Israeli hostages last week displaying a white flag and speaking in Hebrew. Shooting people, even Hamas members who surrender, violates the laws of war and Israel’s military code. Exhausted and trigger happy, the incident is under investigation. The Israeli army chief of staff and the intelligence chief issued apologies. Netanyahu prevaricated, delaying his meeting with hostage families.

The incident caused outrage across Israel, raising questions about Israel’s conduct of the war. The Hamas Ministry of Health claims that 20,000 Palestinian civilians have died as a result of IDF activities. Hostage families are demanding an investigation.

There is a growing clamor to bring the hostages home. Hostage families are also demanding a plan to end the war. They have generally been supportive of Netanyahu’s response, but they are wavering. They believe that continued action in Gaza risks the lives of the remaining 130 hostages. The bungled operation has brought Israeli institutions – the IDF, Shin Bet and Mossad – into disrepute.

Even President Joe Biden, Israel’s biggest backer, criticized the IDF for its “indiscriminate bombing.” France, Germany and Britain are also fed up and have demanded a “sustainable ceasefire.”

Netanyahu said there will be a time and place for an inquiry into the Hamas attack and Israel’s response. He believes that the longer it takes for an inquiry, the more the passions of hostage families will be mollified.

Israel’s slow grinding war with Hamas must stop. Israel was justified in launching a reprisal after October 7, especially as details of the brutality came to light. Two months later, the IDF seems to be flailing about. Israel has been characterized as the aggressor and has lost the moral high ground. For sure, Israel has every right to defend itself. But what started as calculated counterterrorism now seems more like rage and revenge.

Can Hamas even be defeated? Hamas is more than an organization. It is a movement. For every Hamas terrorist that Israel kills, more Palestinian militants are waiting in the wings.

It’s time for a new approach. An interim government overseen by the Palestinian Authority should be established and make plans for an eventual Palestinian state living side-by-side at peace with Israel.

Indiscriminate bombing is counterproductive. A more surgical approach would differentiate between Hamas and Gazans, addressing claims of collective punishment.

Internationally mediated talks would ensue when the hostages are freed. Palestinians need a national horizon to separate themselves from the clutches of Hamas.

Israeli elections would likely repudiate Netanyahu and lead to the creation of a peace cabinet, putting Israel back on track as a democracy that respects minority rights and values good neighborly relations.

It is unimaginable that Netanyahu can survive his putrid performance. Prosecutors are waiting to charge Netanyahu with corruption. Israelis can debate the details of government formation for months, but polling suggests that regime change is something that Israelis agree on now.

David Phillips is an Adjunct Professor at the Security Studies Program of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

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Displaced families in a school in Gaza. 21 December 2023 Credit: WFP/Arete/Abood al Sayd

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 22 2023 (IPS)

As the killings of civilians in Gaza rose to over 20,000, the besieged city—which has been virtually reduced to rubble by Israeli bombardments—is also being ravaged by hunger and starvation.

In new estimates released on December 21, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global partnership that includes the World Health Organization (WHO), said Gaza is facing “catastrophic levels of food insecurity,” with the risk of famine “increasing each day.”

An unprecedented 93% of the population in Gaza is facing crisis levels of hunger, with insufficient food, and high levels of malnutrition.

At least 1 in 4 households are facing “catastrophic conditions”: experiencing an extreme lack of food and starvation and having resorted to selling off their possessions and other extreme measures to afford a simple meal. Starvation, destitution and death are evident.

The World Food Programme warns that these levels of acute food insecurity are unprecedented in recent history and that Gaza risks famine.

Shaza Moghraby, Spokesperson for the UN World Food Programme (WFP) said: “I have been exposed to many IPC reports on various countries throughout my time at WFP and I have never seen anything like this before. The levels of acute food insecurity are unprecedented in terms of seriousness, speed of deterioration and complexity.”

Gaza risks famine. The population falling into the “catastrophe” classification of food security in Gaza or IPC Level 5 is more than four times higher than the total number of people currently facing similar conditions worldwide (577,000 compared to 129,000 respectively).

A family cooks a meal in a temporary accommodation in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. Credit: WFP

“We need an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, the opening of all border crossings and the resumption of commercial cargo to provide relief, put an end to the suffering and avert the very serious threat of famine. We cannot wait for famine to be declared before we act,” she said.

On recent missions to north Gaza, WHO staff say that every single person they spoke to in Gaza is hungry. Wherever they went, including hospitals and emergency wards, people asked them for food.

“We move around Gaza delivering medical supplies and people rush to our trucks hoping it’s food,” they said, calling it “an indicator of the desperation.”

Meanwhile, in a new report released this week, Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused the Israeli government of using “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the occupied Gaza Strip, which is a war crime.”

“Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival”.

Since Hamas-led fighters attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, high-ranking Israeli officials, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Energy Minister Israel Kat have made public statements expressing their aim to deprive civilians in Gaza of food, water and fuel – statements reflecting a policy being carried out by Israeli forces, HRW said.

Other Israeli officials have publicly stated that humanitarian aid to Gaza would be conditioned either on the release of hostages unlawfully held by Hamas or Hamas’ destruction.

“For over two months, Israel has been depriving Gaza’s population of food and water, a policy spurred on or endorsed by high-ranking Israeli officials and reflecting an intent to starve civilians as a method of warfare,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch.

“World leaders should be speaking out against this abhorrent war crime, which has devastating effects on Gaza’s population.”

Human Rights Watch interviewed 11 displaced Palestinians in Gaza between November 24 and December 4. They described their profound hardships in securing basic necessities. “We had no food, no electricity, no internet, nothing at all,” said one man who had left northern Gaza. “We don’t know how we survived.”

Abby Maxman, President and CEO of Oxfam America said the shocking figures describing the high levels of starvation in Gaza are a direct, damning, and predictable consequence of Israel’s policy choices – and President Biden’s unconditional support and diplomatic approach.

“Anyone paying attention cannot be surprised by these figures after more than two months of complete siege, denial of humanitarian aid, and destruction of residential neighborhoods, bakeries, mills, farms, and other infrastructure essential for food and water production,” she said.

“Israel has the right to defend its people from attacks, but it does not have the right to use starvation as a weapon of war to collectively punish an entire civilian population in reprisal. That is a war crime.”

“The US government has repeatedly given Israel diplomatic cover, but now must urgently change course and put politics aside to prioritize the lives of civilians”, said Maxman.

“ As humanitarians, we know no amount of aid can meaningfully address this spiraling crisis without an end to the bombing and siege, but it is unconscionable to deny it to Palestinian families who are starving”.

She argued the Biden administration must use all of its influence to achieve an immediate ceasefire to stop the bloodshed, allow for the safe return of hostages to Israel, and allow aid and commercial goods in, “so we can save lives now.”

“The US cannot continue to stand by and allow Palestinians to be starved to death.”

According to WHO, Gaza is also experiencing soaring rates of infectious diseases. Over 100, 000 cases of diarrhoea have been reported since mid-October. Half of these are among young children under the age of 5 years, case numbers that are 25 times what was reported before the conflict.

Over 150 000 cases of upper respiratory infection, and numerous cases of meningitis, skin rashes, scabies, lice and chickenpox have been reported. Hepatitis is also suspected as many people present with the tell-tale signs of jaundice.

“While a healthy body can more easily fight off these diseases, a wasted and weakened body will struggle. Hunger weakens the body’s defences and opens the door to disease,” WHO warned.

Meanwhile, HRW said international humanitarian law, or the laws of war, prohibits the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) provides that intentionally starving civilians by “depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies” is a war crime.

Criminal intent does not require the attacker’s admission but can also be inferred from the totality of the circumstances of the military campaign.

In addition, Israel’s continuing blockade of Gaza, as well as its more than 16-year closure, amounts to collective punishment of the civilian population, a war crime. As the occupying power in Gaza under the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel has the duty to ensure that the civilian population gets food and medical supplies.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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A woman is advised by a BLAST counsellor. The organization offers legal support, including providing information, advice, and free legal representation. Credit: BLAST

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Dec 21 2023 (IPS)

Criminal justice systems in South Asia are failing women, despite stark statistics on the prevalence of violence. WHO estimates translate to one in every two women and girls in the region experiencing violence daily.

Nawmi Naz Chowdhury, a Global Legal Advisor at Equality Now, told a webinar titled ‘Future of Legal Aid in South Asia for Sexual Violence Offenses Against Women and Girls: Lessons from the Past Five Years’ that women and girls experience indifference and neglect at all levels, and there are gaps in legal protections that leave them vulnerable to sexual violence. Where laws do exist, common failures in implementation effectively prevent survivors from accessing justice.

Research by Equality Now, Dignity Alliance International, and partners has revealed that sexual violence laws in South Asian countries are insufficient, inconsistent, and not systematically enforced, leading to extremely low conviction rates for rape.

Long delays in medical examinations, police investigations, prosecutions, and trials are widespread. Survivors often have difficulties filing cases with the police and face community pressure to withdraw criminal complaints and accept informal mediation. Other protection gaps in legal systems include overly burdensome or discriminatory evidence requirements in rape cases and the failure to fully criminalize marital or intimate partner rape.

To bring about change, more needs to be done by governments, and this requires an increase in budgeting and strategizing on a national level, taking lessons derived from best practices in the region and elsewhere.

Training and raising awareness must go hand in hand with giving the police the tools to operate and upgrade their role to better meet society’s needs. This could include being trained in sign language interpretation, using technology to offer services and information, understanding communities and their intersectionality, and including women and girls from various backgrounds and diversities within the police force.

Chowdhury spoke about how women from excluded groups are frequently targeted. “Women and girls from socially excluded communities are often at higher risk of being subjected to sexual violence as compared to other communities due to the use of rape as a weapon of suppression.

“This is accompanied by a general culture of impunity for sexual violence and particular impunity for those from dominant classes, castes, or religions, which often leads to a denial of justice,” she said, with Dalit women and girls and those from indigenous communities encountering even greater obstacles to accessing justice.

Legal weak spots also make young and adolescent girls more vulnerable to sexual violence and, in some circumstances, enable perpetrators of rape to avoid punishment, typically by marrying the victim or obtaining ‘forgiveness’ from the victim, says Choudhury. “Victims of crime have a right to free legal aid, but in countries where these protection gaps exist, access to legal aid for women and girls seeking justice for sexual violence is hindered.”

Choudhury pointed to the high levels of stigma attached to rape in South Asian societies that often lead to the non-reporting or withdrawal of cases or settlements outside the court. Other factors that impede the reporting of sexual violence include fear of repercussions, such as violence, threats to life, or social ostracization.

“How much support are women and girls in South Asia getting?” she asked. “While accessing the criminal justice system, they are met with indifference and neglect at all levels, and this often results in the withdrawal of cases or long delays in adjudication—despite the pervasiveness of sexual violence in the region.”

Governments in the area rarely provide psychosocial care. While India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka have schemes for the payment of compensation to rape survivors, practical barriers often make compensation inaccessible for survivors, Choudhury explained.

Participants in the webinar from various countries in the region offered insights into how access to justice rights functions on a practical level and shared methods by which civil society organizations nudge criminal justice systems to bring about progressive change.

Sushama Gautam, at the Forum for Women, Law, and Development (FWLD) in Nepal, said that legal aid provided by her organization went beyond assisting individuals and included advocacy with key players and institutions like the police and the courts through public interest litigation.

A significant achievement of FWLD was filing public interest litigation in 2001 to get the Supreme Court of Nepal to declare in 2002 that marital sex without the wife’s consent should be considered rape. Nepal’s parliament adopted in 2018 a new criminal code that increased punishment for marital rape but made it a lesser offense than non-marital rape.

Nepal’s constitution guarantees legal aid as a fundamental right, said Gautam, explaining, “The national policy on legal aid and the policy on unified legal aid have also been formulated. These policies promote victim-centered legal aid, and there are digital mechanisms to ensure that legal aid has been established.”

FWLD has an app that provides people with legal information on various violations and helps them contact legal aid providers. The organization also runs a Legal Clinic and Information Center that extends services to survivors of sexual violence, such as legal counseling, and helps take care of their immediate needs.

Manisha Biswas, senior advocacy officer at the Bangladesh Legal Aid Services Trust (BLAST), says that while Bangladesh has made progress in ensuring access to justice for rape victims, estimates show that only one in 90 cases of sexual violence reaches the stage where the victim gets compensation.

Leading the Rape Law Reform Coalition, comprising 17 rights organizations, BLAST was instrumental in getting the Bangladesh Parliament to amend evidence laws to disallow ‘character assassination’ of rape victims by questioning during prosecution.

BLAST offers a range of legal support, including providing information, advice, and free legal representation, underpinned by a network of paralegal workers, many of whom are recruited from different law colleges. Other activities include public interest litigation and advocacy campaigns to increase awareness and understanding of legal rights, remedies, and services.

“BLAST enjoys a good reputation that helps us to act as a guiding force and use our expertise in providing services such as training paralegal volunteers in police and court procedures and in proactively rehabilitating rape victims,” she said.

Biswas reflected that much remains to be done. Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, with more than half of women marrying before reaching the minimum legal marriage age of 18. Bangladeshi laws also permit marital rape.

Overall, says Choudhury, the reality in South Asia is that “the burden of supporting survivors of sexual violence falls on underfunded NGOs, predominantly legal aid organizations that may not have adequate resources.”

This is particularly true for NGOs and CSOs that operate at the grassroots level, which affects access to justice rights for women and girls who have disabilities, indigenous women and girls, and women and girls from minority groups.

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Food and Agriculture for Climate Justice action by Climate Action Network International at COP28 Credit: COP28/Neville Hopwood

By Umar Manzoor Shah
DUBAI & SRINAGAR, INDIA, Dec 21 2023 (IPS)

Durga Das*, a 59-year-old farmer from the Indian state of Maharashtra, committed suicide last year by ingesting a poisonous substance. He was unable to repay the loan he had taken from the bank for the renovation of his single-story house.

This year, his 32-year-old son, Pradeep Das, a father of two children, is equally desperate. The family owns half an acre of cultivated land where they grow cotton. The harvest has been devastated due to intense heat waves, leaving farmers like Dass and his son Pradeep in dire straits. The loan the family had taken is yet to be paid, and the land they had mortgaged in the bank is about to be confiscated. This means no crops, no cultivation, no business, and no food.

“I would have ended my life long ago, but my kids,” sighs Pradeep.

This family is not alone in such a predicament. About 10,000 farmers in India commit suicide every year. This means 27 every day and about one every hour. Suicides in agricultural communities have been a long-standing issue in the country since the 1970s as farmers face an increasing debt crisis.

“Every day, we are inching closer to death. The summers are getting hotter, extremely hot, and there are no rains. We were hoping to repay the bank the entire amount. Our house was in dire need of repair. The monsoon rain penetrated our home and made us all ill—my kids as well as my mother. We decided to repair it and took out a loan against the land we have. But heaven had something else in store for us,” Pradeep told IPS, explaining the recent uncertain weather patterns.

Based on statistical modeling, researchers predict that if there was a 25 percent deficit in rainfall, the number of farmers dying by suicide in a year would increase to 1,188 individuals; 2023 is already confirmed to emerge as the hottest year ever. Several months this year set new temperature records. More than 80 days this year happened to be at least 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times. “Climate change is making agriculture an extremely risky, potentially dangerous, and loss-making endeavor for farmers, and it’s increasing their risk of suicide,” said Ritu Bharadwaj, a principal researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), which conducted the research.

COP 28

From November 29 to December 13 this year, world leaders, climate experts, scientists, and policymakers hailing from 200 countries congregated in Dubai to discuss, debate, and negotiate over the measures needed to be taken to bring down global temperatures and make the earth fit for human habitation.

Despite being the world’s most populous country, India is also anticipated to be the largest contributor to the increased demand for fossil fuels in the next decade. While affluent nations have reduced their emissions by approximately 16 percent since 2007, and China is expected to reach peak emissions before 2030, India’s emissions are poised to surpass those of the European Union. By 2030, India’s emissions are projected to exceed the combined pollution levels of Europe and Japan.

The COP28 climate meeting delivered some important outcomes—a first-time acknowledgment of the need to move away from fossil fuels, a first promise to reduce methane emissions, operationalization and capitalization of the Loss and Damage Fund, and an agreement on a framework for the global adaptation goals.

A lone anti-fossil fuel protestor at COP28. Credit: Umar Manzoor Shah/IPS

However, like all previous COPs, it remained an underachiever, unable to measure up to expectations, particularly in galvanizing more ambitious climate action in the immediate term. The main agenda at COP28 was to carry out a Global Stocktake (GST), a comprehensive assessment of where the world was in its fight against climate change and what more needed to be done to meet the climate objectives.

Meanwhile, millions of farmers like Pradeep in India seem to have no hope of any respite in the times to come. With the recently concluded COP preferring to play a proverbial ostrich in terms of taking a final call on fossil fuel reduction—the prime culprit for the global heat wave—there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel for India’s crisis-torn farming community. This means more heat waves, a surge in temperatures, and the late arrival of monsoons.

“We could plant good seeds, use quality fertilizer, and make the best human efforts for a profitable harvest, but it is weather that always plays a spoilsport. We cannot escape from its wrath. A farmer would toil for the entire year, and just one single heat wave is enough to dash all his hopes. This is it,” Pradeep said.

Will the Loss and Damage Fund help farmers like Pradeep?

The COP28 climate conference in Dubai marked the official launch of a Loss and Damage Fund designed to assist vulnerable countries in dealing with the consequences of climate change. The initial funding for this initiative is approximately USD 475 million, with the UAE committing USD 100 million, the European Union pledging USD 275 million, the US contributing USD 17.5 million, and Japan offering USD 10 million.

The fund itself represents a global financial package aimed at facilitating the rescue and rehabilitation of countries grappling with the cascading impacts of climate change. Specifically, it involves compensation from wealthy nations, responsible for the industrial growth leading to global warming and the climate crisis, to less industrialized nations. These nations, despite having a low carbon footprint, bear the brunt of rising sea levels, floods, severe droughts, intense cyclones, and other climate-related challenges. The evolving climate has profoundly affected lives, livelihoods, biodiversity, cultural traditions, and identities.

Although the Fund was initially introduced during COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, it wasn’t until a few weeks before COP28 that rich and poor nations were able to resolve some of their differences and reach agreements on crucial aspects of it.

Highlighting the limitations of the traditional project cycle, Dr Anand Patwardhan, Professor at the University of Maryland, asserts that it is insufficient for addressing the impacts of loss and damage.  Emphasizing the importance of recognizing that the ongoing discussion primarily focuses on nations, he underscores the critical need for funds to directly benefit individuals who have undergone loss and damage. He stresses the significance of ensuring access to delivery in this context.

Dr Benito Muller, Managing Director, Oxford Climate Policy, says he doesn’t see this as a fund that spends USD 150 billion annually. “It is very difficult to spend this annually.  What this fund should do is not only pilot new funding arrangements but also identify new ways of spending the money, for example, the new insurance schemes.”

Anita Gosh, a New Delhi-based climate activist, says there seem to be no immediate benefits for Indian farmers, even though the Loss and Damage Fund was announced.

“The farmers should be offered comprehensive insurance policies in case of drought-like situations or massive crop damages. The fund should also provide some financial help to the farming communities if they are in distress, like less harvest, marriage ceremonies, or house repairs. The entire idea should be that we must adopt a humane approach towards this community, which is at the receiving end of climate change,” Anita said.

However, she believes the plan for how the fund should be spent is yet to be devised and that she fears it could be shelved for years, as has been the procedure in the past.

“If the past recommendations had been implemented, the situation would have been different today. Now is the time to say enough is enough; we need action on the ground,” Anita told IPS News.

Postscript

During the 14-day period when COP-28 was being held in the opulent Dubai, more than 380 farmers are likely to have killed themselves in India—some for failing to repay the loans, some for failing to pay dowry for their daughter’s marriage, and some for losing hope of giving a good life to their families. But underneath this crisis lurks the prime reason for all these deaths—climate change and the havoc it has been wrecking upon the poor.

Note: The names of the suicide victim and his family have been changed.

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Queuing up for registration in a city in South Asia. Credit: UN Photo / Kibae Park

By Alice Wolfle and Tanja Sejersen
BANGKOK, Thailand, Dec 21 2023 (IPS)

Have you ever tried to register a birth, a death or maybe your own marriage? Unfortunately, many of these vital events in Asia and the Pacific remain unregistered often with dire consequences for individuals, families and communities.

Civil registration can be a labyrinth to navigate, comprising of multiple stages with many bureaucratic hurdles. Such complex systems discourage individuals from either commencing or completing the arduous registration process.

But what if the process of registering a birth or death could be made less stressful for a new parent or a grieving relative? As an implementing partner of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative, ESCAP has been working with selected countries in the region to improve their Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) systems using the CRVS Systems Improvement Framework.

This framework provides the tools for a participatory approach to identify bottlenecks and solutions to streamline registration processes. The framework has now been used in Niue, Maldives, Nauru, Fiji, Vanuatu, Samoa, and Turkmenistan.

In many cases, people are not aware of the legal timeframes for registering vital events, leading to late registration of births often at school enrolment age, which often means having to pay additional late registration fees or the submission of additional documentation.

People living overseas may be unaware of the need to notify a vital event in their home country or are unable to visit a civil registration office to register the event. Lack of systems for recording overseas vital events in many countries means that events are either not captured, or in some cases may be double counted.

So, why is registering a vital event so complex?

In many countries, notification of a birth or death occurs at a health facility, but an individual must then register the event at a civil registration office. This multi-stage process means several trips to different offices for family members, which can be expensive and time-consuming, especially for those in remote areas.

Additionally, births or deaths occurring outside of health facilities frequently remain unregistered.

Civil registration processes are not only cumbersome for people attempting to register an event, but also for staff engaged in the process. Paper-based registration forms slow down the transfer of information between health facilities and civil registration offices and sometimes staff must (re)enter personal information by hand.

Where digital civil registration systems are used, staff often encounter obstacles in leveraging the potential benefits due to outdated ICT hardware and software, as well as limited internet connectivity. This ‘system’ may be something as simple as a spreadsheet or an MS Access database.

It is hardly surprising that this process is time-consuming for already understaffed facilities, often resulting in long queues at registration offices, not to mention the increased scope for errors or misplaced forms. In many countries, replacing lost forms or changing a mistake is akin to reaching a dead end in the registration labyrinth!

The lack of training and inconsistent forms for coding causes of death in line with the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is also an issue. This means that accurate statistics on causes of death cannot be utilized by government agencies for future planning. Additionally, in many countries, the sharing of data may not be possible among government agencies due to regulations or the absence of integrated digital data systems. This means important data is not utilized to its full potential.

Once the main obstacles for registering a birth or death have been identified, stakeholders are able to develop redesigned civil registration processes. Although CRVS Business Process Improvement aims to encourage longer-term sustainable solutions to strengthen CRVS systems, (e.g., changing legislation, developing digitized platforms, improving interoperability, integrity and efficiency), ‘quick win’ solutions also constitute an important outcome of this work.

These facilitate immediate improvements that require minimal investment (e.g. amending a field on a registration form) to minimize the burden on families and combat the lack of awareness about the importance of registering vital events. ‘Quick win’ solutions may be used as an advocacy tool for increasing future resources for CRVS system improvements.

Examples of longer-term sustainable solutions have included the development of online registration forms, appointment booking systems, SMS mobile messaging communications and development of standard operating procedures for civil registry staff.

The process of implementing a simplified CRVS system is iterative, monitoring progress until complete and timely civil registration is achieved in the Asia and Pacific region as outlined in the Ministerial Declaration to “Get every one in the picture’ in Asia and the Pacific. A smooth experience encourages people to register events, increasing registration completeness alongside accuracy and timeliness of vital statistics, supporting the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development where no one is left behind.

Source: ESCAP

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In Travis County, in the city of Austin, Texas, is the headquarters of the American company Tesla. The group specializing in electric vehicles is building a large plant in the state of Nuevo Leon, in northeastern Mexico, with a production capacity of one million electric vehicles. Credit: Tesla

By Emilio Godoy
AUSTIN, Texas, US, Dec 20 2023 (IPS)

The city of Austin, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, had 945,000 residents in 2021 and on average each household owned two cars, hundreds of them electric. Among the manufacturers of these electric vehicles are companies such as the US Tesla, Ford and General Motors (GM).

From Tesla’s plant in Travis County, one of the automaker’s eight global facilities, there is a virtually invisible line to its future subsidiary in Santa Catarina, in the northeastern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, two locations separated by about 600 kilometers.

The company produced the largest number of electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrids in the second quarter of 2023, followed by the Chinese company Build Your Dreams (BYD).

Tesla has attracted Mexican engineers trained in Nuevo Leon and from Austin supervises the construction of the new plant, whose investment is around 5 billion dollars.

Hundreds of these rolling steel beetles, many of them electric (even from other brands), fill the parking lot of the facility, where Tesla manufactures its Model Y and a cybertruck, and will soon make batteries and cathodes, one of its main parts and which is the electrode that transports the positive electrical charge.

In the morning hours, these vehicles crowd Tesla Street, so rechristened for obvious reasons.

The process involves an issue that is becoming more and more relevant: the transparency of the supply chain. The number of parts in an EV battery varies by model, but in total it’s less than an internal combustion unit.

But, according to specialists interviewed, this chain has different levels of transparency, depending on the company in question. U.S. and European brands are leading the way, while Chinese brands are lagging.

But under pressure from governments, non-governmental organizations and consumers, the situation is showing signs of change.

The supply chain involves the phases of extracting the raw materials for the product, processing and refining them for the preparation of the commodity materials, their coupling for use in the final good, and the end of their useful life, which includes reuse or recycling.

This scaffolding is made up of hundreds of actors, generally disconnected from each other, and involves an enormous effort to trace them and which makes it difficult to clarify who provides which component.

In the research for this report, IPS found that the EV supply chain in Mexico is opaque, which has environmental and human rights repercussions.

In 2021, during the climate summit in the Scottish city of Glasgow, Mexico assumed the voluntary goal of selling only non-polluting cars by 2035. In addition, the U.S. administration of Democrat Joe Biden wants 50% of new cars sold by 2030 to be electric.

 

Global Player

Yong Kwon, the non-governmental Sierra Club’s senior policy adviser, noted that the focus has traditionally been on the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the manufacture of EVs, from the extraction of the minerals needed for the production of batteries and other components to the manufacturing itself.

However, there is increasing pressure to consider other aspects, such as respect for human rights and the presence of child labour.

“We are in the early stages of understanding the full impact of the chain. We don’t know which plants supply steel, for example, to the assembly plants. By having transparency about the environmental impact, you can send signals on other issues. We want to draw attention to them,” he told IPS from Washington.

Mexico is the world’s fourth-largest exporter of light-duty vehicles and the fifth-largest seller of auto parts, but it has yet to weigh in on the global EV market. The automotive sector has about 600 suppliers of original parts, who in turn outsource to another 600 vendors of components or basic services.

In 2021, Mexico was the sixth-largest seller of EVs, with destinations such as the United States, Belgium, and Norway, while importing a low volume of units from the United States, Germany, and China.

It also exported the equivalent of 2% of global electric batteries, while China dominated the sector, with 35%. The main destinations were the United States, Canada and France. Meanwhile, it imported 2.86% of all components, contributed by Poland, the United States and China.

The Asian powerhouse controls almost half of the EV value chain and Contemporary Amperex Technology Company Ltd. (Catl), with its parent company in that country, produces one in three batteries in the whole world.

 

Outside its Austin plant, Tesla has charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs), which are already common in the United States. But the supply chain of materials for the manufacture of EVs has transfer flaws on the part of Tesla and other companies: they do not detail the origin of the raw materials for their production or their components, as well as environmental impact or respect for human rights. Credit: Emilio Godoy / IPS

 

Mass failure

The international platform Lead the Charge, made up of several environmental organizations in the United States (including the Sierra Club), virtually failed all EV producers.

Its objective is to evaluate the automotive industry on the respect for human rights of workers, communities, and Indigenous Peoples, in a sustainable way and without the consumption of fossil fuels.

This assessment is relevant for Mexico, due to its production plant link with the United States, although there is no evaluation of manufacturing in Mexico.

Ford was the highest rated in the examination, with a total score of 33%. In the area of respect for human rights and responsible sourcing, it received 51% and, on the environment, 15%.

GM scored 15 percent overall, with 25 percent on human rights and responsible sourcing and 5 percent on the environment.

Meanwhile, the platform assigned 14% to Tesla, 21% on human rights and responsible sourcing and 7% on the environment.

Another Lead the Charge’s subject was the German BMW Group, to which it gave a total score of 22%, with 26% in environmental aspects and 17% in human rights and responsible sourcing.

The group is investing about $872 million in its plant in the municipality of Villa de Reyes, in the north-central Mexican state of San Luis Potosi, which will manufacture electric models and batteries.

For Cecilia Mattea, Battery and Value Chain Policies manager at the non-governmental network European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E), increasing transparency in value chains offers benefits to stakeholders, such as local communities affected by mining.

“Some automakers are taking significant steps to make their operations more transparent, but others are still lagging behind, especially on sustainability commitments, not to mention increasing transparency,” she told IPS from Brussels.

In 2021, Ford began mapping and auditing the EV and battery supply chain to uncover the source of raw materials such as nickel, lithium, cobalt, and graphite.

In its 2022 sustainability report, Ford, whose global headquarters are located in the U.S. city of Detroit, listed 30 appraisals to its suppliers from these four chains and reviews of its nickel, lithium and cobalt due diligence management systems. But the company has not given details about these measures.

At its plant placed in the municipality of Tutltitlán, located in the central state of Mexico (adjacent to Mexico City), the U.S. multinational assembles the Mustang Mach-E electric model, aimed mainly at the U.S. market.

Customs data from Mexico and Comtrade, the United Nations’ trade statistics system, reveal that Ford imports lithium-ion batteries from companies such as LG Chem and Samsung SDI, which have plants in South Korea and China.

It also acquires electronic components, such as sensors and communication systems, from Germany, the United States and China.

Meanwhile, GM is much more succinct with its information and only indicates its plans to get cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo through a multi-year agreement with Australian miner Glencore, as well as lithium from Argentina.

GM assembles batteries and EVs at its factory in the municipality of Ramos Arizpe, in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, for which it imports lithium batteries from LG Chem, which has suppliers in China and Japan.

The case of Tesla is extremely relevant, due to its ambitious EV production goals, its global expansion, including its future plant in Mexico, and its dependence on China, an aspect linked to the level of transparency of its supply.

This manufacturer sources batteries mainly from Japan’s Panasonic and China’s Catl. In addition, it uses battery cells from LG Chem and BYD.

In the case of batteries, its suppliers include Catl, South Korea’s LG Energy Solution, BYD, Panasonic, South Korea’s SK On, Samsung SDI and China’s China Aviation Lithium Battery Co. (Calb), Guoxuan High-tech Co., Sunwoda Electronic Co. and Svolt Energy Technology Co.

Regarding raw materials, Tesla buys lithium from the US-based Albemarle Corporation, which owns a mine in Australia and a refinery in China; Livent, also from the United States; and China’s Ganfeng Lithium Co. and Yahua Industrial Group.

It also purchases cobalt and nickel from China’s CNGR Advanced Material Co. and Huayou, which mines cobalt from Congo, the same case as Glencore Kamoto Copper Company, which owns a cobalt mine in that African nation.

Japan’s Nikkei news agency concluded that nearly 40 percent of the suppliers of materials used in Tesla’s EV batteries are Chinese companies, accounting for 39 percent of the 61 corporations in the battery segment. The report identified more than 13 428 companies that would supply components to Tesla.

China accounted for 40% of the 42 non-ferrous metal smelting companies, excluding aluminum.

These data are relevant for the future plant in Nuevo León, as the same value chain could be repeated.

For Isabel Studer, an academic at the Riverside School of Public Policy at the University of California, the greater participation of the United States and the European Union (EU) means that issues such as human rights and the environment become more relevant.

“There is more robust civil society and laws, and there is growing concern. Critical minerals are sourced from conflict countries and that makes it difficult to have traceability and respect for human rights. As the U.S. develops this industry further, there is going to be more demand for these minerals to come from sources that have no impacts”, she told IPS from Mexico City.

But the expert warned that such a large demand causes a lack of incentives for manufacturers or refiners to check whether the mining companies are complying with basic standards and asked about the timeframe for these requirements to have a positive impact on the supply chain.

GM and Tesla did not respond to IPS’s inquiry, while Ford de Mexico said it did not have a spokesperson available on these issues.

 

Mining Fever

Although the electrification of as many activities as possible is desirable to abandon fossil fuel consumption and reduce polluting emissions, the deployment of electric cars poses major challenges.

In his 2022 book Volt Rush, journalist Henry Sanderson recounts that Elon Musk, Tesla’s flamboyant owner, acknowledged that his firm would need to increase battery production a hundredfold by 2030, enough to make around twenty million cars a year.

But these goals would require four times the amount of lithium the world currently produces. The Paris-based International Energy Agency, which groups the largest consumers of hydrocarbons, predicted that demand for this mineral would grow thirtyfold by 2030 and more than 100 times by 2050.

An EV contains 83 kilograms of copper, triple the amount of a conventional vehicle, as it is present in the battery, electric motor, inverter, and wiring.

The requirement for copper and nickel would grow two- to three-fold to meet the needs of clean cars and clean power grids by 2050, posing environmental and social risks, according to the “2050 Net Zero Roadmap for Copper and Nickel Value Chains.”

If each of the 1 billion cars currently on the road were replaced by a Tesla model, the demand for cobalt would be equivalent to fourteen million tons, twice the size of the world’s identified reserves.

For this reason, the electrification of public and private transport already has serious climate, environmental and social impacts, as evidenced by well-documented cases in Congo (cobalt), Argentina (lithium) and Indonesia (nickel), to mention just a few cases.

 

Tesla built its electric vehicle plant in Travis, in the southern Texas city of Austin, in just over a year. But the construction plant it hopes to put into operation in 2026 in Mexico, in the northeastern state of Nuevo Leon, is progressing more slowly.
Credit: Emilio Godoy / IPS

 

Make-up or depth?

Faced with the maze of supply chains and the impacts observed, several initiatives are emerging to promote transparency and accountability.

In Germany, the law on corporate due diligence obligations, aimed at the prevention of human rights violations in supply chains –applicable to the automotive sector– and specifying obligations to address environmental and human rights risks, came into force in January.

In addition, the implementation of the so-called “battery passport”, developed by the Global Battery Alliance (GBA), the multi-stakeholder entity that emerged in 2017 to establish a sustainable battery value chain by 2030, is underway.

This instrument, backed by companies such as BMW, Calt, LG Chem, Samsung SDI, Sunwoda and Tesla, will be a mandatory requirement in the EU in 2026 and it is not ruled out that other jurisdictions will adopt it as well.

The passport will provide transparency on battery practices and impact across the value chain to all relevant stakeholders, create a framework for comparing those devices based on the criteria for a sustainable and responsible battery, as well as validate and track progress towards sustainable, responsible, and resource-efficient components.

Three pilots carried out by Germany’s Audi and Tesla reveal the vicissitudes of the initiative, as they were only able to track a portion of the lithium and cobalt used in the battery, thus showing gaps in the monitoring.

In addition, the EU is also debating the draft Law on Critical Raw Materials, which aims to strengthen the security of the supply of these ingredients, by defining 34 fundamental elements and 17 strategic ones, as well as actions for regional supply, national research, and diversification of imports.

In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 incentivizes the purchase of EVs under the condition that at least half of the battery’s components are manufactured in North America and 40% of the minerals used in them comes from domestic sources or countries with which the United States has trade agreements –not China or Russia–. Both percentages will rise from 2029.

For these incentives, cheap labor (compared to the United States), lax permits and logistics route, Tesla chose Nuevo León for its new plant, with capacity for one million EVs and which will be in operation in 2026.

A time that is considered very slow because in Shanghai (China), the construction of a similar plant took 10 months and in Austin, just over a year, plus the expansion process throughout 2023.

But one unknown is the execution of these frameworks, given the magnitude of the challenge.

Although Studer, from the University of California, questioned the record of the United States and the EU in the traceability of products, she considered that they can now exert greater influence.

The U.S. “could have a greater impact in introducing traceability standards, to ensure that the chain has better practices. There are going to be certifications (of batteries). To the extent that it imposes these standards, exporters must comply with them. There should be diversification of supply, because as long as China has a virtual monopoly in the stages, it’s not going to happen overnight”, she said.

According to the Sierra Club’s Kwon, the achievement of the standards is linked to improving authorities’ capacities in the United States, Mexico or the EU.

“We hope that international markets will provide tools for producers to comply with the requirements, for Chinese companies, for example, to disclose aspects of the chain. The emerging requirements will be chaotic at first, but they will push players to be more transparent. They can have a positive impact,” he said.

T&E’s Mattea recommended that Mexico and other countries also introduce oversight mechanisms.

“With the EU regulation on batteries, a big step forward has been taken to ensure that value chains are more transparent thanks to the provisions on carbon footprint, due diligence and battery passporting. In the coming years, these rules will be mandatory for batteries introduced on the market” in the EU, she stressed.

In 2023 third quarter, Tesla produced 430 488 vehicles, down 10% from the second-quarter results (479,700).

But as the EVs craze sweeps across North America, its demand for materials, whose origin remains shrouded in opaque layers, is increasing.

 

This article was produced by IPS with support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

 

Sehlisiwe Sibanda holds kindle that she uses for her energy-saving stove. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
KEZI, ZIMBABWE, Dec 20 2023 (IPS)

Five years ago, farmer Sehlisiwe Sibanda would walk into a nearby forested area to fill a scotch cart with huge wood logs for cooking and heating; a pile of firewood would last her a week during the summer.

But now she does not need a cartful of huge logs. Small branches and twigs are enough to last for more than a month.

Since building a wood-efficient stove, twigs and kindle have provided enough energy to cook meals, warm bath water, and bake scones for her family of five.

The tsotso stove is made of bricks in the shape of a box with two holes on top covered with repurposed plough iron wheels, an oven and a smoke chimney fixed to the wall. Tsotso is a local language word for kindle.

The stoves use less wood fuel and emit less pollution than cooking over an open fire. Now Sibanda can cook in her kitchen.

“The stove has been a life saver for me; my family now eats hot meals and has hot bath water every day,” she chuckles, showing the stove in the middle of her rondavel’s kitchen.

“Cooking in the kitchen has become an easy and enjoyable task; the stove is clean and does not produce irritating smoke, and now my family gathers around in the kitchen whenever I am cooking or baking. It has brought us together.”

Sinikiwe Ngwenya shows off her energy-saving stove, which uses twigs. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Sibanda bakes buns that she sells at local schools and to neighbours. She uses part of the income from her baking to buy feed for her chickens, which she sells for between USD 5 and USD 6. Selling six chickens earns her enough money to pay a tractor driver to plough her fields.

The stove has helped Sibanda and several women access energy efficiently and reduce deforestation in their village in Kezi, southern Zimbabwe. With many communities not connected to the electricity grid, wood is the key source of energy for cooking and heating. Firewood harvesting is a high price to pay for environmental protection in an arid region that experiences massive deforestation and desertification.

Biomass is a key source of energy for cooking across Zimbabwe. Most women carry the burden of collecting firewood and cooking on open fires, which exposes them to smoke pollution and puts their health at risk. The improved stoves are making a difference because they emit less smoke and use wood more efficiently, saving women the drudgery of collecting huge logs many kilometres from their homes.

Zimbabwe has been losing over 260,000 hectares of forests annually as a result of demand for wood fuel and land clearance for agriculture. This is worrisome given that the country is only planting an average of 34 hectares per year, according to the Zimbabwe Forestry Commission.

Sibanda was trained to build the stoves, and she is a community mobiliser and also trains other women to make them.

Another farmer, Sinikiwe Ngwenya, who had a stove built in her home, says the stove has also changed her life.

“Having this stove has made life easy for me; I do not worry about getting a lot of firewood to cook outside, and I have more time to do other tasks because cooking is less of a hassle,” says Ngwenya. “I no longer have to bend when cooking, which is good for my health; besides, my family now enjoys warm meals anytime, and I get to bake buns that I sell.”

Sehlisiwe Sibanda inside her kitchen. She says her kitchen is pleasant to work in because of an energy-efficient stove that does not emit a lot of smoke. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Saving Health, Maybe Trees Too

By getting women to use stoves, a local NGO is not only helping save trees from deforestation but also giving women a hand in easing unpaid care work and also a chance for them to generate income. The women construct the stoves themselves.

Adapting wood-efficient technologies, such as the tsotso stove, is helping women save trees and reduce the burden of unpaid care work.

Women bear the drudgery of collecting firewood, says Lakiness Zimanyiwa, a Programme Officer with the Hope for a Child in Christ (HOCIC), a local NGO that has trained women in rural areas on constructing tsotso stoves under its Securing Rights Programme (SRP PGII) to uplift women economically.

“Tsotso stoves were developed with the aim of reducing the burden of unpaid care work by women as they reduced time taken by women to fetch firewood, and they helped improve income through baking using the stove and selling scones to the community. The stoves are faster, so families have more time to participate in other essential tasks,” Zimanyiwa told IPS.

The stoves have also helped reduce deforestation in Maphisa, as women now take less time gathering firewood and only need to collect twigs, which are enough for cooking a family meal, says Pesistance Mukwena, a project officer with HOCIC.

The world is halfway to the deadline for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and Africa is off the mark on several of them, including SDG 7 on access to clean energy, according to the United Nations.  A UN Policy Brief on Advancing SDG7 in Africa recommends that policies and financing for clean cooking should be integrated into poverty alleviation and health strategies at the national level.

Sehlisiwe Sibanda holds a dish of freshly baked buns from an energy-saving stove in her kitchen in Maphisa village, Zimbabwe. Credit: BusaniBafana/IPS

Gender Considerations Crucial to Energy Alternatives

“The gender element is also crucial, as engaging women in clean cooking businesses will boost results and make such endeavours more lasting. Addressing this should range from awareness-raising campaigns to directly engaging women as champions and entrepreneurs,” the UN notes.

Finding alternative and cleaner energy sources is a priority for Zimbabwe, which needs more than USD 55 billion for climate change mitigation activities, mostly in the energy sector.  According to the country’s “intended nationally determined contribution” (INDC), Zimbabwe aims to cut carbon emissions by 33 percent by 2030 through clean energy initiatives like boosting hydroelectric power in its energy mix, biogas digesters, and improving energy efficiency.

More than 600 million people in Africa have no access to electricity, and many lack clean cooking energy.

A Vision for Clean Cooking by the International Energy Agency released ahead of the recent COP28 held in Dubai shows that in sub-Saharan Africa, only 20 percent of the population in 29 countries have access to clean cooking, with half of the nearly one billion people without access to clean cooking concentrated in five countries, such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uganda.

“Financial incentives are a vital policy tool for facilitating the accelerated deployment of clean cooking technologies. In this regard, approximately USD 8 billion of equipment and infrastructure is required annually from now to 2030 to underpin universal access to clean cooking solutions. But this must be complemented by steadfast leadership from policymakers, given that governments are best placed to influence the future,” Dr Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank Group, says in the report’s foreword.

Indoor air pollution from biomass is one of the top 10 risks for the global burden of diseases, according to the World Health Organization. Household air pollution is responsible for an estimated 3.8 million premature deaths globally.

Leleti Maluleke, researcher, Good Governance, Africa.

Climate change has worsened the demand for energy in Africa, where fossil fuels are a top source of energy for cooking, transportation, and heating, says Leleti Maluleke, a researcher for the Human Security and Climate Change programme at Good Governance Africa.

“Unequal energy access disproportionately affects women and girls due to their gender roles and responsibilities at a domestic level,” Maluleke tells IPS. “Women, especially in rural and remote areas, use polluting energy for cooking and cutting trees, therefore contributing to emissions and deforestation. The lack of electricity, education, and access to information excludes them from safer and greener ways of performing their domestic duties.”

Maluleke bemoaned the fact that, when it comes to energy discussions, decision-makers frequently overlook the struggles of women and that projects involving energy rarely take gender into account. She adds that energy poverty is an inequality issue. Africa has had a slow uptake of clean energy sources compared to Europe and America, making it necessary to focus on regions and communities that are disproportionately impacted by climate change.

“Africa happens to be one of those regions where more priority needs to be placed, as it contributes the least to emissions but is impacted the most,” she said. “Creating awareness of existing inequalities and injustices and how climate change exacerbates them will lead to the necessary dialogues, conversations, and actions that need to be taken on climate justice.”

The use of fossil fuels has taken centre stage on the back of growing climate change impacts, as seen in more and more intense floods, longer droughts, and high temperatures.

However, industrialised countries are not relenting on curbing carbon emissions, despite scientific research indicating that the world has a small window to avoid a catastrophe by phasing out fossil fuels and embracing cleaner renewable energy sources.

Clean Energy is Key to Climate Justice 

Alia Kajee, a senior campaigner for public finance and climate justice at 350.org says the climate crisis will disproportionately affect those who are already vulnerable, whether because of poverty, inequality, unemployment, or gender.

“Climate justice would be that those who are most negatively impacted by the climate crisis are able to withstand extreme weather shocks and adapt to changing conditions so that effects of the climate crisis do not hinder and disrupt lives, health and livelihood, or any other human right,” Kajee said, emphasising the need to ensure that evidence-based decisions are made by the governments, ones that align with the science that shows the worsening of the climate crisis and decisions that need to be taken to mitigate the crisis.

“Government must protect society, whether by ensuring safe, reliable, and clean access to energy such as solar or wind power or by ensuring effective and efficient disaster relief,” Kajee said.

The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, called for decisive climate action at COP28, warning that “trading the future for 30 pieces of silver is immoral” and that developed countries must honour their commitments to provide USD 100 billion a year to developing countries for climate support. During COP28, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) received a boost, with six countries pledging new pledges, with total pledges now standing at a record USD 12.8 billion from 31 countries. Eight donor governments announced new commitments to the Least Developed Countries Fund and Special Climate Change Fund totaling more than USD 174 million, while new pledges totaling nearly USD 188 million were made to the Adaptation Fund at COP28.

However, UNCTAD’s World Investment Report 2023 highlights a worrisome increase in the SDG investment gap, surpassing USD 4 trillion annually in developing countries alone, with energy investment needs estimated at USD 2.2 trillion per year.

This feature was made possible with the support of Open Society Foundations.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Excerpt:

Having this stove has made life easy for me; I do not worry about getting a lot of firewood to cook outside, and I have more time to do other tasks because cooking is less of a hassle. I no longer have to bend when cooking, which is good for my health; besides, my family now enjoys warm meals anytime, and I get to bake buns that I sell. – Sinikiwe Ngwenya on her energy-efficient stove
 

Credit: Orbon Alija/iStock by Getty Images via IMF

By Rafael Machado Parente and Rodrigo Valdes
WASHINGTON DC, Dec 20 2023 (IPS)

Crime and violence have long been a top-of-mind concern for households across Latin America and the Caribbean. The region accounts for nearly half of the world’s intentional homicide victims, despite representing just over 8 percent of the global population, United Nations data show.

The average homicide rate in the region is 10 times that of other emerging markets and developing economies and twice as high as sub-Saharan Africa. Within the region, Central America stands out as the most violent subregion.

Insecurity has also worsened over time, especially in some parts of the region. For example, Central America and the Caribbean have experienced annual increases in homicide rates of about 4 percent in the last two decades.

Crime directly affects the lives of millions of people and imposes large social costs. Because there is a delicate interplay between economic activity and crime, determining causal effects is not easy.

More economic activity will reduce crime, but less crime would, in turn, boost economic activity. Another factor, such as the strength of rule of law, will also affect both.

Our recent study shows that increases in homicide rates significantly reduce economic growth. In Latin America, a 30 percent increase in homicide rates (equivalent to a historical 1 standard deviation) is estimated to reduce growth by 0.14 percentage points.

We build on previous IMF work on Central America, Panama, and the Dominican Republic using data on criminal deportations from the US to tease out the causal effect of crime on economic activity.

Our study highlights the different channels through which insecurity affects economic growth. Estimates show that crime hampers capital accumulation, by possibly deterring investors who fear theft and violence, and decreases productivity, as it likely diverts resources toward less productive investments such as home security.

The benefits of reducing violence can be substantial. According to the study, bringing the crime level in Latin America down to the world average would increase the region’s annual economic growth by 0.5 percentage points, about a third of Latin America’s growth between 2017-19.

Moreover, confronting insecurity where it is most prevalent seems to have the largest payoffs. For example, fully closing the crime gap in countries with the highest homicide rates could elevate their gross domestic product growth by around 0.8 percentage points.

Smarter spending in security

Governments in Latin America are already allocating a considerable share of their resources to public order and safety. Not surprisingly, higher spending occurs in countries with higher crime rates—countries like El Salvador and Jamaica already spend more than 2 percent of their GDP on this matter.

While this substantial spending may be necessary to mitigate and deter crime, it also suggests that implementing more effective strategies could free up significant resources for other spending priorities. The IADB’s Security and Justice Evidence-based Platform is a valuable resource for scientific evidence on the effectiveness of existing security and justice solutions.

The platform highlights, for instance, that there is little evidence that vehicular license plate recognition technologies reduce transportation-related violence, whereas alcohol tax and price policies are found to effectively reduce violence in some cases.

Crime is an economic and social issue with far-reaching consequences and a variety of intertwined roots. If governments in the region were able to prioritize more effective crime-fighting strategies, these would not only enhance public safety but also improve the region’s economic potential.

This underscores the importance of collaboration between policymakers, international financing institutions, academia, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector to find ways to deal with this important obstacle to growth in the region.

Source: International Monetary Fund (IMF)

IPS UN Bureau

 

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec 20 2023 (IPS)

The World Bank insists commercial finance is necessary for achieving economic recovery and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but does little to ensure profit-hungry commercial finance serves the public interest.

By failing to address pressing challenges within their purview, the second-ever Bretton Woods institutions’ (BWIs) annual meetings on the African continent, in Marrakech in October 2023, set the developing world even further back.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The International Monetary and Financial Committee, which oversees the International Monetary Fund (IMF), could not agree, by consensus, on the usual end-of-meeting ministerial communique for ‘geopolitical’ reasons. The Development Committee, which governs the World Bank Group, fared little better.

New World Bank playbook
Little was achieved on crucial outstanding issues of governance reform and sovereign debt. Implicitly acknowledging past failure, World Bank Governors endorsed a “new vision to create a world free of poverty on a livable planet”.

After all, even the World Bank now acknowledges recent increases in global poverty have been the worst since the Second World War as economic stagnation, debt distress and inflation spread across the developing world.

The Bank’s new Evolution Roadmap proposes a just energy transition plan to mobilise private capital to scale up, secure and deploy climate finance. This is mainly for mitigation, rather than adaptation, let alone losses and damages.

The blueprint wants international financial institutions to help developing country governments de-risk private investments. For Muchhala, this reflects “the failure of the Bank’s wealthy shareholders to help ensure a more equitable multilateral system that is truly fit for purpose to meet the challenges of the 21st century”.

Blending finance for private profits
The strategy proposes ‘de-risking’ foreign investment with various types of ‘blended finance’ – such as co-financing, loan guarantees, political risk insurance or public equity co-investments – as well as complementary legal and other reforms.

The Bank and its allies have been promoting ‘blended finance’ for development, the environment and global warming since before the 2008 global financial crisis. Their main recommendation has been to induce profit-seeking private capital to fill growing financing gaps.

Undoubtedly, most poor developing countries have limited public resources to make needed social and environmental, including climate investments. In such arrangements, public funds are used to ‘de-risk’ or otherwise subsidise commercial finance, ostensibly to serve public policy priorities.

However, private commercial involvement in public services and infrastructure is costly and risky for the public sector and citizens, by deploying limited public resources for private gain. Civil society and other critics have already expressed grave concerns about the new Roadmap.

The World Bank Group also set up a Private Sector Investment Lab to scale up private finance in developing economies. It claims to be creating a “business enabling environment that unleashes private financing”.

Billions to trillions
The World Bank’s ‘billions to trillions’ slogan has been the pretext for privileging commercial finance as supposedly necessary to achieve the SDGs. But it has done little to ensure that such profit-seeking private investments will help achieve the SDGs or otherwise serve the public purpose.

The Bank does not consider that profit-seeking private investments expecting attractive returns may not serve the public interest and priorities. Nor do they necessarily support desirable transformations. Worse, their economic, social and environmental consequences may be for the worse.

The privatisation of previously public social services and infrastructure has worsened development and distribution. Unequal access to public services – increasingly linked to affordability and ability to pay – threatens hundreds of millions.

Such blended finance arrangements have also contributed to the debt explosion in the Global South – exacerbating, rather than alleviating developmental, environmental and humanitarian crises.

Debt distress spreading
Developing countries are in their worst-ever debt crises, with debt service obligations higher than ever before. Current debt-to-GDP ratios are more than twice those of LICs before the 1996 HIPCs’ debt relief came into effect, and even higher than for Latin American nations before the 1989 Brady plan.

Unlike the 1980s’ sovereign debt crises, market finance is now more important. Much more government debt from commercial sources involves relying on bond markets, rather than commercial bank borrowings.

With official credit much less important, commercial finance has become much more important compared to the 1980s. Unlike official creditors, most private creditors typically refuse to participate in debt restructuring negotiations, making resolution impossible.

Debt servicing costs equal the combined expenditure for education, health, social protection and climate. In Africa, debt servicing has risen by half. Debt service levels of the 139 World Bank borrowers are higher than during the heavily indebted poor countries’ (HIPCs) and Latin American debt crises peaks.

Debt service is absorbing 38% of budget revenue and 30% of spending on average by developing country governments. In Africa, the levels are much higher, at 54% of revenue and 40% of spending!

The BWIs’ joint debt sustainability framework insists debt-distressed economies must have lower debt-to-GDP ratios than other countries, limiting this LICs’ external ratio to 30% or 40%. This BWI policy effectively penalises the poorer and more vulnerable nations.

In 38 countries with over a billion people, loan conditionalities during 2020-22 resulted in regressive tax reforms and public spending cuts. Less expenditure has hit fuel or electricity subsidies and public wage bills, deepening economic stagnation.

Despite severe debt distress in many developing countries, no meaningful debt relief has been available for most. The most recent debt restructuring deals have left debt service levels averaging at least 48% of revenue over the next three to five years.

Debt distress limits government spending capacity, desperately needed to address social and environmental crises. Hence, overcoming stagnation and achieving the SDGs will require much more debt cancellation, relief and borrowing cost cuts.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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View from the area of La Puntilla, in the bay of the Peruvian town of Chancay, of the beach eroded as a result of the construction of the breakwater that is part of the mega-port built by a Chinese company, whose work is in its first phase. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

By Mariela Jara
CHANCAY, Peru , Dec 19 2023 (IPS)

“We have always lived a very quiet life here, but everything has changed since the construction of the multi-purpose port began a few years ago,” said Miriam Arce, a neighborhood leader in this municipality 80 kilometers north of the Peruvian capital, where the new port is projected to become the epicenter of trade between China and South American countries.

Chancay is one of the 12 municipalities of the province of Huaral and has a population of about 63,000 inhabitants. It is known for its agricultural valleys, a sea providing an abundant catch for artisanal fishers and for fishmeal production, and attractive waves for surfers.

“This bay is ideal for getting away from the chaos of Lima. People came here because they found the calm and certainty of being in a safe place where everyone knows each other, without fear of being robbed while enjoying a beautiful beach and delicious seafood dishes,” Arce, president of the Association in Defense of Housing and the Environment of the port of Chancay, told IPS.

Her great-grandmother came to Peru in the 1930s fleeing the civil war in Spain, and settled in this Pacific coastal town where her children have always been involved in fishing.

“My grandfather worked in the first fishmeal factory and in the boom of the 1960s the company built these houses as a camp facing the sea and my dad, who was a fisherman, bought the house later,” she said.

Arce’s memories are related to the dilemma posed by some people moving away and leaving behind the conflict generated by the construction of the Chancay Multipurpose Port Terminal that will cover a total of 992 hectares, built with an investment of 1.2 billion dollars in Chinese capital in the current first stage, to reach 3.6 billion by the time it is completed.

The investment is part of the Belt and Road Initiative launched globally by Beijing in 2013 as part of its global economic policy, which includes the development of road, port and connectivity infrastructure in different countries around the world, including South American nations.

 

Miriam Arce, president of the Association in Defense of Housing and Environment of the port of Chancay, shows the side of El Cascajo hill that has been mutilated as part of the construction of a mega-port and logistics terminal that will commercially connect China with South America. CREDIT: Marianela Jara / IPS

China’s largest shipping company, the state-owned Cosco Shipping, joined the project in 2019, when it acquired 60 percent of the shares. It changed the original design of the work started in 2016, to reconvert it into a multipurpose terminal, with four planned ports, and it took charge of construction. The remaining 40 percent stayed in the hands of the initial designer, the private Peruvian mining company Volcan.

It is called a multipurpose port due to the different functions of its terminals, which are expected to handle one million containers per year of general, non-mineral bulk, liquid and rolling cargo, using infrastructure with three different components: port operations, access and logistics, and the vehicular tunnel, as explained by the Chinese shipping company on the project’s website.

The first stage, covering 141 hectares, will culminate with the construction of a port that will be inaugurated during the next Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, which will be held for the third time in Peru in November 2024 and will be attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

According to the Peruvian government, the megaproject will position this Andean country as the leading Pacific logistics center in Latin America, which will boost its economy and exports and increase trade opportunities as well as local employment.

Projection of what the multipurpose port under construction in Chancay Bay will look like in an area of 141 hectares. The first of the four planned terminals is to be inaugurated in November 2024, eight years after the start of construction. CREDIT: Cosco Shipping

Why uproot ourselves?

Arce is 54 years old and lives with her parents in the house where her grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins lived. From the front of the house she can see the sea and their dock, while the back of the house is directly adjacent to the Cosco Shipping construction site, which has forced her to live permanently with dust, pollution and noise.

“This is not just a house, it is part of my family history. Why should I have to leave, uproot myself, if I was born here and I love this place. I was not a social activist, but defending the bay of Chancay has made me aware of the meaning of life and the interests at stake in our country, where it seems that money is worth more than people’s rights,” she said.

Her house is in the area of La Puntilla and together with her IPS toured the group of homes that line the boardwalk and lead to a hill from where you can see the breakwater, and the movement of machinery and workers.

What is most striking is the mutilation of one side of the Cascajo hill, on whose slopes are built the houses of La Puntilla, and which overlooks the port’s operational area where the docks, jetties and areas for maritime entry, container storage and maintenance workshops will be built.

Arce pointed out how the beach has eroded in the area. She also showed the geotubes, three-meter diameter canvas sleeves filled with sand and water that the company has placed between the sea and the sand as a retaining wall to counteract erosion.

“The works have changed the marine currents, we no longer have waves and have lost not only the characteristic beauty of the bay that was a tourist attraction, but the environment and natural resources have been damaged,” she complained.

In 2016, explosions began that created seismic waves that affected houses located as far as 50 kilometers from the project area. Protests led to the signing of agreements between affected residents who received payments of between 75 and 260 dollars for the inconvenience caused.

A view from one of the hills of La Puntilla, on the slope of El Cascajo hill, of the construction of the jetty of the Peruvian mega-port that will operate as a trade center between China and South America. The first phase is set to be inaugurated in November 2024 by Chinese President Xi Jinping. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

 

Winging it

“That’s the problem, that they do not recognize us as people affected by the project, and the agreements practically set conditions for people not to complain or protest,” Angely Yufra, from the Peralvillo area, also part of Chancay, where she has lived since she was born 49 years ago, told IPS.

She now lives alone with her husband because their children have become independent and she says that she is not intimidated by threats from the company, which has criminalized the protests by prosecuting several of their leaders.

On a tour through the streets of the port to the main access road to the North Pan-American highway, Arce and Yufra show how the company has practically taken over urban areas to move its trucks with materials to the entrance to the construction site, as well as to a part repaired after a collapse caused by the construction of the tunnel that will run through Chancay.

On its information page, Cosco Shipping states that the viaduct tunnel is 1.8 kilometers long and is a three-lane road for the exclusive transit of cargo related to port operations, along with two large conveyor belts.

“There has been no analysis of soils, which are highly varied in Chancay, to build the tunnel. From the beginning, the project got off on the wrong foot because due to the scope of the work it should have been carried out in an unpopulated desert area,” Arce argued.

 

Angely Yufra, a resident of the Peralvillo area in the Peruvian bay of Chancay, criticizes a port megaproject that has destroyed the community’s way of life and complains in particular about the planned elevated road, while pointing to the cement pylons that will be its base. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

 

Along the Pan-American Highway, a road that separates the municipality of Chancay in two, she pointed to huge concrete pylons on which an elevated road is to be built for the traffic of at least 4,000 trucks a day to the port’s logistics zone.

“And what will happen to the people who live on the sides of the road? They will be trapped, unable to cross to go to school, to the market, to visit relatives. What they have said is that they are going to build an alternative road, but that could take years,” said the community leader.

Arce said the origin of the project was marked by misinformation and under-the-table deals, and that it involved the second government of Alan García (2006-2011) and those that succeeded him: the administrations of Ollanta Humala, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and Pedro Castillo. García committed suicide in 2019 when he was going to be arrested and the others are facing prosecution for different crimes.

“All of them gave their approval despite the fact that civil society and public organizations have submitted more than a hundred observations to the Modification of the Environmental Impact Study, which is necessary for the authorization of the works,” said Arce.

These observations include impacts on the life and rights of the local population and on nature, as well as irregular procedures.

 

Green shading net runs through different areas of the Peruvian port town of Chancay. It is the division between the work zone of a mega-port and the homes of the local population, affected by dust, seismic waves from the explosions, tension and noise. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

 

Among the effects are impacts on the mental health of local residents. This is the case of María Bautista, “a lifelong resident of the Chancay port” who, at the age of 75 years, said she had never experienced anything like this before.

She and her daughter and granddaughter run a restaurant where ceviche, one of Peru’s signature dishes, is a favorite, as well as a hostel on the top floor, where surfers used to come. “Now they don’t come anymore because there are no waves,” she lamented.

She added that she has been badly affected psychologically and suffers from terrible anxiety.

“There is also contamination of the soil that affects our bronchial tubes and mistreatment by the company’s personnel, who trample on our dignity when giving us the agreed-upon amounts. They have told us that for Christmas we will receive a basket of goods ‘because they have been ripped off’, as if we were begging for money when we are working people,” Bautista said.

During the IPS tour through the streets of the port of Chancay, the dialogue was with women neighbors and leaders, because the male leaders were away on other business.

The Association in Defense of Housing and the Environment of the port of Chancay and other local residents’ organizations know that there will be no going back on the works because “the economic interests and political lobbying are very strong,” said Arce.

She explained that in view of this they are proposing the formation of a multisectoral round table at the government level to evaluate the Environmental Impact Study and to recognize local residents as being affected by the project, as this will be the only way to fight for a compensation policy that they currently have no legal basis for demanding.

 

María Bautista is the owner of a small ceviche restaurant, which has seen better times and has declined due to the absence of tourists and surfers who no longer choose the beaches of Chancay as a destination because the works of the mega-port have reduced the waves. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

 

Arce said the local populace would join the protests because as the work progresses, the range of damage will increase, as is happening with the construction of the tunnel under the streets.

They are also beginning to feel the impacts of the overhead road that “will create a traffic jam at kilometer 80 of the North Pan-American highway, harming not only us but everyone who tries to drive along that road,” she said.

“We are a pebble in the giant’s shoe,” she summed up.

 

A boost to the economy?

Economist Norma Canales, who lived in the Huaral valley as a child, said there is a possibility that the multipurpose port of Chancay will increase GDP, as claimed by its advocates, which could contribute to improving the quality of life of the local population.

However, she said it was necessary to take into account the impacts that it will have on the lifestyle of local inhabitants, because it will lead to a radical change in their urban and productive infrastructure.

“It will mean going from a town of small-scale fishermen and farmers to a mega-port city receiving traffic of large-capacity shipping vessels,” she told IPS.

Against this background, she said, it was important not to lose sight of the possible population growth due to the demand for employment that may arise, which will require a response that guarantees access to services such as water, electricity and housing.

By Paul Greening
Dec 19 2023 (IPS-Partners)

 
The typical image of a refugee is a poor person with their hands out asking for aid. The Burmese refugees in Mae Sot on the Thai-Myanmar border defy that stereotype. Many are middle-class, educated urbanites with skills and plenty of initiative.

After standing up to the Burmese military and suffering for it, they left everything and fled for their lives to Mae Sot where they continued their struggle. Despite intimidation, exploitation by some Thai authorities, and living in fear without documentation, they have achieved a lot in under two years. Their purpose is to support their community and the revolution in a variety of ways through their resilience, commitment, ability and innovation.

Some refugees have set up businesses such as cafes, restaurants, bars, shops, hairdressers, a farm and cross-border trade. While they are for-profit, they also provide employment for other refugees and donate to the most vulnerable.

One café owner said, “If I am lucky, I break even but the café gives refugees employment, keeps them occupied and is a place where Burmese can meet and relax.”

A café set up by a refugee is a place to meet and relax.

They also contribute to the town by purchasing supplies and providing services. Unfortunately, Thai authorities don’t see it this way and don’t make life easy. The refugee entrepreneurs need to partner with Thais and compensate Thai authorities for their lack of legal documents.

Other refugees in Mae Sot have formed community-based organizations (CBOs), including a 15-baht meal enterprise that sells about 400 meals a week and gives away a further 100. There is also a free shop stocked with donated items.

Cooks prepare 15-baht meals.

Many refugees arrive in Mae Sot with nothing, so some organizations have set up “safe houses” where their basic needs are catered for. To support the most vulnerable, CSOs provide free basic monthly food rations. Others have started bookshops and a library. At least one informal refugee school has been set up, funded by personal donations. Refugees even have a radio station, which airs programs twice a week.

Both child and adult refugees arrive suffering from trauma, but venues for activities such as sport, yoga, art, music and dance give psychosocial support and help the healing process. A Burmese professional violinist has started an orchestra and even teaches music in nearby Thai schools. One’s identity is linked to what one does. As the music teacher said, “Now I am a violinist again!”

A school set up by an asylum seeker in Mae Sot. / Our School

Another refugee said, “Through the challenges and suffering, I found a renewed purpose in life.”

Importantly some organizations also support internally displaced people (IDPs) from Myanmar without international funding.

The psychosocial support provided by CSOs and CBOs also covers women suffering trauma from gender-based violence.

Many of these refugees have been through hell, which makes their actions even more impressive. Their journeys follow a similar pattern.

A bookstore and library set up by refugees

“I worked in the music business and then after the coup we protested peacefully until the military started killing us,” said one. “Then I ran to the jungle and was a frontline fighter until my friend was killed right next to me. After that, I fled to Mae Sot.”

Those who chose combat had no desire to fight, said one female fighter.

“However, as the military council’s crackdown intensified and peaceful protestors were met with brutality, I made the difficult decision to join the urban guerrilla movement,” she explained.

Another taught computing in Mandalay but joined street protests after the coup, and later became an urban guerilla. Following military training, she fought with a People’s Defense Force (PDF) group. Several of her comrades were killed so, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), she escaped to Mae Sot. Though still needing medication for her trauma, she has started several enterprises to support other refugees.

“It helps with my PTSD,” she said.

The Free Shop is stocked with toys and other items. / Free Shop

One of her enterprises is a school that has grown quickly to meet demand.

“Our School” started with 13 students from nine families known as the “Nine Famili”. Over time, the number of students has grown to around 100 across two branches of the school. “Initially, there was only one teacher – me. However, now there are six volunteer teachers who contribute their knowledge and expertise. Additionally, three doctors take turns providing health knowledge and care.”

She achieved all this while suffering from PTSD!

One artist has produced a book of his drawings and diary from his time in Yangon’s Insein prison (available to buy from SEA Junction in Bangkok), recording a very personal account of suffering. He drew on small scraps of paper that were later smuggled out of the prison.

Shower time in Insein prison, Yangon

The trauma suffered by refugees is compounded by Thai officials, who treat asylum seekers as illegal migrants and harass and exploit them. Instead, refugees should be issued with a one-year temporary work permit, which would also give authorities more control as well as tax income. In this win-win situation, the only losers would be those exploiting the refugees.

The refugee enterprises have achieved a lot with no external funding but could achieve a lot more with just a little money. The international community should divert some funds from United Nations agencies to these community-based enterprises as a more cost-effective solution.

One refugee summed up their commitment: “Together, we face the challenges, share our burdens, and stand united in our struggle. We, the people affected by the coup, are bound together by our shared experiences and determination to bring about positive change.”

With impressive, strong, committed innovative youth like this, there is hope for the future of Myanmar.

Paul Greening is an ex-UN senior staff officer with over 20 years of experience in six Asian countries working for six UN agencies and four INGOs. He worked in Sittwe, Rakhine State for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) from 2017 to 2020 and has been living in Mae Sot for two years.

First published by Myanmar news outlet Irrawady

The longstanding methods of fundraising by African NGOs are shaped by unique challenges, often rooted in economic, political, and cultural factors as well as vestiges of colonialism.

By Tafadzwa Munyaka and Angela Umoru-David
NEW YORK / WASHINGTON DC, Dec 19 2023 (IPS)

Across Africa, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) bearing different monikers such as community-based organisations (CBOs), civil society organisations (CSOs) and nonprofits have long borne the duty of designing and implementing developmental interventions to address varying challenges.

The World Association of Non-governmental Organizations (WANGO) lists 4912 of such entities operating in the Continent, which is safe to say is only a fraction of the true number since many may not be registered on that platform. These non-state actors often rely on the goodwill of volunteers, individual donors, local grant-making bodies, international philanthropy and humanitarian aid to fund and facilitate their operations.

In the pursuit of sustainable development, we propose a shift that makes us look inwards at diaspora investments, local organising, and planned giving (including endowments) to provide African NGOs with the tools to navigate the historical challenges while securing long-term financial stability

As lofty as their mission or magnanimous as their benefactors might be, the sheer number begs the question of how sustainable their funding methods truly are.

As practitioners in the African development space, we have observed over the years that the longstanding methods of fundraising by African NGOs are shaped by unique challenges, often rooted in economic, political, and cultural factors as well as vestiges of colonialism. These factors breed an over-reliance on funding from outside the continent, mainly from Western donor countries and international development organisations.

 

Overview of the Current Funding Landscape

Philanthropy and humanitarian aid from the Global North constitute a large chunk of the funding that African NGOs depend on each year. More often than not, such funding comes with ‘strings attached’ like specifying the issues that the local organisations should focus on, the proportion of the funding that should go to areas of concern and rigorous reporting demands.

It is quite common for funding to be unceremoniously withdrawn when an organisation is termed non-compliant to donor requirements.

“The global flow of aid resources hinders the effectiveness and sustainability of local NGOs, as well as their ability to scale and build capacity”, writes Carlos Mureithi, Kenyan journalist. In addition, funding is usually routed through larger international non-profits while local ones only serve as ‘implementing partners’.

With such intermediaries in the picture, local NGOs are forced to work within the confines of their funding partner’s stipulations. While there have been recent calls for localisation and shifting agency to Africa-based organisations, the reverberations are yet to be felt across the NGO landscape in Africa.

Similarly, smaller nonprofit organisations are completely cut off from international funding because they lack the social credibility and popularity. This creates a cycle where only the most ‘visible’ local non-profits continually receive funding. The ‘invisible’ nonprofits are inadvertently dependent on local grant-making bodies (which are often implementing partners of international funders), individual donors in the communities they serve, self-funding and crowdfunding platforms.

A classic scenario is a case in the South-Eastern part of Zimbabwe. A particular district had been grappling with pervasive issues of child marriages, an alarming rate of teen pregnancies, and school dropouts. In 2019, this plight of vulnerable youths caught the attention of a UN agency who reached out to offer a helping hand.

However, there were differences of opinion on what the agency was willing to support and what the District termed to be the true need. Historically, the District had been marked by severe economic challenges stemming from periods of political instability and other socio-economic issues.

These challenges had created poverty and youth restiveness that left communities to grapple with the effects presenting themselves as students dropping out, child marriages and teen pregnancies exacerbated by inadequacies in healthcare and poor education systems. To the District leadership, tackling these effects was most urgent but the international donor agency wanted to fund birth registrations instead, which according to District records, were already at a 95% coverage and success rate.

While birth registration is crucial, the highlighted issues called for a more comprehensive and holistic approach. Therefore, local needs, while pressing, may be overshadowed by the specific preferences and guidelines set by external funders.

Of a truth, the historical dependence on external funding has been both a blessing and a curse. While it provides necessary resources, it sometimes restricts the flexibility of communities to address their challenges autonomously and radically.

 

Why the Existing Fundraising Model is not Sustainable

1 – Agenda-setting: The landscape of international funding for community development is often a double-edged sword. While financial support from international donors can be a lifeline for communities facing various drawbacks, the attached conditions for such funding sometimes lead to clashes of values.

This poses a significant problem to the existing model of fundraising, as communities may find themselves at a crossroads between meeting immediate needs through the funding provided and adhering to their core values and principles. The model also perpetuates an imbalance of power between international donors and local communities.

The power dynamics can hinder genuine, bi-lateral collaboration and may result in decisions that prioritise the donor’s interests over the community’s needs. The Big Brother syndrome is real. Furthermore, like in the story above, international donors may have specific agendas driven by global concerns, political leanings or their organisational mandates. These may not always align with the grassroots objectives of communities. For example, a donor might prioritise teaching people their rights, while the community seeks expansion of its immunisation program.

2 – Poverty: The fundraising status quo does little to transform systems, creates an over-dependence on foreign aid and perpetuates a cycle of poverty. On the flipside, small NGOs who are not on the radar of foreign donors rely on individual giving or are self-funded and this means that the resources only trickle in.

This limits the impact of projects and forces the staff to live on the barest minimum. In Nigeria, an ongoing jab at development workers is that the NGO staff’s standard of living is so below par that they should also be beneficiaries of their own projects (especially in livelihood and economic empowerment projects).

This is due to the high poverty and unemployment rates in most African cities. Even though the Continent has a long and rich history of local organising, most community members simply cannot afford to spare the little they have for altruistic purposes.

In the same vein, the high poverty levels breeds discontent towards the government and does not inspire many Africans to support the initiatives of local NGOs. It is a widespread notion that the citizens are already doing too much by spearheading the provision of basic amenities like electricity, pipe-borne water and roads. Therefore, the questions are, “Why should we keep doing so much? Why are NGOs forced to do the work that the government should be doing?” This high poverty rate and disillusionment often stops people from donating to NGOs around them.

 

How Can We Improve Fundraising in Africa?

Nonprofit fundraising in Africa has been marred by economic disparities, external dependencies, and changing political landscapes. In the pursuit of sustainable development, we propose a shift that makes us look inwards at diaspora investments, local organising, and planned giving (including endowments) to provide African NGOs with the tools to navigate the historical challenges while securing long-term financial stability.

 

1 – Planned giving: Also known as legacy or deferred giving, it is a unique and strategic approach to fundraising that focuses on securing long-term financial support for NGOs. It comprises several key components including bequests, charitable gift annuities, life insurance, or retirement plans.

Unlike traditional donations, planned giving involves arrangements made during a donor’s lifetime that will take effect at a future date. This form of philanthropy allows individuals to leave a lasting legacy, ensuring that their contributions continue to support a cause dear to their hearts even beyond their lifetime.

The well-heeled in our African communities can be encouraged to seriously consider planned giving as not only a strategic avenue for them as donors to create a lasting impact on the causes they care about but to leave a meaningful legacy that reflects their values and commitment to positive change.

We recognize that planned giving decisions are highly personal and influenced by individual circumstances. Nonetheless, in the dynamic landscape of African fundraising, securing sustainable funding is a perpetual challenge.

Planned giving, with its focus on long-term philanthropy, presents an impactful solution for these nonprofits if they began creating educative campaigns to draw attention to this form of philanthropy. We believe that this piece also creates an opportunity for the well-to-do to explore this possibility.

In the same vein, another beacon of financial stability and long-term sustainability for NGOs in Africa are endowments. An endowment in the context of nonprofit fundraising refers to a dedicated fund established by an organisation, typically through donations or other financial contributions, with the intention of maintaining and growing the principal amount over time.

In the context of the African Union Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want and achieving the mantra ‘African solutions to African problems’, endowments offer a strategic avenue for securing a reliable source of income, fostering autonomy and resilience. Endowments, just like planned giving initiatives, offer opportunities for sustained funding, allowing organisations to plan for the future and achieve lasting impact.

The continent boasts of a large array of individuals who have the capacity to provide endowments to causes that align with their interests. In an age of social status and obscene wealth being flaunted on social media, we ask, “How might this wealth be harnessed for long-term benefits in addressing community challenges?”

The continent also boasts of a large diaspora community that can be invited to partner with local organisations through endowments in service of pressing social and community needs.

 

2 – Diaspora investment: The United Nations reports that in 2022 diaspora remittances reached $100 billion, surpassing funds received through Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Official Development Assistance (ODA).

This whopping sum is largely due to high poverty levels in the continent that compels family members who live abroad to send money back home but it shows two things– the resources collectively owned by Africans in the diaspora can make a huge difference and a strong culture of giving back already exists, so it could be structured and leveraged for a greater good.

We acknowledge that diaspora remittances are private (sent directly by immigrants to their families in Africa for personal/family use) but it still presents an exciting possibility of sustainable fundraising for local NGOs.

A Nigerian non-profit, Jela’s Development Initiatives employs this tactic through personal connections to Nigerians living abroad, and requests for recurring donations of $20 or £20, depending on the donor’s country of residence.

In Zimbabwe, Sisonke ZW Family Trust has some of their board members who live in the diaspora contributing varying amounts monthly with a minimum of $100 to support the organisation’s activities. While these have not yet yielded large scale results, with targeted campaigns and narrative change on giving, diaspora investment presents a unique way of channelling resources directly to the organisations that need them the most.

 

3 – Local organising: By nature, Africans are largely communal and this has resulted in many community members banding together to address societal injustice and developing local solutions.

This trait is one that can be organised and explored to fundraise for local non-profits. For example, in North-Central Nigeria, Vaccine Network for Disease Control mobilises female small business owners to ‘adopt’ a primary healthcare centre, where she makes a donation towards the facility, takes on responsibility to support the monitoring of that facility and holds it accountable in its service delivery.

The donations are not cumbersome to the women and it creates a local networked system of accountability and ownership. A similar initiative exists in Zimbabwe where the Citizen Initiative saw the construction of classroom blocks and ablution facilities in rural areas with citizens financing the projects.

These examples show that local organising works, even if it is on a small scale. However, if more grassroot NGOs adopted this methodology, involving community members in the identification of problems and design of local solutions, they would be more than willing to co-execute and monitor the success of such initiatives towards desired outcomes.

Too often, local NGOs are more concerned with catching the attention of the international funders that they neglect the advantage Africans have as a communal society and the power within that to secure lasting change.

 

Conclusion

Addressing the existing fundraising system in Africa and its linked challenges requires a multifaceted approach. By empowering local organisations, promoting cultural sensitivity, and advocating for supportive policies, we can pave the way for sustainable development that originates from within communities themselves.

While international funding undoubtedly plays a crucial role in community development and we are not advocating for throwing the baby with the bath water, we maintain that addressing the clash of values and power imbalance is paramount for the success and sustainability of projects.

We also recognize the effort of pan-African philanthropic organisations like the African Visionary Fund to democratise the funding space and abide by game-changing principles like multi-year funding and institutional capacity development but one organisation is definitely not enough to serve the needs of the Continent.

Such visionary approaches need to be duplicated by other indigenous philanthropic organisations. Thus, it is through collaborative efforts that we can build a more resilient and self-reliant future for Africa’s community-based initiatives. Ultimately, it is time to look inward and restructure how we give. The time is now.

 

Angela Umoru-David is a creative social impact advocate whose experience cuts across journalism, program design and corporate/development communications, and aims to capture a plurality of views that positively influence the African narrative.

Tafadzwa Munyaka is a nonprofit/social change professional with crosscutting expertise in fundraising, program management, and child rights advocacy.

Michael Tjernström, Professor of Meteorology at Stockholm University, has had five expeditions on the research icebreaker Oden, where he has witnessed the impact of climate change on the Arctic. Credit: Michael Tjernström

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Dec 19 2023 (IPS)

Conflicting emotions greet the outcomes of COP28. After 28 years of climate conferences, an agreement has, for the first time, proclaimed that fossil fuels are the biggest culprit behind the warming of our planet and stated that it would encourage all nations to “accelerating action in this critical decade so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” The agreement calls for, among other things, a tripling of renewable energy by 2030, but also an increased pace in the work to develop technical solutions for the separation and storage of carbon dioxide, an extremely expensive and, so far, limited effort.

However, the agreement can unfortunately not be characterised as “decisive.” The text uses the phrase “transition fuels” as a code word for the fossil gas that causes carbon dioxide emissions, warming up Earth’s atmosphere. The draft text went through multiple iterations over the course of the negotiations, and one version, supported by oil and gas-producing nations, dropped a reference to the root cause of climate change entirely. However, an urgent pushback from the USA, EU, and small island countries saw fossil fuels put back in the text at the last minute, even though the final version lacked the concrete term “phaseout,” which many nations wanted to see.

Palliative formulations thus give rise to several loopholes, allowing fossil-producing countries to continue with, and even increase, their extraction of harmful fossil fuels. 2023 will be the hottest year on record globally, with extreme weather causing death and destruction in the wake of climate change. To mitigate the worst effects, global emissions must be halved by 2030, but so far, the curves continue to rise. Considering this, it has to be kept in mind that the climate meeting’s agreement is not legally binding but only a signal of a direction forward. It still remains uncertain whether COP28 will really result in the countries of the world advancing from words to action.

On this worrisome note, please read this IPS interview with Michael Tjernström, Professor of Meteorology at Stockholm University.

IPS: What is your opinion about the recently concluded COP 28?

Tjernström: The situation is bizarre. The climate system is one of the most complex issues we have to deal with as a society, even without involving its many interactions with human and social sciences. Accordingly, it is not strange that there are many things we don’t fully understand, but this we do know: The climate is warming up because we are accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, and all else results from this! So, having a global climate meeting that cannot agree on having this stated in the final statement is like driving your car to the auto mechanics with an engine problem, but instead of getting that fixed, you get a haircut in the front seat to look better.

A view from the research icebreaker Oden. Credit: Michael Tjernström

That being said, this statement is better than nothing, but not by a whole lot. Sometimes I do think that it might have been better if the meeting had crashed and burned. After all, the Paris Agreement came after the Copenhagen fiasco; sometimes we need to fail in order to succeed.

IPS: This spring, you were part of a research team visiting the Arctic Sea onboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden. Why did you travel to the Arctic, and why did you use an icebreaker?

Tjernström: The Arctic is particularly sensitive to climate change. It is usually said that global warming is going twice as fast in the Arctic as in the rest of the world. However, recent studies indicate that the change might be four times as fast on average across the whole Arctic and up to seven or eight times as fast in some places, for example, around Svalbard and in the Russian Arctic Ocean. Despite the Arctic being so vulnerable, there are almost no other places on earth where the climate system is so under-observed. Over the Arctic Ocean, permanent observation stations cannot be established because of the ever-moving and deforming sea ice. Accordingly, it is most convenient to have an icebreaker as a base for observations and research in this hard-to-reach, inhospitable ocean.

IPS: How many members are there on such an expedition, and have you been doing this kind of research before?

Tjernström: This was my fifth expedition with the research icebreaker Oden. There were 75 people onboard, of whom about 40 were researchers, about 20 members of the ship’s regular crew, and 15 logistics staff. The latter two included kitchen staff, a medical doctor and a nurse, a helicopter pilot, a meteorologist and air traffic controller, several technicians, and even an artist. The artist—in this case, a painter—has a historical heritage. Ever since scientific expeditions were organised hundreds of years ago, it was important to have an artist as part of the team. In those days, photographic techniques did not exist, and a painter was necessary for the documentation of the findings. Ever since, it has been customary to have an artist onboard.

IPS: Is it inconvenient to stay on an icebreaker for several months?

Tjernström:. Yes and no; actually, mostly no, but it is a very special experience. We have electricity and heat, good food, a sauna, gym, library, laboratories, and a small movie theatre. Of course, it is sometimes difficult to live so close to others, but we generally have a good and cooperative mood. And we have lots of work to do! This is not a 9-5 job, with weekends free. And even if it was, there’s not much else to do.

IPS: What does your research consist of?

Tjernström: In a general sense, we try to observe the state of the climate system, but we also measure the processes that generate that state. We are, so to speak, taking the pulse of the current situation, though we are also trying to establish tendencies by taking samples and measuring climatological changes. The goal of our research is to improve our climate models, i.e., computer models describing the Earth’s climate system, essentially a virtual synthetic climate that can also be used to indicate future changes or processes. Climate models have some similarities to weather forecast models, but instead of delivering a ten-day weather forecast detailing a nearby development, a climate model provides a “forecast” of climate for maybe one hundred years into the future. The IPCC, a UN climate panel, uses the results from these models, among other things, to calculate the effects of climate change.

The main task of an Arctic expedition is to secure various measurements. We make comparisons between different weather conditions, observe the clouds and the aerosols, take samples to establish the salinity and temperature of the ocean, and examine the occurrence of microorganisms. We also set up measuring stations on the ice and took snow, ice, and water samples. One group drove a remote-controlled mini-submarine under the ice, and another mounted measuring instruments under a helicopter to study variations over larger surfaces. We also released weather balloons to measure atmospheric changes.

My main interest for the latest expedition was to study the effect warm air inflows have on the sea ice and snow cover. Actually, one can say there are only two seasons in the Arctic: either it freezes or it melts. We wanted to study how abrupt the shift from winter to summer can be, so Oden followed weather forecasts indicating where warm air flows were moving in. By measuring and studying the direction of air flows, we could study their effects on cloud formation as well as their impact on ice and the ocean. Such observations are now used to understand how the system works, and ultimately, this lays the foundation for the development of climate models.

IPS: Are climate models reliable?

Tjernström: Yes and no; it depends on the purpose. They are quite reliable for calculating future temperatures, but less reliable for precipitation changes. They are also fairly reliable for global averages, but the smaller the area of interest, the greater the uncertainty. One explanation for when the models work less well is when we lack adequate understanding of something, and that is often in part because we do not have sufficient observations.

Most Arctic measurements generally originate from late summer, in August or September, when there is relatively less sea ice and the ice is melting, making it easier for research vessels to work in the area. This time we came earlier than usual in the Arctic, in May and June, which is the beginning of the melting season, making it possible for us to more carefully investigate the nature and change in the system when the sea ice starts its annual melt.

IPS: When was your first research expedition to the Arctic, and have you noticed any changes since then?

Tjernström: My first trip to the Arctic took place in 2001, also on the research icebreaker Oden. If there is something that has really changed during the twenty years I have been doing this research, it is the nature of the ice. We notice this when we place our expensive instruments on the ice, because it is important to find proper multi-year ice for this. This is ice that has survived at least one melting season, and it is generally more durable. It is now becoming increasingly difficult to find ice that is thick and durable enough. There is also more meltwater on top of the ice, compared to the situation during my first expedition. While it is tragic to see how the ice is disappearing, it is important for me not to let emotions run away but to keep a cool head, to objectively and systematically collect observations, and to make as accurate calculations as possible.

IPS What about the wildlife up there? Did you see polar bears and seals?

Tjernström: We see polar bears on every expedition. Polar bears have an incredibly well-developed sense of smell, and an icebreaker is therefore a bear magnet. They are very curious animals as well as dangerous, and an icebreaker with 70 people onboard has a distinct smell. Anyone who needs it gets weapons training on the way up north, and we always have bear guards posted when we work on the ice. However, Arctic Ocean wildlife is vulnerable because it is based on the presence of sea ice all year. For example, there are seals that live their whole lives on the ice, and now it is constantly getting thinner and scarcer.

The Arctic’s food chains are becoming depleted, industrial fishing has taken a toll on the marine flora, and harmful microplastics, mercury, and man-made toxins are becoming increasingly common in the water. Polar bears are at the top of the food chain and are particularly vulnerable. They live on seals, which live on fish, and so on, all the way down to the microorganisms. And in the Arctic Ocean, there are no other top predators present. Pollution and climate change have an impact on everything.

IPS: Reportedly, due to the rising sea levels, Bangladesh, small island states, and megacities like Shanghai, Bangkok, Jakarta, Tokyo, and New York—which have sizable populations concentrated close to coastal plains or river deltas—are in danger. Is this threat real?

Tjernström: Sorry to say, it is. I am worried that, as an example, huge areas of Bangladesh and many low-lying islands are going to disappear, resulting in the loss of human lives. And this affects a large population around the globe living in coastal areas. As a matter of fact, the threat of melting land ice is, in the long run, even worse than the disappearance of ice in the sea. The melting of ice on land is a larger threat than the disappearance of sea ice. Even if we are able to stop greenhouse gas emissions right now, it will take hundreds of years before the inland ice sheets stop melting.

When land ice melts, the runoff significantly increases the amount of water in the oceans, contributing to global sea level rise. Sea ice, on the other hand, is like the ice cubes in a glass of water: when it melts, it does not directly change the level of water in the glass.

Our entire society needs to adapt to climate change. Our lifestyles need to change, and with increasing variations in rainfall and the fact that sea levels are rising, housing and harbours need to be rebuilt, as well as resilience to food and health crises. In wealthy countries, we cannot continue to throw away food and waste energy as we are currently doing. We live between hope and despair, but we can absolutely not give up and do nothing. We must study what is happening and find solutions. First of all, it is not enough to limit fossil fuel emissions; they must be stopped.

IPS: What made you become a climate scientist?

Tjernström: As with so much else that happens in life, it was actually mostly a coincidence. As a young man, I was drafted into mandatory military service as an army medic, which was not something I wanted to do. I then remembered an amazing lecture on how to make your own weather forecast, taught by my fantastic high school physics teacher. I discovered that one could do the mandatory military service as a meteorologist, so I made up a story that I was going to become a meteorologist by profession, got my orders changed, and ended up in the Air Force as a forecast office. After a while, I became increasingly fascinated by research and development. For a while, I continued to work with meteorology within the military forces, deepened my knowledge, and eventually got a PhD in meteorology at Uppsala University. Since then, I have also served at various universities in Sweden and the USA, and now, when I’m about to retire, I work at Stockholm University.

IPS: You are interested in photography and music. Do you think that art can contribute to an increased awareness of climate change?

Michael Tjernström: Definitely, literature and art, including photography and music, are other ways to describe reality. I believe that a researcher’s role should be combined with that of the populariser. Researchers ought to act as knowledge brokers, mediating between hope and despair. Frequently, I think of my role in this as “painting a picture” for people to understand. And from there, the distance to composing and taking a landscape photograph is not that far. Different but equally important parts of the brain are involved, and in this way, we are no different from environmentally conscious artists. We want to engage people and inspire them with a will to change a threatening existence and strive for a better future. But my main goal in life is to understand—nothing more than that.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Excerpt:

The climate is warming up because we are accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, and all else results from this! So, having a global climate meeting that cannot agree on having this stated in the final statement is like driving your car to the auto mechanics with an engine problem, but instead of getting that fixed, you get a haircut in the front seat to look better. —Professor Michael Tjernström, Stockholm University
 

Credit: UNICEF Philippines/JMaitem

By Channe Lindstrøm Oğuzhan, Leah Payud and Jessica Henn
MANILA, Philippines, Dec 19 2023 (IPS)

In a coastal community in Tacloban City in Leyte, Philippines, Maria’s life was intricately woven with the ebb and flow of the sea. Her days were filled with caring for her two young children and selling fish caught by her husband at the market. Little did she know that winds of change were brewing far beyond the horizon.

In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan descended upon Maria’s community with an unforgiving force, leaving a haunting landscape of destruction. As the wind and rain subsided, Maria emerged from what remained of her home. Her heart shattered as she surveyed the wreckage.

Many people had been killed, including her husband. With no time to grieve the loss, the weight of being the primary caregiver intensified as Maria’s thoughts turned to her children.

Maria had to walk further each day, just to secure a meager ration of rice and clean water. Her youngest child had developed a persistent cough. Ordinarily, she would have rushed to the local clinic, but now she felt helpless as the nearest functioning healthcare facility was miles away. The school, where Maria’s eldest daughter once eagerly learned, now stood as a skeletal reminder of interrupted dreams.

Like many women in the Philippines, Maria had to juggle the responsibilities of rebuilding a home, providing for her children, and ensuring their survival. A study by Oxfam Pilipinas showed that women usually spent an average of 12.53 hours daily on care activities before the typhoon. The women of Leyte faced a common struggle, and Maria found solace in the Filipino bayanihan, the communal spirit of helping one another.

As the island rose from the ruins, Maria’s story became one of resilience. The scars of Haiyan were evident, but so were the stories of survival, of caregivers who carried the weight of their communities on their shoulders.

Maria’s situation is not an isolated case. The Philippines is ranked as the world’s most disaster-prone country due to its high susceptibility to disaster and lack of adaptive and coping capacities. During disasters, both direct and indirect care work increase due to disruption of care-related services.

Recognizing climate change’s profound impact on care work, the Philippines has been at the forefront of addressing the climate-care nexus. Oxfam Pilipinas and its partners have been campaigning to tackle social norms, advance policy reform and emphasize the importance of unpaid care work in community resilience building, leveraging evidence of exacerbated care tasks post-Haiyan.

This year, a pivotal moment in this endeavour was marked by a subnational consultation on care organized in Region 8 by ESCAP, Oxfam Pilipinas, the National Economic Development Authority-Region 8, Philippine Commission on Women and Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement. This event, timed during the 10-year commemoration of Typhoon Haiyan, provided a platform to delve into the dynamics of the climate-care nexus.

The consultation deepened the understanding of the intersection between climate and care, with the presentation of ESCAP’s recent policy paper on gender equality and climate change. The discussions illuminated the commendable progress made by the Philippines in advancing the care economy, notably through their recent national consultation on care and successful policies, including care ordinances led by local government units.

However, significant challenges emerged, such as the provision of climate-resilient care infrastructure and care policy implementation, especially in rural and remote areas. Additionally, concerns were raised about the limited availability of unconditional social protection measures focused on care, highlighting caregivers’ vulnerabilities during disasters.

During the event, Oxfam Pilipinas appealed to the local government agencies and decision-makers to make visible the invisible, making the case that care work is integral and crucial when thinking of solutions to address climate change. They highlighted the importance of bringing about the agency of carers, mostly women and girls, as active participants in any change process.

ESCAP’s Conceptual Framework for Policy Action on Care Economy emerged as a tool for addressing climate-care challenges in Region 8. This framework outlines four crucial policy categories for addressing the care economy: care infrastructure, care-related social protection, care services and employment-related care policies.

These components aim to tackle unpaid care work, promote equitable distribution, and ensure accessible, affordable and high-quality care services.

The active participation of line ministries, local government officials, and CSO representatives, sparked innovative ideas which culminated in recommendations to address the climate-care nexus in Region 8.

These included the need to improve national data on unpaid care, increasing the role of women as stewards of nature-based solutions such as mangrove restoration, and the potency of creating a cohort of champions to recognize and redistribute care work through shifting norms and formulation of policies.

Haiyan’s aftermath exposed the vulnerabilities of caregivers to climate change, yet, the Philippines has emerged as a pioneer, embarking on a journey to address the intricacies of climate and care. The valuable insights and strategies developed through these efforts now stand as a blueprint for the entire Asia-Pacific region which is the most disaster-prone in the world. Let’s build on these initiatives and propel towards a world that is more gender-equal and climate-resilient, where no one is left behind.

Channe Lindstrøm Oğuzhan is Social Affairs Officer, SDD, ESCAP; Leah Payud is Resilience Portfolio Manager, Oxfam Pilipinas; and Jessica Henn is Junior Consultant, ESCAP

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A peninsula separates the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea in the southwestern village of Scottshead, Dominica. Post-COP28 the region plans to create a Climate Smart Zone in the Caribbean - one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
SAINT LUCIA, Dec 19 2023 (IPS)

Buoyed by USD 800 million in pledges to the Loss and Damage Fund and an unprecedented agreement to transition away from fossil fuels, but grounded in the reality of the work ahead to meet key climate targets, the Caribbean will need to maintain its focus on sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and climate resilience.

That is according to Raquel Moses, UNFCCC Global Ambassador of Small Island Developing States and CEO of the Caribbean Climate Smart Accelerator (CCSA), a partnership of 28 Caribbean governments and global companies working towards making the Caribbean a climate-smart zone.

Moses led a small but dedicated three-woman CCSA team to the climate talks in Dubai. There, the team participated and hosted events to secure financing for climate-resilient projects in the Caribbean, advocate for the Loss and Damage Fund, and present innovative, home-grown solutions to build resilience in the Caribbean.

“The first global stocktake synthesis report by the UNFCCC provides a roadmap for all parties to accelerate their climate action efforts to meet the 1.5-degree target, and the ‘Later is Too Late campaign,’ which we were proud to be a part of, created a strong push for the just phase-out of fossil fuels, the tripling of renewable energy, and the doubling of energy efficiency. While there is still much work to be done, we are especially hopeful given the leadership coming from the Caribbean, which continued to coalesce around one strong voice throughout the COP process,” Moses said.

The deals at COP28 have been tempered by the reality that what happens next will be more important than the pledges and text on paper.

“It is following through to understand how this manifests itself and what is the climate justice impact of a particular decision. When you hear things like climate finance being operationalized for particular things, looking at when the board is implemented on the Loss and Damage Fund, who is on that board and what kind of autonomy do they have? What kind of ability do they have to act with speed, for example? And that for me is a climate justice issue,” she said, noting that the Caribbean needs investment and it also needs heightened philanthropy to meet climate goals.

Among those goals is a long-term vision of creating a Climate Smart Zone in the Caribbean, one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions. Moses says the accelerator will build on projects that promote sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and resilience-building.

“We are excited about our climate-smart agriculture that was launched in August in Anguilla, Barbados, and the Cayman Islands and are looking to see that expand next year. We are always looking for donors that are willing to help us to fortify and secure our food. That is a huge part not just of our adaptation, but it can also be a source of our mitigation because the carbon dioxide that we spend on importing food is unnecessary. As the climate crisis exacerbates, it means that there is more uncertainty in our food production,” Moses said.

As it promotes climate-resilient solutions for the Caribbean, the Accelerator is investing heavily in innovation. It observed a milestone in Dubai when officials launched a Climate Smart Map, a platform with climate action data for 26 Caribbean countries. It is a major relief for a region beset with challenges in accessing current, reliable data for development.

“It demonstrates leadership in global transformation and showcases that we are capable of homegrown, cutting-edge solutions.This data-rich tool pinpoints the main areas of progress and needs across CCSA’s 28 coalition countries, enabling project curation and entrepreneurship. This will help project developers, philanthropists, and investors take a regional view of addressing our needs. To advocate for the Loss and Damage Fund, which has now been operationalized and is beginning to be seriously capitalized,” Moses said.

While the map addresses the dearth of data in the region, the accelerator will be working hard on two other major challenges: fit-for-purpose financing and project preparation funding.

“The Caribbean boasts remarkable projects and visionary initiatives—such as the D30 biofuel by the Carbon Neutral Initiative in Jamaica and the ambitious push for 100% renewable energy in countries like Aruba, Barbados, Dominica, and Grenada—but securing fit-for-purpose financing remains a persistent hurdle,” CCSA’s Director of Public Sector Projects Kiesha Farum told IPS ahead of the climate talks.

“Many projects also require funding for due diligence, assessments, and analysis to attract investor interest and to become ‘bankable.’ Actively pursuing financing is where we see grants, philanthropy, and concessional financing playing a major role. Bringing this type of financing to the region is of great focus, particularly during major events like COP and investor forums aimed at matching projects with potential investors,” she said.

Caribbean SIDS have rallied around calls by Barbados’s Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, for an overhaul of global climate financing. She has said that this shake-up, coined the Bridgetown Initiative, would be based on climate justice, ensuring that the greatest contributors to the climate crisis help countries like those in the Caribbean access finance to respond and build resilience to a crisis they did little to create.

The initiative also promotes innovative financing for climate-related projects. Those at the heart of the mission to build a climate-smart zone in the Caribbean know that conventional financing mechanisms are no longer sufficient to address present climate realities.

“Traditional financiers often seek long-term guarantees and short-term returns, which may not align with the nature and timelines of many climate resilience projects, such as those focused on nature conservation. On a national scale, solutions like debt-for-nature and debt-for-climate swaps, where a portion of government debt is cancelled in exchange for commitments to fund nature conservation projects, prove immensely beneficial,” the CCSA’s Finance Innovation Director, Cheryl Senhouse, told IPS.

‘A notable example is Belize, which completed the world’s largest debt refinancing through a debt-for-nature swap in 2021, directing USD 364 million for marine conservation. Similarly, Barbados executed a USD 150 million debt swap in 2022, generating USD 50 million for marine conservation. Given the significant contribution of the tourism sector to many Caribbean countries’ GDP, solutions like these have positive cascading effects.”

The CCSA officials say the road to COP29 started on December 13. It is a nod to the work ahead. For the Caribbean, it signals the need for greater solidarity and action on sustainable food systems, renewable energy projects, and innovative financing.

“We will continue to work ambitiously to expand on our climate smart map, secure fit-for-purpose financing for projects that will protect 30% of our land and ocean. We want to see the region reach 90% Renewable Energy for All by 2035 and usher in a new economy with at least 1.5% new green jobs,” said Moses.

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CARE Somalia, a UN partner, could provide emergency services to drought-affected communities through humanitarian funding. Credit: OCHA-Yao Chen

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 18 2023 (IPS)

Funding humanitarian programs will continue into the new year, but the funding cuts of the previous year may impact the prioritization of the most immediate and most life-threatening needs.

The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released the Global Humanitarian Overview (GHO) for 2024. This annual assessment of the global humanitarian sector provides insight into the humanitarian action undertaken by the UN and its partners and reviews current and future trends in this sector.

Major crises have been the result of violent conflicts or global climate disasters. The economic impact of these crises has been a contributing factor to the increasing humanitarian needs in places like Afghanistan and Syria, or indicative of greater economic instability. The need for food, water, shelter, and health services, have also contributed to the assessment of needs among affected communities. As a result of these crises, 1 in 73 people have been forcibly displaced. Over 258 million people have experienced acute food insecurity. Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, has remarked that the international community has not been “keeping pace with the needs” brought on by these crises.

For this year, there was a reported decrease in funding from the year prior. In the previous year, in spite of efforts and repeated calls from UN officials to increase funding, the UN received only one-third of the requested USD57 billion for 2023. In 2024, the UN and its humanitarian partners are calling for USD 46.4 billion to assist 180.5 million in 72 countries. The North Africa and Middle East region, which includes the Palestinian Territory, Syria and Yemen, will require USD 13.9 billion, which is the largest amount being asked. East and Southern Africa is next, requiring USD 10.9 billion, followed by Central and West Africa requiring USD 8.3 billion, and Asia and the Pacific, which is calling for USD 5.5 billion.

Two women together in a ‘friendly space’, a woman-only zone in an IDP site in Unity State, South Sudan. Credit: OCHA-Alioune Ndiaye

The current plans from the UN and its humanitarian partners, as indicated by the report, will be to prioritize the communities dealing with the most life-threatening needs, and therefore require urgent action. The response plans that have been formulated promise a more stream-lined approach that will take into consideration the realities of the organizations’ capacity to deliver humanitarian assistance. Given that funding—or the lack thereof—was a particular concern over the last year, and resources were quickly dwindling, this pragmatic approach is founded.

Even with this focus on immediate needs, the predicted funds required for certain regions would suggest that protracted crises with long-term impacts are among the issues that will be addressed. The tragedy of humanitarian work seems to be that with multiple situations and escalations to address, attention and assistance are only further divided between today’s disaster and yesterday’s crisis. The crisis may not have been fully resolved.

For instance, under the Rohingya Joint Response Plan, which will be led by UNHCR and IOM, USD 872.7 million has been requested to fund this plan that will provide ongoing humanitarian support to the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. It is six years since the Rohingya refugee camps have been set up. The need for food, shelter, and protection, and the pressure to keep these camps running have only exacerbated and may continue to do so the longer it persists. The prolonged presence of the camps, and the number of people still seeking refuge by crossing the border, will only leave them more vulnerable to the risks of abuse, exploitation, disease, and other security issues that developed within the settlements.

The GHO attests that humanitarian organizations will aim to deliver better results. This will include acknowledging and supporting local and national humanitarian groups through funding, increasing accountability and people-centered responses, and engaging in humanitarian diplomacy. There is also a call to promote inclusive responses that acknowledge the unique, intersecting, and complex needs of vulnerable peoples, including those from marginalized communities.

Women and girls, for instance, are particularly vulnerable during humanitarian crises. OCHA Director, Coordination Division, Ramesh Rajasingham, remarked on this during a high-level event in Addis Abbaba, Ethiopia. He stated that women are fourteen times more likely to be killed during climate disasters. Women and girls are also at a greater risk of gender-based violence; only 53 percent were able to access GBV services through groups like UN Women. Women and girls also face barriers in receiving life-saving healthcare, especially when it comes to reproductive health. Humanitarian organizations, and the international community that supports them, should be expected to improve their response to the gender-specific needs.

“We need to get better at acting on gender-specific analyses that strengthen our ability to meet the diverse and distinct needs of all the people we serve,” he said. “We need far greater investment in protection and other services in humanitarian settings that are tailored for women and girls.”

What is evident in the GHO is that the compassion and urgency to help those in need remain a driving force for the UN’s humanitarian actors. Yet, one cannot help but lament at the adjusted funding request, which is lower than last year’s. When it is now, more than ever, that millions of people are living through dire situations, through conflict or displacement, and many more are at risk of falling.

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Before, when it didn't rain in the summertime, we children used to pray to God to send us water from the heavens, and the rain would come. But now it's different; the climate has changed and no prayers work—Juan Hilario Quispe, president of the small farming community of Muñapata