Men and women from Kalawa ward in Kenya’s Makueni County attended a forum on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Many said that development projects implemented for them didn’t include their views and input. Credit: Justus Wanzala/IPS
By Justus Wanzala
MAKUENI, Kenya, Feb 18 2019 (IPS)
Julia Mutua is a resident of Kalawa ward in the semi-arid Makueni County in Eastern Kenya and a member of a women’s farmers group that runs a poultry project.
“Women are increasingly playing a key role in economically uplifting of their households, unlike before, but they need access to affordable loans from financial institutions and requisite skills to run own enterprise,” Mutua told IPS.
When she looks around she sees the issues of poverty, and access to essential services like running water and healthcare that many in the county grapple with. She notes too that poverty has affected access to education as many parents are unable to pay their children’s school fees.
Mutua is also concerned about ensuring that people living with disabilities are included in development. “People living with disabilities have been marginalised for long, alongside poor women and girls. To bring everybody on board in the journey to achieve SDGs, they need tailor-made interventions to address their unique challenges,” she told IPS.
But she understands the need for partnership and collaboration in attaining these development goals.
In the early morning at the end of January, she is one of a group of about 100 women and men in Kalawa Township who attended a forum on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
While the dialogue concentrated on effective and local participation in implementing the SDGs, the one-day forum’s main theme was ‘Leave no one behind’. Apart from local participants, also in attendance were representatives from Kenya’s National Treasury State Planning SDGs Unit, Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), Islamic Relief and Caritas International.
The initiative is part of the International Civil Society Centre’s programme that involves working with governments, ordinary citizens and civil society to obtain community-driven data on marginalised communities.
The project is still in its pilot phase and is taking place in Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Nepal and Vietnam.
Back in Makueni County, the dialogue is the third in a series of five that are taking place across the country. The forums began in December, with the first one taking place Kibera Slums in the country’s capital, Nairobi. A national forum will be held later this February.
But in Makueni the issues discussed included; understanding the conditions that promote the exclusion and marginalisation of various groups in society, categories of marginalised groups, and ways of ensuring their participation in decision making when it comes to the SDGs. Deliberations also included the impact of policy intervention on development outcomes for marginalised groups.
The 100 participants, most of whom are members of community-based organisation tackling development challenges, where in agreement that the dialogue provided a great opportunity to discuss issues affecting marginalised groups.
“Water scarcity affects women and children most,” Patricia Mutuku, an official of a local Water Users Association (WRUA ) called Thwake Kalawa, said. Her association undertakes projects such as creating sand dams, managing water springs, planting trees and reclaiming degraded land.
“We’ve a plan to plant trees specifically for ground water recharge. One of our members visited Ethiopia and learnt how trees can be used to enhance ground water recharge, an initiative we’re keen to replicate,” she said.
Fred Odinga, from VSO, said the dialogue offered his organisation an opportunity to understand how different groups and communities perceive the SDGs.
“We’ve observed in forums across the country that the most marginalised segments of society, like women who have never been heard before in the development process, get a chance to be heard by government officials during such events,” Odinga told IPS.
Odinga, however, said that public participation in undertaking of SDGs projects, although highly appreciated, had flaws that required addressing.
Indeed, participants expressed their frustrations saying views collected at grassroots level for county projects were rarely used in the final plans. Participants lamented that by the time decisions were made, what was aired at the grassroots level was rarely reflected because the process involved many levels of input.
They also said that many people failed to provide this input in the first place because in many cases this was only collected from city centres, which are not easily accessible for many.
“This means that their ideas are never considered in the development process,” Odinga said.
Odinga said as convenors, they were able to demystify the SDGs, “when we started [this morning] not many appeared to comprehend SDGs. Quite a number have had heard about it but couldn’t link it to the challenges they face.”
“Unfortunately, this is just a discussion with 100 people in a county with over a million. We need many similar forums to grasp the issues facing counties as they pursue the attainment of the SDGs,” Odinga said. He added that everyone had to be part and parcel of the journey, and that nobody should be left behind.
Charles Nyakundi of VSO, who chaired a session on citizen participation when implementing the SDGs, observed that key shortcomings for this are monitoring, evaluation and accountability.
“To ensure positive change we need to let communities [financially] own projects for sustainability instead of initiating, implementing and moving away,” he explained.
Nyakundi said in earlier SDG dialogue forums in other counties they noted that most marginalised groups include the elderly, persons with disabilities and women.
“In some cultures men are the decision makers, women don’t [contribute] ideas,” Nyakundi explained.
His views were reiterated by Fredrick Musau, a resident of Kalawa who said that a bottom up approach in terms of identification and execution of community projects is preferred by residents. Musau is an opinion leader in Kalawa ward—a former teacher who sits in most local county committees that deal with development.
Despite being a drought-prone area, Makueni County is noted to have made huge strides in improving the lives of its people since Kenya adopted devolution six years ago. Devolution is a constitutional arrangement where decision making is vested in local administrative units or counties, with national government allocating resources. The counties are run by governors.
Stephen Odhiambo from the SDG Unit of the National Treasury in the Government of Kenya called for enhanced collaboration and partnership between all levels of government and non state actors.
He explained that an intergovernmental technical working group has been constituted to oversee the implementation of SDGs at national and county services.
Noting that the dialogue forum was successful, Odhiambo said, “Citizens should not cow from demanding for services.”
Odhiambo explained that currently no useable data was available on attaining the SDGs amongst Kenya’s communities and what was mostly used to evaluate this was proxy data.
“We are working on collecting community data. The National Treasury, National Bureau of Statistics, civil society organisations in collaboration with the Germany agency, GIZ, among others, are supporting the initiative. A lot of citizen-generated data is gathered at county level, but is rarely harnessed,” he said.
Odiambo said that there is need for a multi-sectoral approach of mapping and reaching marginalised groups where they are in order to engage them.
Crispus Mwanzoya, a national government sub county administrator was, however, concerned with the sustainability of SDG projects. But he added that contributing to the SDGs could be as simple as enhancing and redirecting a gutter on a house in order to collect rain water.
“We need to change our mindsets to attain SDGs for we’re not poor in resources but poor in mind. The government can’t do everything, we have a central role.”
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"Humanitarian aid now. We need it," read a banner during a massive demonstration in Caracas on Feb. 12, demanding that international aid blocked at the border of neighboring countries be allowed into the country. The demonstrations were held in 50 towns and cities around the country, in support of Juan Guaidó as acting president and demanding that President Nicolás Maduro step down. Credit: Humberto Márquez/IPS
By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 16 2019 (IPS)
The international food and medical aid awaiting entry into Venezuela from neighboring Colombia, Brazil and Curacao is at the crux of the struggle for power between President Nicolás Maduro and opposition leader Juan Guaidó, recognised as “legitimate president” by 50 governments.
The current situation “offers advantages to Guaidó. It is trying to break the ties between Maduro and the armed forces through the pressure to receive humanitarian aid,” Argentine analyst Andrei Serbin Pont, director of the Regional Coordinator of Economic and Social Research, a Latin American academic network, told IPS.
Serbin said Guaidó should secure the so-far reluctant participation of the Red Cross and the United Nations with respect to getting the aid into the country because “by definition humanitarian aid cannot have political objectives,” which are clearly present in the cooperation offered by governments of the Americas and Europe that refuse to recognise Maduro as the legitimately re-elected president."The struggle over the aid makes many local residents here see that there is hope that this time the opposition will bring about change; people now see light at the end of the tunnel." -- Nadine Cubas
President Maduro said: “It is not humanitarian aid but a rotten gift, which carries within the poison of humiliation of our people and serves as a prelude to military intervention. If the United States wants to help us, the blockade, the financial persecution and the economic sanctions against Venezuela should cease.”
U.S. President Donald Trump and several of his Latin America policy advisers repeat the mantra that “Maduro must go,” and that Washington “does not rule out any option, including the military option” with respect to Venezuela.
The Venezuelan armed forces, which have reiterated their loyalty to Maduro, have been deployed in territorial defence exercises since late January, have blocked road access from Colombia, and are ready to prevent any attempt to bring in the controversial aid shipments.
In the midst of one of the multitudinous street demonstrations that the opposition has held in recent weeks, Guaidó announced that “humanitarian aid is going to come in, no ifs ands or buts. I have given the order to the armed forces to allow it to enter” on Feb. 23.
The unprecedented situation in which Venezuela finds itself, with two supposed presidents, is due to the fact that the opposition and many governments consider invalid the May 2018 elections in which Maduro, 56, was elected for a second six-year term on Jan. 10, and refuse to recognise him as president.
In response, the opposition-dominated National Assembly, considered to be in a state of rebellion by the other branches of government, decided that its president, the 35-year-old Guaidó, would be acting president of Venezuela, starting on Jan. 23.
The border city of Cúcuta in northeastern Colombia has already received 500 tons of medicines and nutritional supplements, while Guaidó announced new collection centers in the state of Roraima in northern Brazil and on the neighboring Dutch island of Curacao, where 90 tons are expected from France, opposition deputy Stalin González told the media.
The aid accumulated so far “consists of emergency medicines and supplements for children under three years of age with severe malnutrition, pregnant or nursing mothers, and the elderly,” Julio Castro, leader of the non-governmental organisation Doctors for Health, told IPS.
The medical aid, according to Castro, “10 percent of what is urgently needed,” for some 300,000 patients, will go to public hospitals and will be distributed by NGOs and religious organisations, with the support of thousands of volunteers responding to the opposition’s call.
Gonzalez said there are already 250,000 volunteers mobilised around the country, including 10,000 health professionals.
Young people from the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela gathered in downtown Caracas on Feb. 12 to express support for President Nicolás Maduro. Credit: AVN
An immediate effect of the bid for aid has been that the government has increased in recent days the delivery of apparently stockpiled medicines and supplies to several public hospitals, according to workers at several hospitals in Caracas and other cities.
People like Natalia Vargas, 39, a bank clerk and diabetes patient, hope that “if emergency help arrives, then other medicines that are scarce because they are imported can come. And when you get them, they’re too expensive.”
“I hope that the politicians and the military will reach an agreement to bring in the aid,” she told IPS at her home in La Candelaria, a traditional lower-middle-class neighourhood in central Caracas.
The international aid initiatives are in response to the social and economic collapse that has occurred in Venezuela since Maduro firste came to power in 2013, unprecedented due to the fact that it happened in an oil-rich country and because of the speed of the collapse, without no natural catastrophe or war.
During the last five years and while some three million people left the country, more than 80 percent of Venezuela’s 31 million inhabitants were left in poverty and unable to acquire enough food and the medicines they need, in addition to hyperinflation since 2017, according to the Study on Living Conditions conducted by three of the country’s leading universities.
In the same period, the economy shrunk to half its size, GDP plunged 56 percent, 210,000 of the 490,000 companies in the country closed, half of the industrial park has been operating at 20 percent of capacity, and local agriculture can barely provide 25 percent of the necessary food, according to the 2018 year-end report of the Fedecámaras central business chamber.
The deficit of medicines in pharmacies remains has stood at 85 percent since last year, the president of the Federation of Pharmacists, Freddy Ceballos, said on Feb. 13.
From the town of Cúa, near the east of the capital, Nadine Cubas, 71, who suffers from hypertension and glaucoma, told IPS that “we are far from the border, that aid may not reach the valleys of the Tuy River, where we are, but if it supplies the people in the west then there is a better chance of getting medicines here.”
Cubas added that “the struggle over the aid makes many local residents here see that there is hope that this time the opposition will bring about change; people now see light at the end of the tunnel.”
What the opposition is counting on is this: if the government lets the aid in, it will show weakness and a division in the support of the military, with an unpredictable domino effect, and if it does not allow it in, it will look like an inhumane clique of leaders whose only concern is to hold onto power, opposition deputies Julio Borges and Juan Miguel Matheus told reporters.
This position is in line with the demand that the entry of aid be a first step for the Venezuelan crisis to lead to elections for a new government, as demanded by the United States, the Lima Group of 12 countries from the hemisphere and the majority of the European Union, against opposition by other governments, such as those of China, Cuba, Iran, Russia and Turkey, or calls for a search for a middle path, issued by Mexico and Uruguay.
Borges and Gonzalez said the humanitarian aid that has accumulated will be followed by more aid as the political game unfolds in Venezuela.
Governments such as those of Argentina, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Puerto Rico and the United States, plus the Organisation of American States, have offered more than 200 million dollars in assistance.
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