Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

While India decreased its population without access to clean cooking fuels by about 30 percent from 2010 to 2020, Africa has seen an increase of more than 50 percent over the same period, driven by a rising number of poor, tepid government policies to address this issue, and overarching poverty challenges. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Alexandra Peek and Philippe Benoit
WASHINGTON DC, Jul 12 2023 (IPS)

An estimated 2.4 billion people currently lack access to clean cooking fuels, with the majority relying on biomass (firewood, charcoal, dung) to meet household cooking needs. This is only a slight decrease from 2017, when 2.5 billion people lacked access to clean cooking fuels.

Of those who continue to lack this access, the majority—923 million—live in sub-Saharan Africa, followed by 490 million in India. While India decreased its population without access by about 30 percent from 2010 to 2020, Africa has seen an increase of more than 50 percent over the same period, driven by a rising number of poor, tepid government policies to address this issue, and overarching poverty challenges.

These figures are likely to remain persistently high at about 2.2 billion over the next decade, roughly split between India and other parts of developing Asia on the one hand, and sub-Saharan Africa on the other.

It’s important to see these women and girls—potentially the largest segment of the energy labor force today and in the foreseeable future—as producers and workers. In understanding them as a formidable workforce of biomass producers, their knowledge and experience can inform ongoing efforts of electrification, clean cooking alternatives, gender rights, and overall poverty alleviation

Hidden behind these figures are the people who produce the biomass that powers most of this energy use: often it’s women and girls who are tasked with this labor. In this article, the authors discuss why it’s important to see these women and girls—potentially the largest segment of the energy labor force today and in the foreseeable future—as producers and workers.

In understanding them as a formidable workforce of biomass producers, their knowledge and experience can inform ongoing efforts of electrification, clean cooking alternatives, gender rights, and overall poverty alleviation. It is also equally important to recognize this workforce in order to improve its working conditions on the path to building a more inclusive energy workforce toward net zero emissions.

While the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #7 (SDG 7) draws attention to the need to eliminate the use of non-clean cooking techniques that kill millions each year, the working conditions under which women toil today to produce biomass also merits greater attention.

As the World Bank reported recently, “across most of Sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of China, women are the primary fuel wood collectors,” which is also the case in areas of South Asia. This is time-consuming and physically demanding work that can involve “collecting and carrying loads of wood that weigh as much as 25-50 kilogrammes” and can “take up to 20 or more hours per week.”

 

Estimating the Size of this Workforce

Just how many women are working in this area? A preliminary estimate—based on data regarding the number of households relying on biomass for cooking and the rate of participation of women in this labor—puts the number at over 300 million. Overall, while there is reliable data on lack of access to clean cooking, reliance on biomass, and deforestation trends, there is a gap in knowledge about the (wo)man power it takes to produce biomass.

This gap may stem from the way issues around biomass are often discussed in the SDG 7 context. For example, data on the lack of access to clean cooking primarily informs solutions to shift cooking norms and electrification pathways and efforts to obviate the need for women to labor in producing biomass, while data on biomass reliance feeds into conservation and land use efforts.

Such efforts, however, tend to overlook women as an energy workforce, even though across sub-Saharan Africa, India, parts of China, and Latin America, women and young girls collect and make the biomass necessary to power their homes, including for heating.

Organizations focused on gender parity, such as SEforAll, come closer to recognizing the work of these women and girls, but they, too, frame their efforts in line with clean cooking initiatives rather than labor conditions or rights. For instance, research on the number of hours spent collecting firewood and preparing meals is used to discuss cultural and gender roles that lead to systemic disadvantages for women and girls.

A missing link in all of these narratives and frameworks is understanding the size and importance of this workforce and how it might inform different strategies.

 

Embracing a Worker-Producer Narrative

Calculating the number of women and girls in their capacity as biomass producers reframes the perception of them as passive consumers (i.e., cooks) to active self-producers of the household energy sector. This framework can bolster efforts mentioned above in the following ways:

 

First, it reframes biomass—from an issue singularly belonging to the clean cooking initiative— and places it more broadly in the context of workers’ rights. Despite numerous clean cooking campaigns, poor women and girls will continue to produce biomass for their families for the foreseeable future. As important as it is to make access to clean cooking technologies universally available, what can be done for those producing their own energy in the meantime?

For example, these could be solutions such as creating wood stalls in more accessible areas to reduce collection times, or developing more ergonomic harnesses for carrying the wood to reduce the physical burden of the work. In addition, can more income-generating opportunities be created to help reduce the poverty of these women and girls?

Second, it informs policies around building an inclusive energy workforce. Recognizing that there is already a female-run and -operated energy workforce across the developing world has implications for workforce policies governing the energy transition. For example, when it comes to the ability to tap into this existing labor force, does reskilling apply to this workforce as it does to coal miners?

Moreover, by focusing on improving the labor conditions of women and girl biomass producers, this framework intersects with SDG 5: achieve gender equality and empower all women and girl. Organizations such as the Clean Cooking Alliance that aim to “increase the role of women in the clean cooking sector” and collect data on the number of hours required for biomass production could benefit from such a framework.

Third, research that intentionally includes groups underserved and underrepresented in data can inform policies for a just energy transition. Capturing the number of women and girls producing biomass can lead to important discoveries for improving their lives while informing the energy transition. For instance, surveys and fieldwork to collect the amount of biomass producers could also be used to track energy consumption and production trends that inform electrification efforts.

Many biomass collectors live on the margins or in rural areas, and research geared toward their energy needs can inform, for example, decentralized renewable energy projects and help anticipate their consumption patterns.

This energy workforce comprises some of the poorest people in the world—women, girls, and people of color—and that may partly explain why their labor and working conditions have received relatively less attention.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and other research puts the world on a tight timeline for lowering emissions. Existing frameworks for achieving a clean energy transition can be strengthened through approaches that recognize and acknowledge the agency of biomass energy producers made up of millions of women and girls.

[First published by Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy on July 6, 2023.]

 

Alexandra Peek is a research associate with Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Philippe Benoit is an adjunct senior research scholar with Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and is also research director for Global Infrastructure Analytics and Sustainability 2050.

 

Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson and Robert Mugabe walking hand in hand in 1989
 
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Proverb of unknown origin

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Jul 12 2023 (IPS)

The war in Ukraine continues unabated; young men are sacrificed on battlefields, towns laid waste by aerial attacks, the threat of nuclear disasters is looming. People within an often formerly friendly inclined Europe are now wondering if Vladimir Putin has gone insane. The war in Ukraine is generally called “Putin’s war” and in April 2021 Putin signed a legislation providing him the right to run for two more consecutive terms, thus he could stay in power till 2036.

Nazi Germany was equalled with Hitler, the Soviet Union with Stalin, Communist China with Mao, and now Russia with Putin. Another example of the identification of an entire nation with a totalitarian ruler was Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. A president who apart from participating in the invasion of a neighbouring country led his nation into a bloody civil war.

When I in the year 2000 was working for the Swedish International Development Cooperation (Sida) it was questioned why the Swedish Government every year granted SEK 140 million (USD 15 million) in development aid to Zimbabwe, a country governed by a scorned Robert Mugabe. At that time, Zimbabwe’s GNI had in one year shrunk by 13 percent, among other things due to unbudgeted expenses for the country’s participation in a war in the DR Congo (from 1998 to 2003 Zimbabwe’s participation in this war cost USD 1 million a day). A badly managed land reform had drastically reduced agricultural production. Even before the crisis 75 percent of the population was unable to meet necessary needs of food, clothing, schooling, health care and housing. Unemployment was over 60 percent, while 25 percent of the adult population was infected with HIV/AIDS.

Misery was blamed on Mugabe’s misrule, but Swedish support to Zimbabwe continued during his reign. Since Swedish aid was initiated in the early1980s Zimbabwe had by the year 2000 received SEK 5 billion (approximately USD 460 million). Economic support currently amounts to USD 28 million per year.

Swedish relations with Robert Mugabe indicate difficulties opinion leaders face while analysing the power game of other nations. For fear of being seen as harbouring neo-colonial attitudes “experts” often withheld critical judgment and were apt to name various leaders as ”hopes for Africa”. Unfortunately personal benefits from supremacy may prove to be a fatal temptation , several heroes of yesterday have after their seizure of power turn into despots.

In the case of Zimbabwe (which at the time was “Rhodesia” governed by a white minority party, the Rhodesian Front) it was reasonable to oppose a regime that kept the majority of a nation’s population out of power because of the colour of their skin. Swedish debate has often been characterized by two different worldviews, either that the world consists of democracies and dictatorships, with the former being on the good side, or that an enduring conflict subsists between the “West” and the “Rest”, where “West” is seen as the villain. According to the latter understanding , it did not matter if Zanu (PF), the party of Robert Mugabe, actually pursued one-party rule, any opposition towards the “ancient colonial world order” was OK.

It was thus more justifiable to support an armed struggle than the democratic consensus policy proclaimed by another Zimbabwean liberation group, Zapu, headed by Joshua Nkomo. The influential Pierre Schori, international secretary of the Swedish Social Democratic Party and close assistant to Prime Minister Olof Palme, supported the “eloquent and radical” Mugabe:

I think that it had to do with personal contacts. […] In the case of Zimbabwe, we did not choose between Zapu and Zanu, but I think that when Joshua Nkomo came to Sweden it was often through the churches, while Robert Mugabe was more of a pure freedom fighter.

Mugabe spoke fluent English, with an “exquisite” Oxford accent. He liked “open conversations and intellectual debates”, and in spite of an aversion to English colonialism he was an admirer of “Anglophone culture” and a fan of cricket, attesting that it “civilizes people and creates good gentlemen.”

Mugabe had been arrested in 1963 and was after 1966 transferred to a cell he shared with Zanu’s leader Ndabaningi Sithole. Mugabe remained in custody for a further eight years, devoting his time to studies. He gained a masters in economics, a bachelor of administration, and two law degrees from the University of London. Amnesty International’s Swedish Group 34 had as its lot to support the imprisoned freedom fighter. One member of the group later stated;

– He took advantage of the opportunity to study in prison and asked us to get literature. So we members shared the expenses and sent books to him. […] At that time, Mugabe was considered as a good guy. He was very fond of children and always remembered all our children’s names and greeted them in his letters. In addition to the books, Mugabe also asked for help with items such as a pair of pyjamas and tubes of toothpaste. Before his release, I and Eva Moberg [a well-known journalist], who had started the group, went and bought a suitcase, which we sent to him with his wife Sally.

In 1958, Mugabe had moved to Ghana to gain a teacher’s certificate at the Achimota College where he met his first wife, Sally Hafton. During Mugabe’s imprisonment Sally first moved to London, where she taught at the Africa Centre. She also lived for several years in Sweden, mostly in the village of Heby, north of the university town of Uppsala. She kept close contact with the members of Amnesty Group 34. Mugabe appreciated that Sally was staying in Sweden, which he considered to be a “safe country”. Sally worked as a nanny, learned Swedish and campaigned for Zimbabwe’s freedom struggle, both in Sweden and England. In Sweden, she became a frequently seen and well-liked person.

Mugabe was released in 1974 and resolved to leave Rhodesia for Moçambique. However, Samora Machel, who in 1975 became Moçambique’s president, was suspicious of Mugabe, whom he considered to be immature and belligerent. Furthermore, Machel suspected that Mugabe’s quick rise to power was due to machinations to get rid of Sithole as head of Zanu, a “prison coup” that might have been supported by Rhodesia’s white leader, Ian Smith. Machel put Mugabe under house arrest in Quelimane, far from the Zimbabwean guerrilla camps. It was rumoured that Machel was jealous of Mugabe’s intellectual achievements, preferring more down-to-earth men, especially the Zimbabwean guerrilla commander Josiah Tongogara. Contrary to Machel, Mugabe had never been an active fighter. When Machel in 1980 attended Mugabe’s inauguration as Zimbabwe’s president, he was well aware of Mugabe’s intention to form a one-party government, giving his Shona supporters absolute power. Machel addressed Mugabe:

To ensure national unity, there must be no Shonas in Zimbabwe, there must be no Ndebeles in Zimbabwe, there must be Zimbabweans. Some people are proud of their tribalism. But we call tribalists reactionary agents of the enemy. […] Zimbabwe is the jewel of Africa. Don’t tarnish it!

Some of Mugabe’s Swedish acquaintances were suspicious of him:

He considered himself to be a superior teacher, a professor. He had six different degrees, he was a learned and well-read man. Therefore, he believed that he was right in everything, and if he was opposed, he went mad.

Politicians and journalists declared that Mugabe could be charming and nice, but it was also alleged that he was a loner; admittedly a hard-working man, a voracious reader and not much given to laughter, but above all – a single-minded and extremely complex person, not easily captured by conventional categories. Some even claimed they considered him to be devoid of ordinary warmth and humanity; emotionally immature, homophobic and xenophobic. The last time a Swedish friend met with him, Mugabe told him:

When we are elected presidents, we suddenly get enormous power in accordance with the constitution that we took over from the colonial power. We can fill positions for relatives, friends and party sympathizers. We live well and have a different life than the vast majority of our citizens. But when we leave the presidential palace, we have nothing, there are no presidential pensions.

Mugabe coveted absolute power and when he obtained it, he hold on to it. Zanu came to act as yesterday’s colonial rulers. Even if power relations had changed, perceptions of power were the same. The Swedish Government did not lack documentation warning about Mugabe’s ambitions, nevertheless its conclusion was that he was Zimbabwe’s strongest leader and moreover “pro-Sweden”, accordingly Swedish aid could not be terminated, and even had to be increased.

Already in 1977, Mugabe declared that “any man who maliciously plants contradictions within our ranks will be struck by the Zanu axe” and he was even more ruthless towards his former brothers in arms – Zapu, and its leader Joshua Nkomo.

Zanu’s power base was among the Shona people, while Zapu found its strongest support among the Ndebeles in Matabeleland. Furthermore, the Cold War was reflected in the two parties’ relations to the outside world. Zapu received Soviet support, while Zanu relied on China, which wanted to undermine Soviet influence in Africa.

In early 1983, the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, a unit subordinated to the presidency, began a crackdown on dissidents in Matabeleland. Over the following two years, thousands of Ndebele and Kalanga were accused of being “Zapu-traitors”, detained, marched to “re-education camps”, tortured, raped and/or summarily executed. Although there are different estimates, the consensus of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) is that more than 20,000 people were killed.

Swedish aid workers were knowledgeable about these atrocities. Nevertheless, Swedish aid continued to be delivered to Zanu-controlled Zimbabwe. The former head of Sida’s aid office in Harare played down the events, declaring that “the civilian population in Matabeleland has been stuck between warring factions.” He advised against using aid as a means of pressure to get Mugabe to stop the mass killing.

After the 93 years old Mugabe finally was removed from power, Zimbabwe continued to spiral down the abyss, while Swedish support is uninterrupted. The country is now ruled by Emmerson Mnangagwa, who once was a close ally to Mugabe. A brutal man who in 1983 described Government opponents as “cockroaches and bugs requiring DDT to be removed.” In 1998, Mnangagwa was put in charge of Zimbabwe’s intervention in the DR Congo wars and accused of “swapping Zimbabwean soldiers’ lives for mining contracts.” Mnangagwa does not further human rights, instead his government has deepened Zimbabwe’s economic struggles, enabled endemic corruption, fuelled instability, and targeted human rights activists and journalists. It is estimated that Zimbabwe may lose up to half the value of its annual GDP of USD 21.4 billion due to corrupt economic activities. Money laundering is among the murky deals said to be carried out under Mnangagwa’s aegis. Under diplomatic cover, criminals send unaccounted cash in exchange of equivalent amounts in Zimbabwean gold, and then sell it for seemingly legitimate money.

Swedish support to Mugabe and his successor might be considered as an effort to alleviate the plight of Zimbabwe’s citizens, but it might also be interpreted as being based on simplifications of a complicated reality and furthermore relying on one man’s power. When Mugabe’s abuse of sovereignty led to massacres, they were minimalized by those of those who had bet on him and the misrule of his successor is hardly noticed.

The world is now wondering whether the majority of Russia’s population will continue to support its strong man. If Putin’s nation will be weaken or strengthened by such encouragement. The stakes are high and predictions are generally gloomy.

Main sources: Yap, Katri P. (2001). Uprooting the weeds: Power, ethnicity and violence in the Matabeleland conflict. Ph.D Thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam and various Swedish newspaper articles.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Since 2018, PBF has invested $22M in Mauritania, implemented by 11 UN Agencies, Funds and Programmes. Credit: IOM Mauritania

By Lila Pieters Yahia
NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania, Jul 12 2023 (IPS)

Deep in the heart of Southeastern Mauritania lies the district and town of Bassikounou, nestled on the border with neighboring Mali, over 1,200 kilometers from the capital city of Nouakchott.

The border between the two countries is barely visible, but the communities on either side remain tightly knit through their shared family ties, trading relationships and religious traditions.

The vast grasslands of Bassikounou have long provided nourishment for herds of livestock, yet in recent years, the region has experienced a decline in rainfall and pasture which has made life more challenging for communities and their animals.

In addition to the strains caused by a changing climate, in 2022, Mauritania experienced an influx of new refugees, including Mauritanian returnees from Mali due to the deteriorating security situation.

By the end of last year, almost 83 000 refugees resided in the Mbera camp in Bassikounou and over 8,000 in small villages outside the camp.

This influx of refugees with their livestock increased pressure on the pastures and water sources; and led to greater conflict and competition between communities for access to water and grazing fields.

On top of this, returning pastoralist herds of livestock are estimated at 800,000; further exacerbating the scarcity of resources, and raising concerns about tensions with the host population over water access.

Cohesion and economic empowerment

As part of my new role as Resident Coordinator in Mauritania, I visited Bassikounou district in January 2023 to see how the UN country team on the ground was utilizing the Secretary-General’s Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) to foster conflict prevention, promote social cohesion and tackle the devastating effects of climate change among the host communities, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and refugees.

The PBF’s investment in Mauritania date back to 2018 when FAO, UNDP, UNICEF and OHCHR collaborated to implement a pioneering project aimed at managing scarce natural resources, enhancing economic development, and supporting village committees to resolving conflicts.

Although the project has ended, lasting effects can still be observed. For example, the local radio station which was set up with the support of the PBF is now managed by the local and has become a vital tool in promoting social harmony between host communities and refugees.

As the head of the coordination cell of the Hodh El Charugui told me during the visit, “the radio is a jewel, through its broadcasting and radio talk shows, it allowed to reinforce social cohesion and peaceful coexistence between refugees and host communities” including young people and women.

During my visit, I also had the privilege of meeting inspiring women and young girls who shared their journeys towards greater economic empowerment. The Bassikounou women’s network, which was supported by PBF’s first project in the region, consists of 49 gender focal points, village committees and 20 women’s associations. The network is now fully institutionalized with legal status.

The women spoke about the transformational change they brought to their communities through this network by implementing simple rules to lift structural barriers regarding women’s participation and rights.

One such rule is to ensure that each time a man speaks, a women should have the opportunity to voice her opinion. Today, the Bassikounou network is the technical branch of the newly created Observatoire National des Droits de la Femme et de la Fille (ONDFF), making it a powerful force for gender equality in Mauritania.

Women play a critical role in conflict management and peacebuilding efforts in Mauritania. Credit: IOM Mauritania

Whilst in Bassikounnou I also had the honor of meeting with the Mourchidates, a group of fifty Mauritanian women religious guides, who are working to deconstruct radical rhetoric arguments used by extremist groups in Néma, and prevent violent extremism.

Through an innovative pilot initiative supported by PBF and implemented by UNOSSC and UNESCO, these women received training on how to spot warning signs of radicalization in individuals and communities and how to intervene early to prevent violence from erupting.

Building resilience to climate shocks

Investing in adaptation measures and building greater resilience to the effects of climate change is another key priority for host communities, IDPs and refugees in Bassikounou district.

Mauritania’s mostly desert territory is highly susceptible to deforestation and drought, with temperatures regularly exceeding 40°c during the dry season from September to July; which means that bushfires have become an increasingly frequent occurrence threatening refugees and host communities, their herds and livelihoods.

With thanks to support from the UN country team and investments from the PBF, communities are coming together to manage and mitigate risks of such bushfires.

During my visit to the district, I saw first-hand the achievements of the Mbera fire brigade volunteers. Founded by refugees, this all-volunteer firefighting group has extinguished over 100 bushfires since 2019 and planted thousands of trees to preserve the lives, livelihoods of the host communities and refugees and the local environment.

These interactions between refugees and host populations has led to a more inclusive, equitable and sustainable management of natural resources in Mbera. The Fire Brigade’s courage and tenacity in safeguarding lives, livelihoods and the environment has earned them the title of the Africa Regional Winner of the 2022 Nansen Refugee Award.

Elsewhere during our visit to Mbera camp and surrounding villages, we saw inspiring youth and women-led initiatives to strengthen community resilience to climate change and promote social cohesion, specifically through the regeneration of vegetation cover.

Through the planting of 20,000 seedlings cultivated on five reforestation sites, women are now able to sell vegetables produced in community fields to sustain their families, invest in small businesses, and save for joint initiatives. In addition, a youth-led start-up is piloting biogas production in Bassikounou by employing youth to provide natural gas for vulnerable families.

Towards peace and prevention

Beyond Bassikounou, the Fund has invested in cross-border initiatives to address fragility risks, including in Mauritania due to its porous borders and security threats such as trafficking and terrorism.

Between Mali and Mauritania, with PBF’s support, FAO and IOM are strengthening the conflict prevention and management capacities of cross-border communities by setting up, training and equipping 24 village committees located on the Mauritano-Malian border zone.

In a world that is often plagued by conflict and strife, the need for peacebuilding initiatives has never been greater. The Secretary-General’s Peacebuilding Fund is a unique tool that can effectively prevent conflicts from escalating and support ongoing peacebuilding efforts.

My visit to Bassikounou allowed me to see firsthand the changes and transformation on the ground supported by the PBF and jointly implemented by the UN country team and national partners and refugees communities.

From strengthening social cohesion to empowering more women and young people in conflict and natural resource management, the impact of these initiatives continues to grow.

I am more convinced than ever that we must continue to support such initiatives and invest in peacebuilding – only then can we hope to create a better future for all.

Lila Pieters Yahia is UN Resident Coordinator in Mauritania. This article was written with support from the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) and the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO).

Source: UN Development Coordination Office (UNDCO), New York.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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By Sarah Razak and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jul 12 2023 (IPS)

As our planet continues to heat up at an alarming rate, carbon credits, markets and trading have been promoted as effective measures to combat global warming. While there is an urgent need to curb planetary heating, growing reliance on this innovation is problematic, to say the least.

Global warming occurs when heat from the sun is absorbed by greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane. Like a blanket, GHGs trap heat, preventing it from escaping our atmosphere. This raises temperatures on Earth, accelerating climate change and triggering extreme weather events such as droughts, cyclones and floods.

Sarah Razak

Historically, human activities – including deforestation and fossil fuel burning – have released CO2 into the atmosphere, increasing the already huge accumulation of emissions. Continuing GHG emissions are now making this problem worse.

Market solution?
Carbon trading has been touted by some economists as the best, fairest and most efficient solution to mitigate global warming. The basically simple market-based idea behind carbon trading is appealing – companies will stop emitting as they must pay to release GHGs by buying ‘carbon [dioxide-equivalent] credits’.

With carbon trading, companies are rewarded for releasing less GHGs. Such companies can sell their extra carbon credits to other companies exceeding their credits, who must thus pay to release more GHGs.

Correctly pricing such credits is thus crucial for the efficacy of the mechanism. But carbon trading promoters tend to under-price credits for carbon trading to gain more acceptance and support.

Thus, this approach treats the Earth’s capacity to absorb CO2 as a service to be bought and sold while ignoring its other all too real implications. Worse, quotas are often arbitrarily set, without rewarding low emitters of the past and present.

Dubious equivalence
There are many GHGs – including methane, nitrous oxide, and others – of which the most important is CO2. The notion of carbon [dioxide] equivalence had to be created to create a market for GHGs’ estimated carbon equivalents (CO2e), ostensibly measured by their global warming potential relative to CO2.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Thus, CO2e has become the ‘universal’ measurement unit for carbon trading, functioning like a common currency. However, the CO2e yardstick for GHG trading is problematic as such measures rely heavily on assumptions and estimates.

Carbon markets and trading – based on such equivalence – have, in turn, led to misleading estimates and interpretation. The resulting poor policy analysis, formulation and efficacy undermine efforts to address global warming more effectively.

Due to the complex and changing properties of gases, CO2e estimates have been subject to many revisions. In 1996, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared one unit of hydrofluorocarbon (HFC-23) gas had a global warming potential equivalent to 11,700 units of carbon dioxide (CO2e) over a 100-year period.

In 2007, HFC-23’s CO2 equivalence was revised upwards to 14,800 CO2e. But the IPCC noted even this huge revision upwards remained subject to a huge margin of error of plus or minus 5000 CO2e units.

CO2e is also complex to navigate as different GHGs have different properties. For example, HFC-23 has a stronger warming effect than CO2 in the short-term. Thus, using a common yardstick for these two very different gases – as is commonly done – is not only scientifically moot, but also analytically misleading.

Carbon markets delay action
Unsurprisingly, carbon trading’s premises remain controversial. After all, carbon trading does not actually reduce GHGs, but merely discourages increasing emissions by imposing the costs of buying credits. Thus, instead of cutting GHG emissions, companies can buy carbon credits, fostering an illusion of progress.

Those buying carbon credits may believe they are thus reducing GHG emissions. But in fact, emissions do not decline much. Worse, companies may believe they are fully compensating for all the negative consequences (‘externalities’) of emitting GHGs by buying carbon credits. But this is an illusion.

High GHG emitters do not actually have to make much effort to cut emissions. Buying carbon credits, ostensibly to compensate for their GHG emissions, has thus become a low-cost, low-effort alternative to investing in less GHG-emitting technologies.

Unsurprisingly, most major emitters prefer the cheaper option of carbon trading over such transformative investments. Real investments in better technologies typically require significant upfront costs, while the financial returns to such investments are almost never immediate.

Companies have every incentive to indefinitely postpone major efforts to cut GHG emissions by participating in carbon trading. Thus, carbon trading effectively delays – rather than accelerates – needed transitions to renewable energy technologies.

‘Carbon offsets’ offset action
Companies can earn carbon credits for doing ‘climate friendly’ projects – such as reforestation – to offset the harm done by GHG emissions. These projects are supposed to compensate for the harm caused by GHG emissions, ostensibly offsetting companies’ adverse environmental impacts.

While planting trees can absorb CO2, it does not immediately eliminate accumulated CO2. A significant time lag occurs as growing trees need time to increase their capacity to absorb CO2, and thus reduce atmospheric CO2 levels.

The rate of CO2 emissions release into the atmosphere exceeds the rate at which CO2 is naturally absorbed by natural sinks like forests, including offset projects. This imbalance has contributed to an accelerating increase in long-term GHG accumulation levels in the atmosphere.

Although carbon trading may help reduce growing emissions at the margin, it has not significantly reduced accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere. The time lags involved further diminish its net contribution, and certainly do not offer the urgent solutions needed.

By purchasing carbon credits from such projects, many think they are thus offsetting their GHG emissions. But there is no empirical evidence that such offset projects actually reduce GHG emissions, i.e., carbon trading is not even ‘net-zero’.

Holistic approach needed
Unsurprisingly, carbon credits, markets and trading have fostered a false sense of progress. Most problematically, it has delayed the urgent need for an accelerated transition, especially to far more renewable energy generation and use.

To more effectively address the challenges of global warming, we need to move beyond carbon trading to a more comprehensive approach prioritizing more urgent, effective and impactful adaptation and mitigation efforts, including renewable energy generation and use.

Sarah Razak and Jomo Kwame Sundaram work at the Khazanah Research Institute in Kuala Lumpur.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Credit: U.S. Department of Commerce’s, Industry & Analysis-Aerospace Office and U.S. Commercial Service

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 12 2023 (IPS)

When President Ferdinand Marcos was running an authoritarian regime in the Philippines (1965-1986), he was once asked about rumors of rigged elections in his country.

“I promised I will give you the right to vote,” he said, according to a joke circulating at that time, “But I did not say anything about counting those votes”

The Marcos regime – and the rise and fall of Ferdinand Marcos and First Lady Imelda—is now being portrayed as a glittering musical titled “Here Lies Love” on Broadway: the showcase for some of the biggest hits in New York’s famed theatre district.

The New York Times ran a review last week under the headline “Disco and a Dictatorship: Brewing a Combustible Mix”.

The US, which was a close political and military ally of the Marcos dictatorship, took a backseat after his fall from power—and never exerted the same influence under successive. post-Marcos governments.

But the US has now resurrected its relationship and has made a strong comeback under Marcos’ son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr who took over as president in June 2022, and whose country is now going to be one of the biggest single beneficiaries of the growing political – and possibly military confrontation—between the US and China.

The positive fallout is on the Philippines– as the US bolsters its military relations with Manila with millions of dollars in US arms and security assistance

The U.S. has also designated the Philippines a Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA), strengthening security ties between the two nations.

The Philippines joins the privileged group of 19 MNNAs, including Israel, Australia, Egypt, South Korea, Jordan and New Zealand, among others.

They are all “close American allies that have strategic working relationships with US armed forces” but are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The strong new relationship has also contributed to the development of significant opportunities for U.S. defense and security equipment manufacturers and service- providers to enhance the Philippines’ self-defense capabilities, according to the U.S. Commercial Service (USCS), the trade promotion arm of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration.

The U.S. provides an average of about $120 million per year in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) to the Philippines. This year, it will be in excess of $200 million.

The U.S. Government has expressed its intent to make available to the Philippines $100 million in additional Foreign Military Financing (FMF) to be used by the Philippine Department of National Defense (DND) to fund its armed forces modernization programs.

According to the USCS, the Philippine’s defense market is contingent with the 15-year modernization program (2013-2028) currently underway.

“With the current challenges faced by the Philippines, including maritime disputes with China in the West Philippine Sea”, the Department of National Defense (DND) reiterated that air power is a critical component in its joint forces, especially in territorial defense.

The Philippine DND is a key player in the Indo-Pacific region as it continues to bolster its defense capabilities and maintain regional stability.

Under Horizon 3, the desired capabilities are focused on enhancements to C4ISTAR, air defense systems, air and surface interdiction systems, anti-tank systems and ground rocket systems, all pending approval by the Department of National Defense.

During a briefing last April, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “Our security alliance is an enduring source of strength for both of our nations. Today, we focused on ways to continue our close partnership under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement so that our forces can work even more closely together, including to provide humanitarian assistance and respond to disasters.”

“We also discussed deepening our robust economic ties, including through the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity. We’re working closely with other IPEF partners to build out this framework to help our economies grow faster and fairer so that all our people can reach their full potential, lead on issues shaping the 21st-century economy, and do it in a way that is sustainable for our planet.”

At the April briefing, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said the two countries had just celebrated the start of their 38th annual Exercise Balikatan.

He said more than 17,000 troops are participating this year. “It is the largest and most complex iteration in the exercise’s history”.

“Now the commitments that we made today will further integrate our strong bilateral ties into multilateral networks, including with Japan and Australia, and we discussed plans to conduct combined maritime activities with likeminded partners in the South China Sea later this year as we work to enhance our collective deterrence”.

“Our alliance is ultimately guided by our deep and enduring commitment to freedom. So, we’re not just allies, we’re democratic allies, and the United States and the Philippines are bound by a common vision for the future – a vision that’s anchored in the rule of law and freedom of the seas and respect for the territorial integrity of sovereign states.”

Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry, was quoted as saying: “Out of self-interest, the United States continues to strengthen its military deployment in the region with a zero-sum mentality, which is exacerbating tension in the region and endangering regional peace and stability.”

She said “countries in the region should remain vigilant against this and avoid being coerced and used by the United States.”

In February 2023, the Biden administration announced a new conventional arms transfer policy. One of the objectives is to “Prevent arms transfers that risk facilitating or otherwise contributing to violations of human rights or international humanitarian law…”

After a meeting with Philippine President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. at the White House in May 2023, the Biden administration issued a statement that said in part, “The United States and the Philippines’ shared democratic values strengthen our alliance immeasurably”.

Promoting respect for human rights and rule of law, and ensuring civil society leaders and members of marginalized communities are safe from violence, are key priorities for the U.S.-Philippines relationship.

Dr. Natalie J. Goldring, a Visiting Professor of the Practice in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, told IPS “The Biden administration’s new conventional arms transfer policy is a welcome development. But the policy needs to be fully implemented to be effective.”

“The US security relationship with the Philippines is an important test of whether the policy rhetoric will become reality. So far, the signs are not encouraging.”

Reporting by Human Rights Watch* indicates that human rights violations continue to occur regularly under the Marcos administration. They report that, “Marcos has done little to address the pending human rights issues.

Police and their agents continue their ‘drug war’ killings, though at a lower rate than during the Duterte administration. “The authorities remain responsible for extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary arrests of activists and outspoken critics.”

“It’s time to stop rewarding countries that systematically abuse the human rights of their citizens. At a minimum, US arms and security assistance to the Philippines should be paused until the Marcos administration demonstrates significant improvement in its human rights record,” said Dr Goldring, who also represents the Acronym Institute at the United Nations on conventional weapons and arms trade issues

“Continuing to provide US military assistance and arms transfers sends exactly the wrong message. Business as usual is likely to perpetuate the human rights abuses the Biden administration claims to oppose,” she declared.

*HRW statement:
“Philippines: Marcos Failing on Rights,” A Year On, Course Correction Needed. Human Rights Watch, 28 June 2023, https://www.hrw.org/node/385256/printable/print

White House statement on Marcos’ visit:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/05/01/fact-sheet-investing-in-the-special-friendship-and-alliance-between-the-united-states-and-the-philippines/#:~:text=The%20Philippines%20is%20the%20United,the%20broader%20Indo%2DPacific%20region.

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Sudanese refugee James Mathiang (left) with his teammates has had difficulties getting his qualifications recognised even though he was offered a scholarship. Wilson Odhiambo/IPS

By Wilson Odhiambo
NAIROBI, Jul 11 2023 (IPS)

East African international students could soon easily study in neighbouring countries after the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) proposed a new qualification framework to mitigate the difficulties faced when seeking education across borders.

IGAD has, over the past year, been conducting a series of seminars and workshops aimed at finding a solution to the problems faced by foreigners and refugees looking to continue with their education and employability in foreign lands.

During the 3rd IGAD conference held in Nairobi, Kenya, in March last year, it was agreed that its member states needed to develop a harmonised qualification framework that would allow their students to cross borders in search of work and education easily.

The IGAD member states include Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Djibouti, Uganda, South Sudan and Eritrea.

Countries usually have different education systems and standards, making it mandatory for foreigners to prove their qualifications before joining any institution.

Joining a higher education institution in Kenya demands one to have attained certain set standards from high school, which in this case, is to have a mean grade of at least a C+. Therefore, an international student seeking to join the same institution must show that they achieved an academic qualification from their country equivalent to the Kenyan standard.

To do this, they must go through the Kenya National Qualification Authority (KNQA) and have their high school grades converted to verify whether they meet the standards.

However, given the difference in curriculum and education standards for different countries, this is usually a tedious process for many.

Students have complained of waiting for months (or even years, in some cases) before having their qualifications approved to join learning institutions. This has especially been tough on refugees from Somalia and South Sudan, whose education systems are still volatile, making it difficult for them to get quality education in countries of their choice.

South Sudan, for instance, has seen many of its citizens stream into Kenya in search of refuge and a fresh start to life. And due to their height, many Sudanese teenagers are sought after by basketball coaches in colleges and universities who are willing to offer them sport scholarship opportunities.

IPS spoke to James Mathiang during one of his basketball games to understand his transition process as a foreigner trying to further his ambitions.

Mathiang is a refugee from South Sudan who had been offered a sports scholarship by African Nazarene University (ANU) but is yet to join since he has not cleared the qualification process.

“I came to Kenya in 2021 with my family and currently live in one of the estates in Nairobi. Our country is still facing civil unrest, and my parents felt it was wise for us to seek refuge in Kenya, which also meant continuing with our lives in a new country,” Mathiang told IPS.

“I play basketball and have many of my relatives who have been in Kenya for longer, who also play the sport and were able to introduce me to some of the teams they play in.”

It was not long before one of the basketball scouts noticed Mathiang’s potential and offered to get him a scholarship in return for his talents. Mathiang is, however, yet to benefit from the deal due to the required qualification conversion process.

“It has already been seven months since I was offered the scholarship, but I am yet to understand how the conversion process works. I may have to sit for another qualification exam in Kenya since my papers are not recognised by KNQA,” Mathiang told UWN.

According to KNQA, the qualification is a planned combination of learning outcomes with a definite purpose and is intended to provide qualifying learners with applied competence and a basis for further learning.

Joining a university in Kenya, requires one to have completed four years in high school and attained a mean grade of at least a C+.

This standard may differ in a country like Sudan or Uganda, where students must spend at least six years in high school before joining a University. As such, a Kenyan going to Uganda in search of higher education has to meet a standard equivalent to that of Uganda and vice versa.

Rollins Oduk, who has been on a basketball scholarship at the Uganda Martyr University, recalls how it took him almost two years to convert his secondary school certificates to meet the qualifications required by the Ugandan system.

“Since Uganda did not have a qualification system like Kenya, I had no choice but to enrol into one of their secondary schools and sit for fresh exams so that I could be accepted by their higher education institutions. In the meantime, I could still play for the University and get some financial benefits as I waited. This is a good move by IGAD, and it will help a lot of foreigners like me,” Oduk told UWN.

According to IGAD, only one of its member states, Kenya, has a properly functioning qualification system that enables foreigners to confirm and convert their qualifications quickly.

Dr Alice Kande, managing director, KNQA, explained that having a regional qualification framework would lessen students’ obstacles when moving across the member states in search of education.

“KNQA is receiving so many foreign qualifications that are awarded without a clear clarification on whether they are accredited in their countries of origin, their requisite volume of learning, the skills that they impart and their equivalence to local qualifications,” Kande told IPS.

“The authority plays an important role in ensuring that authenticity of foreign qualifications is ascertained; and that the country only accepts and recognises foreign qualifications that meet the national standard. By doing this, we hope that students get quality training and education that equips them with the skills necessary to work both locally and internationally and that the country as a whole only accepts and recognises qualifications that meet the national standard and protects the country from fake and substandard qualifications,” she added.

According to Zetech University, it is tough for institutions to enrol international students due to the bureaucracy of specific government offices that frustrates the effort of potential students and the recruiting universities. There is a disconnect that makes it necessary for the concerned offices to sit with the universities and discuss a way forward.

“To join Zetech, foreign students are expected to have a visa, a student pass and the KNQA equation to get admission. It is particularly difficult for Somali students because of the fear of terrorism; hence the student pass takes too long to process,” said Dr Catherine Njoki, Liaison and Resource Mobilization Director Zetech University. A student’s pass can take up to eight months to a year to acquire, making some give up entirely on their education.

“The students are also required to equate their results with the KNQA. This Government body is also very slow in their service delivery, and they decline to support the recruiting institutions with a general guideline of how students can get temporary admission as they await the confirmation. KNQA should become a little flexible with such information and also realise the country needs the foreign exchange as much as the institutions need the students,” Njoki told UWN.

KNQA, however, states that it should only take two to eight weeks for an evaluation process to be concluded.

“According to Kenya National Qualifications Authority, service charter evaluation of qualifications processing time is (14 -60) working days from receipt of an application. This is counted from date of receipt of all relevant documents provided by the applicants,” Kande explained.

The following are some of the requirements that will be expected of someone trying to have his qualifications converted:

(i) Certified copy of each qualification certificate to be evaluated.

(ii) Certified copy of official transcript of each qualification to

be evaluated.

(iii) Certified copy of certificate and transcript of qualification preceding the one

that has been submitted for evaluation.

(iv) Certified copy of Identity Document or birth certificate for children

under the age of 18 for citizens or Passport for foreigners

(v) Translations (if applicable) together with the documents in the original

language prepared by a sworn translator.

Njoki added that IGAD should bring all stakeholders involved to help address these issues.

“I would like to continue with my education through this sports scholarship, and if this harmonised system works, there are many foreigners like me who are going to benefit from it,” Mathiang concluded.

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Water is used to cool processes at the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. Credit: IAEA/Fredrik Dahl

By Maria Skold and Martina Klimes
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Jul 11 2023 (IPS)

The role of water in conflicts is changing, with more attacks against environmental and civilian infrastructure. Dr Martina Klimes of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) recently held a lecture describing the shifting security landscape and how water can be both a weapon and a victim of war – and sometimes a tool for peace.

The Kakhovka dam disaster in Ukraine on 6 June is a painful reminder of how collapsing water infrastructure can cause enormous suffering in times of war, sometimes with consequences that last for generations. Ukraine accuses Russia of destroying the dam and using it as a weapon of war.

“That would be in direct conflict with the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions which protects civilians in times of war,” says Dr Martina Klimes who is Advisor Water and Peace at SIWI.

On 14 June, she participated in a breakfast meeting at the Swedish parliament together with other representatives from the Stockholm Hub on Environment, Climate and Security of which SIWI is a founding member.

Klimes’ presentation outlined the different roles of water in war:

• Direct impact – where water and attacks on water infrastructure are used as a weapon of war.
• Indirect impact – where military operations harm the environment, for example poisoning water sources or contaminating soil.
• Transboundary impact – where the consequences are felt also in other countries.

During the war in Ukraine, all three dimensions are carefully monitored by local and international organizations to an extent rarely seen in other wars. Already before the Kakhovka dam disaster, Ukrainian authorities estimated the cost of the environmental impacts of the war to be approximately 50 billion euros.

Rivers, groundwater, and soil are polluted, and many national parks are impacted in the country which is described as the most biodiverse in Europe. In 2022, 16 million Ukrainians needed water, sanitation, and hygiene assistance.

By tracking the environmental consequences of the war so closely, the Ukrainian government hopes not just to facilitate reconstruction. Another aim is to collect evidence that could be used in a future war tribunal against Russia.

President Zelensky has said that charges could include ecocide, in addition to the four types of crimes currently covered by the International Criminal Court (ICC). In recent years, the idea of making ecocide a fifth crime enshrined in the Rome Statute of the ICC has started to gain traction.

The parliament of the European Union recently voted to make ecocide part of EU law.

At the United Nations, a commission has assessed gaps in existing international law and presented a set of more far-reaching draft principles on protection of the environment in relation to armed conflicts.

But researchers who have studied Yemen, Libya, and Syria say that attacks on civilian and environmental infrastructure have become more common in the past decade.

“This causes immense suffering for local populations and the impact often goes beyond national borders. We also know that environmental degradation is a risk multiplier that can trigger social instability and violence,” Klimes says.

Meanwhile, a landmark report on the topic – Environment of Peace – was presented last year by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), another partner of the Stockholm Hub on Environment, Climate and Security.

At the same time, countries and regions can reduce tensions by strengthening the resilience of ecosystems and humans. Collaborating around for example shared waters can also foster cooperation and peace.

To raise awareness of these complex interlinkages, SIWI works actively to bring together actors with different types of competencies. One example is the Shared Waters Partnership Programme to strengthen transboundary water cooperation.

Every year, SIWI also hosts a high-level panel during World Water Week on water-related security issues. This year the event will take place on 23 August at 11am CET with the theme Innovative Approaches to Support Peace and Conflict Prevention.

Maria Sköld, is Senior Manager, Communications.
Martina Klimes, PhD, is Advisor, Water and Peace, and Transboundary Water Cooperation.

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The shortages of days in the classroom and teachers, and the poverty of their schools and living conditions, provide for a very poor education for Venezuela's children and augur a significant lag for their performance in adult life and for the country's development. CREDIT: El Ucabista

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jul 10 2023 (IPS)

Hundreds of thousands of children and young people, and thousands of their teachers, drop out of regular schooling in Venezuela year after year, and most of those who remain go to the classroom only two or three days a week, highlighting the abysmal backwardness of education in the country.

“Why continue studying, to graduate unemployed and earn a pittance? We prefer to get into a trade, make money, help our parents; there are a lot of needs at home,” Edgar, 19, who with his brother Ernesto, 18, has been gardening in homes in southeastern Caracas for three years, told IPS."The education crisis did not begin in March 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. These are problems that form part of the complex humanitarian emergency that Venezuela has been experiencing for many years." -- Luisa Pernalete

A study this year by the non-governmental organization Con la Escuela (With the School), in seven of Venezuela’s 24 states -including the five most populated- found that 22 percent of students skip classes to help their parents, and in the 15-17 age group this is the case for 45 percent of girls.

In the school where teacher Rita Castillo worked, in La Pomona, a shantytown in the torrid western city of Maracaibo, “for many days in a row there is no running water, there are blackouts, and it’s impossible to use the fans to cool off the classrooms,” she told IPS.

The classes in the school are divided into 17 to 25 children each: the first three grades of primary school attend on Mondays and Tuesdays, the next three grades on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and Fridays make up for whoever missed class the previous days. That is in the mornings; secondary school students attend during the hot afternoons.

These are the first steps towards the definitive dropout of students: 1.2 million in the three years prior to 2021 and another 190,000 in the 2021-2022 school year, with 2022-2023 still to be estimated, with no signs of a reversal in the trend.

“The dropout rate is also high in secondary schools in Caracas, and the students who remain often pass from one year to the next without having received, for example, a single physics or chemistry class, due to the shortage of teachers,” Lucila Zambrano, a math teacher in public schools in the populous western part of the capital, told IPS.

Authorities in the education districts are increasingly calling on retired teachers to return to work, “but who is going to return to earn for 25, 20 or less dollars a month?” Isabel Labrador, a retired teacher from Colón, a small town in the southwestern state of Táchira, told IPS.

Currently, the monthly food basket costs 526 dollars, according to the Documentation and Analysis Center of the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers.

 

The infrastructure and equipment of many schools is seriously affected in different areas of Venezuela, and its recovery is essential as a space not only for students to obtain knowledge but also for the socialization and coexistence of students, teachers and representatives. CREDIT: E. Carvajal / CPV

 

Teachers held colorful street protests in the first few months of 2023, demanding decent salaries and other benefits acquired by their collective bargaining agreement, and these demands remain unheeded as the school year ends this July.

Teachers earning ridiculously small salaries, high school dropout rates, rundown infrastructure, lack of services, loss of quality and a marked lag in the education of children and young people are the predominant characteristics of Venezuelan public education today.

But “the education crisis did not begin in March 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. These are problems that form part of the complex humanitarian emergency that Venezuela has been experiencing for many years,” Luisa Pernalete, a trainer and researcher at the Fe y Alegría educational institution for decades, told IPS.

 

Numbers in red

In the current school year, enrollment in kindergarten, primary and secondary education totaled 7.7 million, said Education Minister Yelitze Santaella, in this country which according to the National Institute of Statistics has 33.7 million inhabitants, but only 28.7 million according to university studies.

The difference in the numbers may be due to the migration of more than seven million Venezuelans in the last decade, according to United Nations agencies – a figure that the government of President Nicolás Maduro considers exaggerated, although it has not provided an alternative number.

The attraction or the need to migrate, in the face of the complex humanitarian emergency – whose material basis begins with the loss of four-fifths of GDP in the period 2013-2021 – also mark the desertion of students and teachers.

In the three-year period ending in 2021 alone, 166,000 teachers (25 percent of the total) and 1.2 million students (15 percent of the number enrolled at the time), dropped out, according to a study by the private Andrés Bello Catholic University (Ucab) in Caracas, ranked as the top higher education center in the country.

Con la Escuela estimates that at least 40 percent of the teachers who have quit have already emigrated to other countries.

Educational coverage among the population aged three to 17 years continues to decline: 1.5 million children and adolescents between those ages were left out of the education system in the 2021-2022 period. The hardest hit group is children between three and five years of age, where coverage amounts to just 56 percent.

 

Public school teachers, whose basic salary barely exceeds 20 dollars per month, have held massive protests in Caracas and other cities in the country demanding a living wage and compliance with the provisions of their collective bargaining agreement. CREDIT: M. Chourio / Efecto Cocuyo

 

According to official figures, there are 29,400 educational institutions in the country, of which 24,400 are public, with 6.4 million students and 542,000 teachers; and 5,000 are private, with 1.2 million students and 121,000 teachers.

They cover three years of early education, six years of primary school and five years of secondary school. It was decreed 153 years ago that primary education should be free and compulsory.

According to Ucab and Con la Escuela, 85 percent of public schools do not have internet, 69 percent have acute shortages of electricity and 45 percent do not have running water. There are also deficiencies in health services (93 percent), laboratories (79 percent) and theater or music rooms (85 percent).

Surveying 79 public schools in seven states, Con la Escuela found that 52 percent of the bathrooms are in poor condition, 35 percent of the schools do not have enough bathrooms, and two percent have no bathrooms.

In 19 percent of the schools classes have been suspended due to the damage to the toilets, and 34 percent do not have sewage pipes.

“Water is the service that generates the most suspension of classes in Venezuela,” Pernalete said. “Classes can be held without electricity in the school, but you can’t do without water, and if the service fails in the community or in the whole town, then it’s hard for teachers to go to work or the families don’t send their children to school.”

 

The backpack decorated with the tricolor Venezuelan flag, which is given to primary school students in the country’s public schools, is often carried by immigrants, such as these walking along a Colombian highway, as many students and teachers, in addition to dropping out of school, go abroad. CREDIT: JRS

 

Con la Escuela also found that 36 percent of the classrooms are insufficient for the number of youngsters enrolled, 44 percent of the schools have classrooms in poor condition and 50 percent reported desks in poor condition.

Moreover, the Ucab investigation found “ghost schools”, which appear in the Education Ministry figures but are actually only empty shells.

“We have gone to the field with the list of these schools and we have found that they no longer exist. There are just four walls standing,” said Eduardo Cantera, director of Ucab’s Center for Educational Innovation.

 

From precariousness to backwardness

If the salary of a new teacher in a public school is 20 dollars a month, those who are five levels higher in the ranks do not earn much more, just 30 or 35 dollars, although they do receive some bonuses that are not part of the salary.

In Caracas, private schools – which serve from kindergarten to the end of high school – a teacher earns about 100, maybe 200 or more dollars, depending on seniority, hours of work, and the families’ ability to pay.

The drop in wages cuts across the entire labor spectrum. The basic minimum is around five dollars a month, although there are food bonuses, and the average salary of formal sector workers is around 100 dollars.

It is a difficult figure to reach for many of those who work in the informal sector of the economy – 60 percent of the country’s workers according to the Survey of Living Conditions that Ucab carried out in 2022 among 2,300 households across the country.

 

A view of the María Auxiliadora school in a middle and upper-middle class area of Caracas. In private education, families must make extraordinary contributions to improve teachers’ salaries and thus hold onto them. CREDIT: Oema

 

It is a consequence of the gigantic setback of the Venezuelan economy – GDP shrank by four-fifths between 2013 and 2021 – compounded by almost three years of hyperinflation between 2017 and 2020, and depreciation that liquefied the value of the local currency, the bolivar, and led to a costly de facto dollarization.

Although public education is formally free, parents must contribute a few dollars each month to help maintain the schools. In private schools, prices are raised under the guise of extraordinary fees – the only way to obtain funds that make it possible for them to hold onto their teachers.

Pernalete says that in the interior of the country many teachers have to walk up to an hour to get to school -there is no public transportation or they can’t afford to take it-, not to mention the lack of water or electricity in their homes, or the absence of or the poor quality of internet connection, if they can afford it, or the lack of other technological resources.

And if they do have internet, that’s not always the case for their students.

Damelis, a domestic worker who lives in a poor neighborhood in Los Teques, a city neighboring Caracas, has three children in school. Some teachers, she told IPS, assign homework through a WhatsApp group, but in her home no one has a computer, internet or smartphone.

What is the result? The initial reading assessment test that Ucab recently administered to 1,028 third grade students nationwide showed high oral and reading comprehension (82 and 85 percent, respectively), but low reading aloud and decoding skills (43 and 53 percent).

More than 40 percent of the students only read 64 words per minute or less, when they should read 85 or more. Con la Escuela applied the test to 364 students in Caracas and the neighboring state of Miranda, and the children only read 48 words per minute.

There is also discouragement among teachers. The main public teaching university in the country has almost no applicants. In the School of Education at Ucab, the first two years have been closed due to a lack of students, despite the fact that the university offers scholarships to those who want to train as teachers.

What can be done? “The physical recovery of schools should be one of the first steps to guarantee their fundamental function: to serve as a center for socialization and meeting of teachers, students and representatives around the teaching-learning process,” said Cantera.

“Otherwise, the consequences will be very serious for the country’s development,” he said.

Labrador said she observes “a gradual privatization of education, it is no longer truly free,” and the disparity between public and private education is increasing inequality in a country where in the second half of the 20th century public education stood out as the most powerful lever for social ascent.

Pernalete said it is a matter of complying with the 1999 Constitution, which stipulates that workers’ salaries must be sufficient to live on and establishes the government’s commitment to the right to education, as it states that education and work are the means for the realization of the government’s goals.

Credit: United Nations

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jul 10 2023 (IPS)

A quick glance at the current European political map would clearly show how far the extremist ideology has been installed in European countries –those who still wave the French Revolution’s flag of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.”

According to the Napoleonic French Revolution’s three pillars, Liberty means freedom for an individual to do what he/she wants to do without harming others’ Liberty. Equality means equal opportunity to all the citizens irrespective of their caste, religion, race, gender.

Fraternity means an environment of brotherhood among the citizens of a nation.

 

“Not true” that “all humans are equal”

The extremist ideology promoted by Europe’s right and far-right politicians is pushing –either openly or surreptitiously– for the suppression of many of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established in the worldwide adopted 2030 Agenda under the principle: Leave No One Behind

These concepts have also been clearly reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the actual umbrella of all the other international laws and agreements, such as the 2030 Agenda, which was adopted in 2015 by all countries -including the richest ones, those who now violate their own principles.

Instead, the extremist ideology promoted by Europe’s right and far-right politicians is pushing –either openly or surreptitiously– for the suppression of many of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established in the worldwide adopted 2030 Agenda under the principle: Leave No One Behind.

A compilation of all the extremist ideology postulates, which are now spreading like wildfire in Europe, would require drafting a long book or more. Therefore, this report is based on the most shared right and far-right doctrines in the continent.

 

“Gender violence does not exist“

To start with, one of the Agenda 2030 Goals: Gender Equality, has been gradually breached by the European far-right parties, by either directly or indirectly claiming that women should stay at home, caring for children, as the only way to prevent the ‘disappearance of families.’

Some of them even start advocating for the separation of students by gender, e.g., classrooms for boys and others for girls.

 

‘Penis matter’

In Spain, for instance, the conservative party– Partido Popular (PP), has adopted such a far-right party VOX doctrine in all those regions where they rule in coalition with the PP: to replace the concept of gender violence with “intra-family violence.”

Not only that: one VOX leader, Gabriel Le Senne, who now chairs the Balear Islands regional Parliament as part of the pact between VOX and the PP, says that “Women are more belligerent because they lack a penis.”

 

Migrants, “that big threat”

Migrants have further been targeted by European extremist ideology, which assures those who flee former European colonies, those who have fallen victims of externally-induced wars and severe climate change’s impacts.

In their hate speech, the far-right claims that migrants come to Europe to “steal our jobs, destroy our social fabric, threaten our civilisation, our faith, kill our innocent citizens,” and a long etcetera.

The very same far-right leader, Gabriel Le Senne, also stated that “In Spain, between Hispanics and Africans it is not clear where the thing will end, but it is clear that the natives are increasingly in danger of extinction.”

 

“Labour exploitation does not exist“

Meanwhile, alongside other European extremist political groups, the two Spanish right and far-right parties, PP and VOX, show reluctance to a European Commission directive aimed at preventing labour exploitation and child labour.

Reason: the proposed directive intends to penalise large companies that benefit from labour exploitation. A high number of the exploited children are migrant descendants.

 

Islam is “terror”

In a related hate speech, the European extremist politicians continue to target the world’s Muslim for all sorts of “terrorism,” and criminality.

For example, the leader of the far-right party VOX, Santiago Abascal, has indirectly blamed ‘radical Muslims’ living in the European Union of fuelling and masterminding the already week-long social unrest in France, following the assasination by a French policeman of an Argelian-descendent 17 years old Nahel.

This growing anti-Muslim trend goes against all international laws and agreements, including the worldwide adopted Agenda 2030, let alone the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

For instance, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief report launched ahead of the International Day to Combat Islamophobia (15 March 2023), warned that, motivated by institutional, ideological, political and religious hostility that transcends into structural and cultural racism, it targets the symbols and markers of being a Muslim.

According to this United Nations report, the outright hatred towards Muslims has risen to ‘epidemic proportions.’

 

“Climate change does not exist”

Climate change is another key target of European extremist ideology, which not only negates its existence, but it also refuses regulations and policies that aim to reduce both its causes and worldwide devastating impacts, Europe included.

In this, they deny what two authoritative specialised bodies, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, have warned on 19 June 2023.

 

“Not true” that Europe is the fastest warming continent

Europe is “the fastest warming continent of the world, doubling global average,” WMO and Copernicus warned in their joint report: The State of the Climate in Europe 2022 report.

“The year 2022 was marked by extreme heat, drought and wildfires. Sea surface temperatures around Europe reached new highs, accompanied by marine heatwaves. Glacier melt was unprecedented.”

Such a fact is easily verifiable: around one third of European crops have been already lost, and the sources of water, both for humans, irrigation, and livestock, are rapidly drying up.

Already in May 2022, the UN Children Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that from insufficient drinking water supply to contamination by sewage overflow and disease outbreaks from improper wastewater treatment, “existing risks from climate change to water, sanitation and hygiene in the pan-European region are set to increase significantly.”

 

“No” to a European Nature Restoration Law

In spite of all this, a dozen of the European Union’s member countries oppose a proposed Nature Restoration Law. According to its detractors, such a law would harm the market and financial interests of the agri-food business in their countries.

In yet another negation of the SDGs’ key pillar: Leave No One Behind, the ultra-right parties in Europe, also deny the rights of the lesbians, gays, bi, trans and intersex (LGBTI) people, who, according to the UN, “continue to face widespread stigma, exclusion and discrimination, including in education, employment and health care.”

Let alone refusing the right to euthanasia, abortion, and a very long etcetera.

By Daud Khan
ROME, Jul 10 2023 (IPS)

There seems to be no end in sight to the war in Ukraine. On the contrary it continues to escalate. The latest ratchet up has been the decision by the USA to supply the Ukrainian army with cluster bombs. These are nasty weapons which scatter and explode over a wide area. They are specifically designed to kill people rather that destroy infrastructure, military installations or communication hubs. They also have a sting in the tail – some of the bomblets remain unexploded, effectively becoming anti-personnel mines. These can turn wide swathes of territory into virtual no-go areas.

Daud Khan

In recognition of the awful nature of these bombs, their use, transfer, production, and stockpiling has been prohibited under the Convention on Cluster Munitions, an international treaty signed in 2008 by 108 countries. However, several major military powers, including the China, Russia and the USA have not signed the Convention, as did not the Ukraine.

Cluster bombs have been used by both sides in the current war. This has not only caused high human casualties but already turned many areas into a minefield that will take decades to clear up. But reportedly stocks of such bombs in the Ukraine are running low and the decision of the USA would effectively help them continue a flagging counter-offensive. In particular, it is expected that they would help dislodge Russian forces that are dug in inside Ukrainian territory.

The latest move once again raises awkward questions – what is this war about, how long will it last and will anyone come out a winner.

As in all wars, there are many short-term proximate causes. Depending on the lens which one uses, the war is about protecting the rights of Russian speaking people in the Donbas; or about the rights of all Ukrainians – Russian or Ukrainian speaking – to follow their desire to be part of a liberal democratic Europe. But there are also long-term interests at play. Depending on one’s political views this war is about an irredentist and power hungry Putin. An alternative view is that the war is about Russian resistance to the continued eastern expansion of NATO and the creation of a well-armed, albeit denuclearized, Ukraine – a thorn in the side of Russia.

Whatever view one wishes to take on various causes, this is undoubtedly an existential war for the Russian state as it is now, for the Ukraine state as it is now, and the unipolar, US dominated world as it is now. If the Ukrainians win, it would be the end the Putin regime. It would also signal the end to his aspirations for a Greater Russian, to his dreams of making Russia once again a global power, and to his hopes of using Russian energy and other mineral resources to build domestic prosperity.

If on the other hand, should the Russians win it would be the end of Ukraine aspirations to be a part of a liberal democratic Europe, to be part of the EU and a member of NATO. Russian victory would also mean a serious blow to the USA, its allies and to the existing world order.

The very high stakes implies that none of the major protagonists can afford to walk away without a clear cut victory. This is in contrast to other recent wars such as the Afghan wars that Russia and the USA fought. Strategic interests were at stake even in these wars – Russia wanting access to a warm water port on the Indian Ocean and the USA wanting a friendly regime in Kabul to contain Islamic terrorism. Walking away from those wars certainly involved giving up these strategic objectives as well as a major loss of prestige. But the stakes were nowhere as high as in the current Ukraine Russia war.

And so it is unlikely we will be seeing any serious attempt towards a ceasefire, even less a convening of parties around a negotiating table. Unfortunately the most likely scenario is that the war will continue. Not only that, it is likely to escalate as it has over the last year from an initial dispatch of “defensive weapons”, to dispatch of long range missiles, modern tanks, and now cluster bombs. The next step will most likely be the dispatch of modern airplanes such as the F-16 on which Ukrainian pilot are already being trained. And then? Maybe some use of some sort of battlefield nuclear weapons.

And while the war in Europe drags on and escalates, there is an elephant in the room – China, the archenemy of the USA. How will they behave as the USA and its allies supply increasingly sophisticated weapons to Ukraine? Will they try and bolster Russia with who they have a “friendship with no limits”? Or would they be tempted to make a grab for Taiwan while the USA is tied up in the Ukraine.

There are dangerous and uncertain times ahead.

Daud Khan works as consultant and advisor for various Governments and international agencies. 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. He lives partly in Italy and partly in Pakistan.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Some people in parts of Uganda have depended on small-scale charcoal production for livelihoods, but the trade has been taken over by illicit charcoal traders. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
KAMPALA, Jul 10 2023 (IPS)

At Kampala’s Nakawa market, Lovisa Nabisubi scoops charcoal from a bag and packs it into tins ready for customers. Her bare hands, feet, and clothes are stained black from hours of dealing in this popular household fuel which some equate to “black gold” not just in Uganda but in most of East Africa.

The sizes of Nabisubi’s measuring tins have been shrinking as charcoal gets scarcer and more expensive. While the price of charcoal is getting out of reach for some residents in Kampala, Nabisubi tells IPS that she may lose her only source of income if the situation persists.

“It is becoming difficult to find the suppliers of charcoal. We have been buying a bag of charcoal at ninety thousand shillings. The suppliers sell at one hundred and ten thousand shillings ($32). Sometimes I don’t get any stock, so I stay at home,” she said.

Charcoal is a popular source of cooking energy for urbanites in Uganda and most of East Africa. It also has immense social-economic importance, but it is getting scarce and expensive.

A household study by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) in 2021 found that charcoal provides the primary energy of up to 80% of Kampala’s population. While charcoal, wood, and other forms of biomass together provide more than 90% of the total primary energy consumed in Uganda.

Most of the charcoal supplies to Uganda’s capital Kampala, neighbouring municipalities, and districts have been from formerly war-torn Northern Uganda, but there has emerged pressure against it over environmental concerns.

In February this year, a former member of Parliament, Samuel Odonga Otto, and others mobilised vigilantes to enforce bans on charcoal burning and illegal trade in a region which has a tree cover relatively better compared to other parts of Uganda. The vigilantes would intercept trucks loaded with charcoal cutting off supplies to markets like Nakawa and others.

“Cutting (down) any trees should stop. It should stop if we are to protect our environment. You can see the rainfall patterns. We will not turn to politics; this is environmental,” said Odonga Otto.

As the vigilante group got more sympathizers, President Yoweri Museveni swiftly responded by issuing an order banning commercial charcoal trade in northern Uganda and districts bordering South Sudan and DRC and Kenya to the northeast of Uganda.

While the ban was celebrated by some in the region, a number of questions have emerged. What alternatives to charcoal? How can governments address the conflict between the charcoal ban versus lives and livelihoods?

Only 1.7 million of about 8 million households in Uganda are connected to grid electricity while small-scale charcoal burners, like Cypriano Bongoyinge, wondered how else to survive as the ban took effect.

Bongoyinge told IPS that traders from cities and towns should have been cut off because they were fueling large-scale production.

He told IPS that the traders from Kampala pay between $400-800 to clear an acre of land covered with trees and then hire labourers to burn into charcoal for transportation to the cities or across the borders.

Like Bongoyinge, Ceaser Akol, a politician based in Uganda’s northeastern district of Karamoja, told IPS that communities in the region were burning charcoal at a small-scale level, but they were invaded by large-scale commercial charcoal burners. “While the president came up with a ban, the challenge, as usual, is on enforcement and, of course, corruption.”

Denis Ojwee, a journalist based in northern Uganda’s Gulu city, told IPS that “Our ancestors used to use firewood for cooking but not charcoal. One tree cut for firewood would last longer. So fewer trees were cut for firewood than it is for charcoal.”

Ojwee said the war in northern Uganda may have saved the trees from unsustainable harvesting and that the times of peace have come with a negative impact on the region’s tree cover.

“As much as people died during the war, the environment got saved. But now, trees are getting finished. They have finished other types of trees now they are cutting shea nut trees (Vitellaria paradoxa). Rare species of tree which take very long to grow,”  said Ojwee.

Charcoal from Uganda’s Acholi and Karamoja regions is not only sold to cities in Uganda. It gets through the porous borders and is smuggled to Kenya and beyond.

The Wasteful Archaic Method of Making Charcoal

Charcoal in most of East Africa is produced under anaerobic conditions. That method cannot efficiently regulate the oxygen supply, leading to a lot of wastage.

Xavier Mugumya, a forestry expert, told IPS that the high demand for charcoal had escalated the levels of destruction of trees because people look at it as a source of income.

“If you take a thousand kilograms or a ton of wood and you want to convert it into charcoal using the methods which we normally see, you will only get 100 kilograms of charcoal. That means you are only able to utilize 10% of the original wood. Meaning that 90% of the trees go to waste and become carbon dioxide and ashes,” explained Mugumya.

Corruption and the Role of Organized Crime in the Charcoal Value Chain

The Global Initiative Against Transitional Crime 2021 released the findings of the study investigating the charcoal market in Kenya, Uganda, and South Sudan. It produced a report titled “Black Gold The charcoal grey market in Kenya, Uganda, and South Sudan”.

Michael McLaggan, one of the co-authors of the report, said they found what he described as “a classic grey market, where laws or regulations are flouted at some point in the value chain.”

“There are more organized criminal elements in the charcoal market. And while it is not pronounced in other trades such as drug trade or markets for animal parts, it is present,” said McLaggan

The report found that loose groupings headed by charcoal dealers or people with influence in charcoal value chains commission clandestine production of Charcoal to stay in the market.

Nyathon Hoth Mai, a South Sudanese Climate and natural resources expert, told IPS that small-scale charcoal is produced predominantly by the armed forces in South Sudan, while foreign traders were involved in large-scale production.

“We have seen a lot of traders that come from Sudan, Uganda, DRC, Ethiopia, and Eretria. And they exert a lot of pressure on forests. And then as well how this has the potential of corruption practices,” she said.

Can Charcoal Prohibitionist Policies Work? 

Kenya has since 2018 used sporadic bans on charcoal production. In Uganda, a number of bylaws against trade in charcoal have emerged, but there has not been a national moratorium. There exists a national moratorium in South Sudan on the export of Charcoal, but this has hardly been enforced.

The main shortcoming with prohibition, according to McLaggan, is that where there exists a commodity for which there is a sizable demand, that demand doesn’t disappear upon the commodity being outlawed.

“We noticed that when charcoal gets banned in a certain county, production shifts to another county. Or from one country to another country. So the problem is merely displaced,” he said

 Sustainability Interventions in the Charcoal Sector

At the end of March, the FAO released a study report, Are policies in Africa conducive to sustainability interventions in the charcoal sector? It assessed forestry, environmental and energy policies related to charcoal in 31 African countries.

The report found that more than half of the 31 countries assessed do not have policy frameworks that would encourage sustainable interventions in the charcoal sector.

In other countries, existing policies and regulations tended to be inconsistent and risk creating a confusing and unconducive environment to increase the sustainability of the sector.

The study found that five countries – Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda and Uganda – provide favourable policy frameworks for interventions that would improve sustainability.

Another study, “Cross-border charcoal trade in selected East Central and Southern Africa Countries: A call for regional dialogue”, said although several governments in Africa have banned the cross-border trade of charcoal, making it effectively illegal, markets in border areas and beyond remain vibrant.

“Therefore, the issue of sustainable charcoal production and trade remain critical and must be addressed as part of broader efforts to manage forest-agricultural landscapes across national borders,” it suggested.

While policymakers and environmentalists lobby for change, those trying to make a living from it have uncertain futures.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Persons with disabilities have been disproportionately affected by the events of recent years, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: UNDP Honduras

By Ulrika Modéer and Jose Viera
NEW YORK, Jul 10 2023 (IPS)

This year marks halfway towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), an ambitious agenda which set out to transform our world.

We have always known that the goals cannot be realized without the inclusion of persons with disabilities. From poverty to inequality, climate to health the promise to leave no-one behind is the bedrock of the SDG call to action.

Unfortunately, the midway indicators should give us all cause for concern. The UN Secretary-General recently announced that progress on 50 percent is weak and insufficient and we have stalled or gone into reverse on more than 30 percent of the goals.

And what can this lack of SDG progress tell us about disability inclusion?

Worryingly, very little. While the SDGs include persons with disabilities, this does not fully extend into the monitoring. Only seven out of 169 targets specifically address disability inclusion and only 10 of their 231 indicators explicitly require disability data disaggregation.

However even without specific SDG data, the extent of progress must be called into question when we see that, in 2023, the 1.3 billion people worldwide who experience significant disability, still face a range of barriers to inclusion.

While specific actions to progress disability inclusion undoubtedly need reinvigorating, it is also important to remember that we are living in unprecedented, testing times.

The COVID-19 pandemic, the largest cost of living crisis this generation has ever seen, climate change and increasing conflicts are placing pressure on communities all over the world at a ferocity and speed which we have rarely seen before.

And while everyone may be affected by these interconnected crises, they are not affected equally. The most vulnerable always bear the greatest burden and persons with disabilities have been disproportionately affected by the events of recent years.

Yet despite these challenges, across the world, disability inclusion has been gathering greater momentum. Even in the most challenging of crisis settings, such as the war in Ukraine, we have seen that early assessments such as the one UNDP carried out – looking at how to improve the accessibility of information and notifications in crises, and the specific difficulties persons with disabilities face during evacuations – have brought together persons with disabilities, civil society and government partners to help bring about change.

These joint efforts also give recognition to the importance of not only taking into account the needs of persons with disabilities as beneficiaries of aid, but also their engagement as key actors in humanitarian response planning.

An increased understanding of intersectionality and recognition of the multiple factors which affect people’s lived experience is also taking hold, and it is awe-inspiring to see the extent to which organizations of persons with disabilities are driving forward this change.

But it is time for global and country level policy commitments to catch up. At a global level monitoring of the SDGs must include greater involvement of organizations of persons with disabilities, and this should be matched with investment for these groups, to ensure capacity building programmes around the SDGs can scale up.

Without this, the disability community and underrepresented groups will continue to struggle to take part in national SDG plans.

The collection of disability-specific SDG data is also a priority. Persons with disabilities are often excluded from participating in data collection processes, leading to an under-representation of their perspectives.

Data collection mechanisms designed by and with persons with disabilities and their respective organizations, including disaggregated data on disability types, age and gender, are vital yet currently missing.

At a national level, we must fast track implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which sets out to promote, protect and ensure the human rights of persons with disabilities.

Significant progress has been made since 2008, when the convention came into force, but more must be done to develop policies and legislative frameworks in close consultation with persons with disabilities and their respective organizations, and to couple this with strong political will and the necessary resources.

UNDP and the International Disability Alliance (IDA) are working together with global partners to advance this work, recognizing that it is a prerequisite to achieving the SDGs.

But much more remains to be done. Because we cannot truly claim progress when in large parts of the world, persons with disabilities are still unable to equally and meaningfully participate in the world around them.

When they remain unheard and unseen in programmes designed to meet their needs, and when systemic barriers to their full inclusion and participation in society still exist.

This year offers an important moment for reflection, to take stock of what has been achieved but also – critically – to course correct. Persons with disabilities are some of the most marginalized and excluded in the world.

Righting this wrong is one of the ways that we can get the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda back on track. This is not a task for one group or one country. It will require cooperation across the board, political will and perhaps most importantly – real collaboration with persons with disabilities and their representative organizations – recognizing that they are the ones who stand to benefit or lose the most from the progress being made.

Ulrika Modeer is UN Assistant Secretary-General and Director of the Bureau of External Relations and Advocacy, UNDP; Jose Viera is Advocacy Director, International Disability Alliance.

SOURCE: UNDP

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Experts continue to debate where insurance belongs in climate financing. Credit: Peter Richards/IPS

By Jamie Cummings
CHAPEL HILL, NC, USA, Jul 7 2023 (IPS)

Small Island Developing States (or SIDS) have been talking about loss and damage in an insurance context since the creation of the UNFCCC. The original 1990s outline of the UNFCCC included the proposal for an international insurance fund that would compensate low-lying countries for losses from rising sea levels in the future, however, this fund was never adopted in the final text.

The 2023 Climate Conference COP27 in Sharm put loss and damage clearly on the political agenda with the agreement to set up a Transitional Committee to seek to establish a fund for Loss and Damage and to look at other ways to help countries and people address disasters.

Today the conversations around insurance in regard to loss and damage have shifted. Some argue that insurance comes up short when addressing loss and damage. For example, one idea of an insurance fund would require all parties, including those from the Global South, who have contributed the least to global emissions, to buy in and share the risk burden.

Prevention is critical but fails to address the question of losses and damages which have already occurred. If vulnerable communities are faced with climate disasters, they must have community resilience (i.e., resources), which can be secured through accessible insurance

This idea negates the historical responsibility of the Global North as leading polluters. Experts continue to debate where insurance belongs in climate financing and this article intends to highlight some critical thinkers in the space.

Paul Hudson, a lecturer of Environmental Economics at the University of York and frequent contributor to the International Science Council, contends that insurance can still be a useful tool for addressing natural hazards and climate impacts if its function in the private or public sector is previously determined.

“In order for society to have a great degree of adaptive capacity we still need to work out what is the actual role we expect insurance to achieve,” Hudson said.

According to Hudson, the ideas of insurance in the public and private sectors are in contention. In discussions around insurance, people often use the language of private responsibility in relation to a compensation fund but what may be more necessary is for people to simply have an accessible and affordable means of compensation, which is the role of a public good.

An additional fear is that countries fall back on the private insurance sector too often when they have yet to provide the funding for adaptation and mitigation, which puts the commitment to losses and damages in question. Still, perhaps there is a role for the private and public insurance sector despite its shortcomings.

Experts are considering ways to integrate both private and public solutions so the most vulnerable populations are protected from climate-induced losses and damages.

Raghuveer Vinukollu, Senior Vice President and Climate Resilience and Solutions Lead at Munich Reinsurance America, Inc., argues that an integrated approach could provide a sustainable and affordable solution to the question of insurance. Vinukollu supports a bottom-up and top-down process to address resiliency.

Resilience from both angles aims to mitigate the protection gap caused by high costs. Such a model underscores the importance of community resilience as well as risk prevention, promoting the whole of society’s safety from risk rather than the few who can afford a premium.

Again, prevention is critical but fails to address the question of losses and damages which have already occurred. If vulnerable communities are faced with climate disasters, they must have community resilience (i.e., resources), which can be secured through accessible insurance.

Waterfront Alliance is a company that strives to build community resilience in part through education. Joseph Sutkowi, the group’s Chief Waterfront Design Officer, explains that it is critical to standardize aspects of design and make such knowledge accessible.

In this way, architects and engineers from around the world can create infrastructure built for the community and will be resilient in the face of natural disasters. Additionally, spreading awareness about flood risk–or other climate hazards–can in turn raise awareness around purchasing insurance that could be critical to forming communities that can recover from disasters.

The crucial piece of this argument on the implementation of insurance mechanisms is that they must not exclude the most vulnerable groups, including low-income communities. Here, Mathieu Verougstraete, Lead on Disaster Risk Reduction Financing and Infrastructure Resilience for UNDRR, suggests countries from the Global North have a role to play.

Verougstraete asserts that international cooperation would allow donor countries to step in and provide a mechanism to ensure that insurance remains affordable and still provides the protection the vulnerable countries need.

Brandon Mathews works directly with these vulnerable nations to meet their needs. Mathews is the head of the Vulnerable 20 (V20) Sustainable Insurance Facility within the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The facility funds insurance for micro, small, and medium enterprises which are the “cornerstone of economies.”

Aligning with vulnerable groups means giving them ownership. Oda Henriksen, Climate Risk Manager for Food Security as a Financing Advisor at United Nations World Food Program (UN WFP), has highlighted ownership as a key finding based on case studies in Belize and Nicaragua with insurance programs.

UN WFP argues that local government and private sector contributions, as well as consumer empowerment, are essential for a sustainable approach to insurance in disaster risk reduction.

Held on June 1st the Insurance Development Forum signed an agreement to advance the Global Resilience Index with the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) to “help countries, financial institutions and investors, map and quantify their current and future climate and disaster risks and demonstrate the benefits of investing in resilience.”

With Loss and Damage now near the center of the political preparations for the upcoming Climate Summit COP28 in Dubai in December then a menu of approaches will be explored. Within this menu perhaps there is a role for the insurance sector (in either a private or public sector capacity) if done the right way.

A strong insurance system should examine all of the stipulations raised by experts in the field. The system must also be continuously revised to meet the evolving demands of vulnerable climate communities. With livelihoods at risk, potential solutions must be critiqued and considered from all angles.

Jamie Cummings is part of a Belmont Forum-funded grant, Re-Energize Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience for Sustainable Development. She was the climate change focal point for the recent UNFCCC Bonn Climate Conference for the Sendai Stakeholder Engagement Mechanism. With additional support from Rene Marker-Katz and Cameron Mcbroom-Fitterer, Associate Researchers with Re-Energize DR3.

 

A view of the Canoas Wind Farm, owned by Neoenergia, the Brazilian subsidiary of Spain's Iberdrola. Several wind farms with hundreds of turbines have already been built in the mountains of the Seridó mountain range, which vertically cross the state of Paraíba, in the Northeast region of Brazil, and are continuing to expand. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
SANTA LUZIA, Brazil , Jul 7 2023 (IPS)

“Anxiety, insomnia and depression have become widespread. We don’t sleep well, I wake up three, four times a night,” complained Brazilian farmer Roselma de Melo Oliveira, 35, who has lived 160 meters from a wind turbine for eight years.

Her story illustrates the ordeal of at least 80 families who decided to hire a lawyer to demand compensation from the company that owns the Ventos de Santa Brigida wind farm complex in Caetés, a municipality of 28,000 inhabitants in the state of Pernambuco, in the Northeast region of Brazil."We are not against wind energy, but against the way these large projects are implemented, without studying or avoiding their impacts." -- Roselma de Melo Oliveira

Dozens of other families affected by the proximity of the wind towers have not joined the legal action, largely because they fear losing the rental income from part of their land where one or more wind turbines have been erected.

The company pays them about 290 dollars for each wind tower, which represents 1.5 percent of the electricity generated and sold, according to Oliveira. Those who were not offered or did not accept the lease are left with the damage and no profits.

Built in 2015 by the national company Casa dos Ventos and sold the following year to the British corporation Cubico Sustainable Investments, the set of seven wind farms, consisting of 107 wind turbines 80 meters high, has a total installed capacity of 182 megawatts, enough to supply 350,000 homes.

The wind energy boom has intensified in recent years in Brazil’s Northeast region, which accounts for more than 80 percent of the wind electricity generated in the whole country.

 

Severino Olegario, a small farmer impoverished by a plague that destroyed the local cotton crop, took advantage of the arrival of the wind towers on his family’s mountainous land to become the owner of an open-air restaurant, now a tourist attraction in the municipality of Santa Luzia, in the Northeastern Brazilian state of Paraíba. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

 

Wind power boom

This expansion will be accelerated by plans to produce green hydrogen, which requires a large amount of renewable energy for electrolysis, the technology of choice. The region’s enormous wind and solar potential, in addition to its relative proximity to Europe, the great consumer market of green hydrogen, puts the Northeast in a strong position as a supplier of the so-called fuel of the future.

As a result, large energy projects are proliferating in the region, which is mostly semiarid and almost always sunny. The giant parks have triggered local resistance, due to the social and environmental impacts, which are felt more intensely in the Northeast, where small rural properties are the norm.

Brazil currently has 191,702 megawatts of installed capacity, including 53.3 percent hydroelectric, 13.2 percent wind and 4.4 percent solar. The goal is for wind, solar and biomass to contribute 23 percent of the total by 2030, with the Northeast as the epicenter of the production of renewable sources.

“We are not against wind energy, but against the way these large projects are implemented, without studying or avoiding their impacts,” Oliveira said. Renewable sources are not always clean and sustainable, say activists, especially movements led by women in the Northeast.

“Because they are considered low-impact, wind and solar farms obtain permits for implementation and operation more quickly and at a low cost, without in-depth studies,” said José Aderivaldo, a sociologist and secondary school teacher in Santa Luzia, a municipality of 15,000 inhabitants in the semiarid zone of the Northeastern state of Paraíba.

 

The Neoenergia company’s Renewable Complex; in the background can be seen a small part of the solar panels and the wind farm. The synergy between the daytime sunshine and nighttime winds generates enough electricity for 1.3 million homes in the Northeast region of Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

 

“But solar energy has a greater impact, it is more invasive. A wind farm has little impact on livestock, which do lose a lot of space to solar, more extensive in terms of the land it occupies,” he told IPS.

His field of observation is the Neoenergía company’s Renewable Complex, a project that combines wind power, with 136 wind turbines in the Chafariz complex in the mountains, and 228,000 photovoltaic panels in the Luzia Park on the plains. The former generates more electricity at night, the latter during the day.

In total, they cover 8,700 hectares in Santa Luzia and three other neighboring municipalities and can generate up to 620.4 megawatts, most of it – 471.2 megawatts – coming from the wind in the mountains. They can supply electricity to 1.3 million housing units and avoid the emission of 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide gas, according to the company, a subsidiary of Spain’s Iberdrola.

One of the impacts was a reduction in the local capacity for the production of cheap protein from livestock farming adapted for centuries to the local ecosystem, in addition to extracting rocks for the construction of wind towers and damaging local roads with trucks for their transport, lamented João Telésforo, an engineer and retired professor from the public Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte.

“Neoenergía carried out all the socio-environmental impact studies rigorously in accordance with the country’s current legislation and global best practices. The distance between the homes and the wind turbines is in compliance with the law,” the company responded to IPS in writing, in response to questions about criticism of its activities.

 

Marizelda Duarte da Silva, vice-president of the Esperança Rural Workers Union, is one of the leaders of the women’s resistance to the installation of wind farms in the mountains of the Borborema Plateau, coveted for its strong, regular winds, in the state of Paraíba, in Brazil’s Northeast region. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

 

“In addition, it only leases the land, without purchasing it, which means people stay in their homes and in the countryside, and owners receive payments according to the contracts, with transparency, contributing to income distribution and local quality of life,” it added.

 

Local complaints

But Pedro Olegario, 73, laments that the remuneration has declined, explained by the company as a result of a drop in the energy generated. “The wind is still blowing the same,” he protested.

His wife, Maria José Gomes, 57, complains about the noise, even though the nearest wind turbine is about 500 meters away from their house. “Sometimes I can only fall asleep in the wee hours of the morning with the window tightly closed,” she said.

The couple lives on their share of a 265-hectare property, inherited and divided between the widow and 17 children of the previous owner, on one of the mountains of the Seridó range, part of Santa Luzia.

The 18 family members split the income from four wind towers installed on their land.

 

Not everyone is unhappy

On the other hand, Pedro’s brother Severino Olegario, 50, has a positive view of the Canoas Wind Farm, which also belongs to Neoenergia. The 2019 construction made it possible for him to open a restaurant to feed 40 technicians of the company who installed the mechanical components.

 

On the horizon can be seen one of the hills of the Borborema Plateua, whose occupation by wind turbines faces resistance from the Women’s Movement, which began holding annual marches for agroecology and in defense of the land in 2010. Nearly 5,000 women mobilized this year in opposition to wind farms in the Northeast region of Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

 

“I sleep despite the noise and the remuneration is low because we had to divide it among a very large family,” he said. He also improved the road, which brings tourists to his restaurant on Sundays, after the construction work ended, and slowed the local exodus of people from the region.

About 1,000 families used to live in the three communities up in the mountains, due to the high level of production of cotton. But the cotton boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis) plague in the 1990s destroyed the crop and the value of the land.

“Today there are less than a hundred families left,” said Severino, who continues to grow some of the food that he uses to serve meals at his restaurant.

His perspective differs from the picture described by Oliveira to IPS by telephone from her rural community, Sobradinho, in Caetés, the result of a wind farm authorized before the government’s Brazilian Environmental Institute issued new rules in 2014.

 

The state government’s wind map points out mountain ranges favorable for wind energy. In red are the areas of greatest potential. The longest is the Seridó mountain range, to the west, already covered by dozens of wind farms. About 100 kilometers to the east, the second largest area, Borborema, has a women’s movement that aims to keep it free of wind farms. CREDIT: Government of Paraíba

 

Damage and unfavorable contracts

“There are cases of allergies that we believe are caused by the dust from the wind turbine blades, which also contaminates the water we drink, as it falls on our roofs where we collect rainwater in tanks,” Oliveira complained.

The alternative would be to buy water from tanker trucks which “costs 300 reais (62 dollars ) – too expensive for a family with two children who only harvest beans and corn once a year,” she explained, adding that growing vegetables and medicinal herbs is impossible because of the polluted water.

In addition to the audible sound, vibrations, infrasound (considered inaudible), shadow flicker (the effect of rotating turbine blades causing varying brightness levels and blocking the sun’s rays) and microparticles cause symptoms of “wind turbine syndrome,” according to Wanessa Gomes, a professor at the public University of Pernambuco, who is researching the subject with colleagues from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazil’s leading academic public health institution.

Local families have also been living in fear since a blade broke and fell with a loud bang. Many take medication for sleep and mental illness, according to Oliveira, whose testimony aims to alert other communities to the risks posed by wind energy enterprises.

On Mar. 16, she took her complaints to the Women’s March for Life and Agroecology, organized by the Polo de Borborema in Montadas, a municipality of 5,800 people, about 280 kilometers north of Caetés.

The Polo is a group of rural workers’ unions in 13 municipalities in the Borborema highlands in the state of Paraíba, whose windy mountains are coveted by companies.

The women’s movement, with the support of the non-governmental Consultancy and Services for Alternative Agriculture Projects, mobilized 5,000 women this year, in its fourteenth edition, the second one focused on opposition to wind farms.

“Our struggle is to prevent these parks from being installed here. If many families refuse to sign the contracts with the companies, there will be no parks,” Marizelda Duarte da Silva, 50, vice-president of the Rural Workers Union of Esperança, a municipality of 31,000 inhabitants in the center of Borborema territory, told IPS.

“The contracts are draconian, up to 49 years and renewable by unilateral decision of the company,” said Claudionor Vital Pereira, a lawyer for the Polo union. “They demand unjustifiable confidentiality, charge fines for withdrawing and make variable payments for the lease depending on the amount and prices of energy generated, imposing on the lessor a risk that should only be assumed by the company.”

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Aerial view of the town of Soufriere in the south of Saint Lucia. Sea level rise is threatening coastal areas of small island developing states (SIDS) in the Caribbean. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
SOUFRIERE, SAINT LUCIA, Jul 7 2023 (IPS)

The World Meteorological Organization says adaptation efforts and the switch to renewable energy must increase for regions like Latin America and the Caribbean to face the challenges of a changing climate.

The United Nations Weather Agency released its State of the Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean 2022 report this week.

It states that storms, rainfall and flooding in some areas, along with severe drought in others, resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses and placed a ‘significant’ burden on human lives and wellbeing throughout the reporting period.

It adds that North and South Atlantic sea levels rose at a higher rate than the global average – threatening coastal areas of several Latin American countries and small island developing states (SIDS) in the Caribbean.

While the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season recorded 14 named storms, a near-average number, nine of those cyclones affected land areas, with Fiona and Ian becoming major hurricanes. Hurricane Fiona led to 22 deaths and caused an estimated US$2.5 billion in damage across Puerto Rico, making it the third costliest hurricane on record there. Hurricane Ian drenched Jamaica with 1,500 mm of rainfall that impacted local communities before striking Cuba as a category 3 storm which destroyed over 20,000 hectares of land for food production.

According to the report, temperatures have increased by an average of 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade over the past 30 years, which represents the highest spike since records began.

“Many of the extreme events were influenced by the long-running La Niña but also bore the hallmark of human-induced climate change. The newly arrived El Niño will turn up the heat and bring with it more extreme weather,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

The second most disaster-prone region in the world, Latin America and the Caribbean must now bolster climate change adaptation and mitigation measures, particularly in agriculture, food security and energy. This is also where Early Warning Systems (EWS) come in.

“There are major gaps in the weather and climate observing networks, especially in the least developed countries (LDCs) and small island developing States (SIDS); these gaps represent an obstacle to effective climate monitoring, especially at the regional and national scales, and to the provision of early warnings and adequate climate services. Early warnings are fundamental for anticipating and reducing the impacts of extreme events,” Taalas said in the foreword to the 2022 report.

The WMO is leading the United Nations Early Warnings for All initiative and its Executive Action Plan launched by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres during the World Leaders Summit at the 2022 Climate Change Conference, COP27. The Action Plan aims to protect everyone on earth with early warning systems within five years.

“Only half of our members have proper early warning services in place,” said Taalas. “In order to more efficiently adapt to the consequences of climate change and the resulting increase in the intensity and frequency of many extreme weather and climate events, the Latin American and Caribbean population must be made more aware of climate-related risks, and early warning systems in the region must employ improved multidisciplinary mechanisms.”

According to the report, multi-hazard early warning systems (MHEWS) with the ability to warn of one or more hazards increase the efficiency and consistency of warnings through coordinated and compatible mechanisms. It adds that the Latin America and Caribbean Region experiences considerable early warning challenges. For example, in South America, only 60% of people are covered by these systems.

Over 15 research organizations and 60 scientists contributed to the 2022 report. They are calling for widespread education campaigns on the deadly risks of climate-related disasters and to reinforce public perceptions of the need to react to natural hazard alerts and warnings issued by national institutions.

“The ultimate goal is to ensure that responsibilities, roles and behaviours are well described and made known to everyone involved in the identification and analysis of risks related to weather, water and climate extremes and the early warning providers and recipients.”

This is the WMO’s third annual report, and its release coincided with the hottest day on earth.

With the confirmation that extreme weather and climate shocks are becoming more acute in Latin America and the Caribbean, coupled with global warming and sea level rise, the organization says multi-hazard early warning systems are needed to improve anticipatory action.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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The World Meteorological Organization launched its State of the Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean report this week. Amid above average sea-level rise, drought and global warming, the new publication is calling for ramped up adaptation action to save lives and livelihoods.

Credit: UNICEF/Aleksey Filippov
 
“The war in Ukraine has created a humanitarian and human rights catastrophe, traumatized a generation of children, and accelerated the global food and energy crises,” said Rosemary DiCarlo, Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, addressing the UN Security Council. June 2023

By Roland Bathon
BERLIN, Jul 7 2023 (IPS)

The Wagner uprising – despite its short duration – has demonstrated the vulnerability of Putin’s power system.

In the past, the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin seemed like a dark, mysterious figure somewhere from the depths of the Kremlin’s web of secrets. This also has to do with the fact that he did those ‘jobs’ for the Russian government that took place in a semi-official grey area — such as mercenary assignments in Syria or Africa, or even before that the operation of the Petersburg troll factory with a network of fake media and disinformation machinery.

As his mercenary army PMC Wagner – to which he only openly professed his allegiance at a very late stage – gained considerable combat experience in more and more wars, his personal military power continued to grow. The Wagner fighters, in fact, are his personal soldiers.

This was to become evident in the recent military uprising led by Prigozhin, as the soldiers immediately occupied the large city of Rostov on his orders, advanced on Moscow and simply ignored orders from the Russian authorities to arrest Prigozhin.

As Wagner is the largest Russian-based mercenary formation – according to the British Ministry of Defence, it grew to up to 50,000 soldiers in January – Prigozhin became a real power factor in Russia.

Roland Bathon

Military versus political power

In the purely political sphere, however, Prigozhin was by no means as powerful of a factor to the extent as it was repeatedly interpreted abroad on the basis of his mysterious aura. The pool of media under his control was much smaller than that of ‘businessmen from Putin’s immediate entourage’, Russian journalist and Kremlin expert Andrey Pertsev noted in an analysis after the start of the war. In polls on the most important Russian politicians, his name never appeared in the results, and his earlier calls for a general mobilisation were met with zero sympathy from the Russians.

For Putin, the interactions with Prigozhin never had any special status until his open revolt. According to the Russian political scientist Tatyana Stanovaya, the oligarch was never close enough to the head of state to entrust him with an important political office. Prigozhin’s tasks always remained informal — he used the niches that official state organs could not or would not fill. Thus, he was never integrated into the front row of Russian politics.

Yet, it was precisely this lack of integration that led to the emergence of a dual structure which turned out to be dangerous for the overall structure of Russian power. Prigozhin increasingly staged himself as a counter-elite – even though he himself came from this social class – and progressively engaged in power struggles with the official military hierarchy around the Russian Ministry of Defence. This also succeeded because officially, he always remained a ‘private citizen’ without an office in the top political ranks.

The military leadership countered by wanting to subordinate all volunteer units such as Wagner back to its own command through contractual structures. Prigozhin refused. But here, too, his political isolation and weakness within the Russian apparatus became apparent.

All other leaders of such units, such as Chechen strongman Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov, bowed to the order. Putin himself put his foot down in favour of his Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, who was repeatedly criticised by Prigozhin, and described the contract closures as necessary.

The uprising

Hope was fading away for Prigozhin, a fact that could also become dangerous for him as a person. And so, it came to his uprising – a surprise for all observers. After harsh criticism of the entire war conduct in Ukraine, he mobilised his mercenaries, captured the headquarters of the Russian Southern Forces in Rostov in a coup d’état and sent an advance detachment of Wagner fighters on their way to Moscow – an open military uprising.

Yet, here, too, the great discrepancy between Prigozhin’s military and political influence became immediately apparent. His soldiers quickly advanced up to 200 kilometres on Moscow, destroying initial resistance from government troops on the way, for example, by shooting three helicopters and an aeroplane out of the sky.

His mercenaries followed his orders unconditionally, refused to arrest Prigozhin as ordered by the domestic intelligence service FSB and secured power in Rostov with a massive military presence.

But Prigozhin’s lack of political influence was equally evident. One after another, regional governors declared their loyalty to Putin, and Kadyrov even provided troops to push Wagner PMC out of Rostov.

No one from the presidential administration voiced criticism of the leadership – instead, they united behind the Kremlin. Prigozhin acted militarily quickly and thus gained situational advantages over the sluggish state apparatus. But it was clear that a prolonged armed conflict would consolidate the shaken apparatus and – in case his uprising failed – Prigozhin would face a quick death or a long imprisonment.

The fact that the Kremlin did not take the chance and commissioned Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko to mediate was again due to military uncertainties. For no one knew to what extent war-weary Russian army units would actually fight their mercenary compatriots or perhaps would even partially defect.

After all, the Wagner fighters were able to move into Rostov without any significant resistance, and no one knew how many military officers shared Prigozhin’s anti-establishment populism. The quick end of the revolt also superficially brought back to the Russian hinterland a central element of Putin’s rule: stability.

As a result, both sides in the conflict came to a surprisingly quick agreement. Prigozhin was able to leave for Belarus with Putin’s guarantee of free passage, his entourage obtained immunity from prosecution and retreated to the rear of the Donbass combat zone. An uncertainty remains for the oligarch in that he could still be ‘secretly’ killed.

‘This is the style of the current government’ notes historian Nikolai Svanidze. The FSB also seems to be investigating Prigozhin. But all of this is still better than the almost certain death that would have awaited him and many of his men if the uprising had continued.

For the Kremlin, this action meant damage control, even if the image of being a guarantor of security and stability in Russia was tarnished. Prigozhin thus achieved more than he could have hoped for – if only because he escaped abroad unharmed.

The uprising will leave a lasting mark on the Putin system. Prigozhin and his Wagner army were his personal project, notes Maxim Trudolyubov, editor-in-chief of the exiled Russian newspaper Meduza.

In his view, Putin also used Prigozhin in the war against Ukraine to humiliate those generals who had been unsuccessful in his personal campaign. Now, the ‘PMC uprising’ – despite its short duration – shows the vulnerability of Putin’s power system.

Roland Bathon is a freelance journalist. He writes mainly about Russia and Eastern Europe.

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

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Credit: John Wessels/AFP via Getty Image

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Jul 7 2023 (IPS)

People went to the polls in Sierra Leone on 24 June to pick a president, parliament and municipal representatives. Results were quickly announced and the president sworn in for a second term. But a cloud of doubt lingers.

Runner-up cries foul

The presidential race offered a repeat of the previous vote in 2018, when Julius Madaa Bio beat Samura Kamara in a closely fought runoff, 51.8 per cent to 48.2 per cent. But despite the economy being in worse shape than five years ago – something that might be expected to cost the incumbent support – this time round Bio’s lead was bigger. He took 56.2 per cent to Kamara’s 41.2 per cent in the first round, narrowly clearing the 55 per cent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.

Kamara and his party, the All People’s Congress (APC), immediately cried foul and demanded a rerun, saying there were ‘glaring irregularities’. While observers from the African Union and Economic Community of West African States declared the elections free and fair, others expressed concerns. European Union observers pointed to ‘statistical inconsistencies’ in the presidential election results. These include very high turnout in some districts and a very low number of invalid votes. In addition, seals were reportedly broken on some ballot boxes before votes were counted.

National Election Watch, a coalition of over 400 domestic and international civil society organisations (CSOs), has also reported concerns. It deployed 6,000 observers, covering every polling station, and used a sampling technique to estimate the results – a method that closely matched the final tallies at the last three elections. But this time its results disagreed on all the key figures: levels of support for the two main candidates, turnout and the amount of invalid votes. Based on its analysis, neither candidate was expected to clear the 55 per cent hurdle.

For transparency, domestic and international observers are calling on the electoral commission to publish detailed results with data disaggregated by polling station. The commission has said it will do so but it will take some time.

The shadow of violence

Bio has already been sworn in for his second term. His party, the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), has also been declared the clear winner of parliamentary elections, taking 60 per cent of seats.

The two sides however seem set to continue at loggerheads. The APC has said it won’t take part in government at any level, including parliament and municipal councils, while state officials have said that comments from civil society and foreign governments could inflame tensions and Bio has accused governments that have expressed concern of political interference.

Over all this lurks the shadow of violence. The scars of the country’s 1991 to 2002 civil war, when tens of thousands were killed, still run deep, and any outbreak of violence sparks fears of escalation. On election day, violence was seen at a small number of polling stations. During the campaign, APC supporters complained of attacks in the south and east regions, where SLPP backing is strongest, while SLLP members also reported violence by opposition followers.

A few days before the election, violence broke out outside the APC’s headquarters in Freetown, with one person reported dead as a result of a shooting, which the APC blamed on the police. A post-election meeting at the same venue saw police surround the building and use firearms and teargas. Nurse and APC volunteer Hawa Dumbaya died after being shot in the head.

Clearly the concern shouldn’t only be about public violence – it must also be about police violence. People don’t need to look back as far as the civil war to see the danger. Last year protests sparked by soaring food inflation turned deadly, and by the time calm had returned, over 20 protesters and bystanders and six police officers had been killed. In response to protest vandalism and property damage, the police were alleged to have used live ammunition.

Troublingly, Bio responded to these protests by claiming they were acts of terrorism with the intent of overthrowing the government. He blamed the APC, since protests took place in regions where the party has most support. The government set up a committee to investigate the violence, but its report followed the government’s line.

While the scale of the 2022 violence was unprecedented in peacetime Sierra Leone, this wasn’t the first instance of the authorities responding to protests with excessive force. Meanwhile no one in the police has been held to account. It isn’t encouraging if fresh protests now result.

Transparency urgently needed

Polls always put Bio ahead, and the distribution of regional and ethnic loyalties favours him. Bio also forged alliances with some parties that had previously ran against him, incentivised by changes to the electoral system that made it harder for smaller parties to enter parliament. National Election Watch’s figures still suggest Bio was ahead of Kamara – just not by enough to avoid the runoff.

The fact that Bio didn’t clear the runoff hurdle by much is the crux of the matter, because relatively small numbers of inaccuracies could have made the difference between whether or not a second vote and continued campaigning took place.

The crucial question is what this now means for trust in democracy. If suspicions aren’t dispelled by the publication of detailed and disaggregated data and allegations aren’t fully investigated, they will thrive and take hold, even should they turn out not to be true. That can only be a setback for democracy. Sierra Leone’s people have shown consistently high levels of electoral turnout and continue to favour democracy above any other regime. But in any country, trust in democracy can be fragile and, once lost, hard to restore.

In this period of uncertainty, both sides have a responsibility to refrain from inflammatory language and actions. The government must allow peaceful protests and ensure the police don’t respond with excessive force. There’s no way forward that involves violence, whatever the source.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

 

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Experts encourage parents to vaccinate their children against typhoid to ensure that the child has access to clean drinking water. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Jul 6 2023 (IPS)

The first thing you notice about eight-month-old Manahil Zeeshan is how tiny she looks on the adult-size hospital bed at the government-run Sindh Institute of Child Health and Neonatology (SICHN) in Korangi, a neighbourhood in Karachi.

Her right foot is taped with a cannula, and she whimpers incessantly. “I have been in and out of the hospital for the last seven days,” said Uzma Mohammad, Zeeshan’s mom, with worry lines on her forehead. “High fever that refused to come down, severe cough for days and breathlessness,” were some of the symptoms Mohammad described. She was convinced someone had “put a spell” on her daughter.

The doctors, however, suspected she had typhoid.

Salmonella Typhi bacteria cause typhoid fever, and Salmonella Paratyphi bacteria cause paratyphoid fever. According to the US-based public health agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with a fever that can be as high as 103 to 104°F (39 to 40°C), the sick person can have weakness, stomach pain, headache, diarrhoea or constipation, cough, and loss of appetite. Some people have a rash of flat, rose-coloured spots.  Internal bleeding and death can occur but are rare. It affects between 11 and 20 million people each year, leading to 128,000 to 161,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The highest fatality rates are reported in children under four years of age.

While Zeeshan’s blood culture report had yet to come to ascertain the cause of her sickness, she needed urgent medical care, said Dr Shabita Bai, who had admitted her.

“We could not wait for five days for the blood culture report as she was not doing well. And because she had already been given an antibiotic (a medicine used to kill bacteria) from outside, our chances of finding if the baby had typhoid for sure were slim, and we had to rely on the history,” justified Bai.

Decisions had to be made. Based on her condition, symptoms, and clinical diagnosis, the baby was given Ceftriaxone, an intravenous antibiotic, but she showed no improvement. The doctors then administered the stronger Meropeneme intravenously, a last-resort antibiotic.

Manahil Zeeshan’s foot has a drip in an effort to bring her temperature down and fight suspected typhoid. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

Battling the Superbug

But even if she had typhoid, the bacteria in her body had taken on the form of a superbug — the extensively drug-resistant (XDR) typhoid and the current antimicrobials had become ineffective, said paediatrician Dr Jamal Raza, the executive director of the SICHN.

According to a Lancet study published in 2022, multidrug-resistant (MDR) typhoid has been seen in Pakistan, while typhoid bacteria resistant to the widely-used antibiotic azithromycin have been found in Bangladesh, Nepal and India. “Our analysis revealed a declining trend of MDR typhoid in south Asia, except for Pakistan, where XDR S Typhi emerged in 2016 and rapidly replaced less-resistant strains,” stated the study, which researchers claim is the largest ever examination of the S.Typhi bacterium.

The reason why antibiotics are losing their punch against some types of bacteria, said Raza, was the “indiscriminate use of antibiotics” that health practitioners prescribe to provide immediate relief. Another big problem was self-medication by people. “I know people often use an old prescription by a doctor to get the same medicine if they feel they have the same symptoms, thinking they do not need to visit the doctor.”

But he pointed out viruses, which are also small germs like bacteria, are causing bacteria-like infections, like a cold or the flu.

“Taking an antibiotic for the latter does not treat the disease; it only leads to antibiotic resistance,” said Raza.

A study conducted by researchers from three medical institutions, namely, the Aga Khan University (AKU) in Karachi, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in Rawalpindi, and the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital & Research Center (SKH) in Lahore in 2018, found indiscriminate use of antibiotics to be causing new drug-resistant “superbugs.”

It found a high prevalence of multidrug and fluoroquinolone resistance for both S.Typhi and S. Paratyphi strains of typhoid bacteria. From 20% in 1992, the resistance was found to have increased to around 50% in 2015. The stubborn bacteria were resistant to antibiotics like ampicillin, chloramphenicol (and co-trimoxazole), as well as fluoroquinolone (ciprofloxacin and/or ofloxacin).

“The situation is quite grim,” said Dr Mashal Khan, chairperson of the government-run paediatric medicine department at Karachi’s National Institute of Child Health, referring to the increase in the number of children developing resistance to typhoid drugs. His worry is not that the bacteria has spread; his concern is the bacteria has mutated and become resistant to the drug.

“We’re running out of new antibiotics to treat bacterial infections; Meropeneme is the last one, and a very expensive one too,” he said resignedly, adding: “Although the development of newer antibiotics is the need of the day, I must emphasise the rational use of the ones being used is more urgent.”

Developing new drugs is challenging, and antibiotics more so, as the science is tricky.

“Antibiotics are not the most lucrative drugs to develop for pharmaceuticals as their utility is limited in the future due to the bacteria developing the ability to resist them,” said Infectious Diseases specialist and epidemiologist Dr Faisal Mahmood at the Aga Khan University Hospital in Karachi. “A lot of money goes into developing new drugs, and since most of the funding is from the global north, they prefer to work on infections which concern them directly. Typhoid is unfortunately endemic in the low and middle-income countries in the South, which have poorer water quality and have warmer, more humid climates.”

And that is why the only sure-shot way of reducing the disease burden of typhoid is to vaccinate the children.

In 2019, Pakistan became the first country to get the World Health Organization (WHO)-recommended single-dose typhoid conjugate vaccine (TCV) injected intramuscularly, added to its routine immunisation (RI) regime. This is given to babies at nine months, alongside measles-rubella vaccinations, without impacting either vaccine.

“Childhood vaccination complemented with clean drinking water and improved hygiene practices is the much more cost-effective way of eradicating typhoid than pumping antibiotics in a child,” said Raza. Meropenem costs as much as Rs. 30,000 (USD 105) for a 10-day course, and if hospitalisation is included, it can go up to Rs 100,000 ($349), said the doctor. Being in a government hospital, Zeeshan is treated free of cost.

Eight-month-old Manahil Zeeshan is treated for typhoid at the government-run Sindh Institute of Child Health and Neonatology (SICHN) in Korangi, a neighbourhood in Karachi. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

Typhoid Vaccine Launch Hits a Snag as Covid-19 Surfaces

The 2019 TCV campaign was first launched in the two cities of Sindh – Karachi and Hyderabad (children up to 15 years of age were also given a shot), which reported the highest number of typhoid cases among children. There was a pause when Covid-19 hit the world. But by 2022, TCV had been launched across Pakistan, and 35.5 million children were vaccinated, after which it was added to the government-run Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) programme.

“Many parents do not know that the TCV is a more effective vaccine but only available at government vaccination centres, and not at private clinics and hospitals as Gavi has only given it to the government of Pakistan,” said paediatrician Dr D.S. Akram.

“There is another typhoid vaccine available in the private sector (typhoid polysaccharide vaccine), but it can only be given to children over two years of age, and it needs boosters every three years. My advice to parents is to vaccinate their kids against typhoid bacteria at nine months,” she said.

But it is still a drop in the ocean, and the fight against typhoid and other childhood diseases continues. The WHO places Pakistan among the ten countries that account for almost two-thirds of the world’s unimmunised children.

When Covid-19 hit the country’s already crumbling health system, it also brought the country’s immunisation programme to a halt too. An estimated 1.5 million children across Pakistan missed out on basic vaccines from March to May 2020, according to Gavi.

For Pakistan, which already has low immunisation coverage (the percentage of fully immunised children aged 12-23 months is just 66%), it meant a further dip in coverage which led to an unprecedented rise in the number of zero-dose children (those that have not received any routine vaccine). Add to these were the almost 19,000 new births every day. But when the lockdown eased and vaccinators returned to work, there was less demand for vaccination, having been replaced by fear of the new virus.

While Pakistan has yet to reach the optimal immunisation coverage of 90%, during Covid-19, Pakistan’s EPI received plaudits internationally for taking both vaccine coverage and the number of zero-dose children close to pre-pandemic levels in 2021. “What Pakistan achieved needs to be celebrated. In fact, Pakistan and Chad are used as examples internationally of how to get it right in an emergency,” said Huma Khawar, an immunisation and child health advocate working closely with EPI.

“Despite a year’s delay due to Covid-19, which was unforeseen, I think it is the best thing that the government has done for its country’s children,” said Khawar. She credited the RI programme that bounced back to the pre-pandemic level in 2021.

Clean water, Good Hygiene Key to Preventing typhoid

While immunisation can protect children from getting infected, clean drinking water and improved hygiene practices can reduce the risk of catching the disease to a great extent.

“Vaccines provide immunity when there is exposure to the bacteria,” agreed Dr Jai Das, assistant director at the Institute for Global Health and Development at the Aga Khan University and one of the co-authors of the 2018 report on typhoid, but emphasised the need for improved water and sanitation, a situation that continues to remain dismal and compromised in Pakistan.

The same study not only found a strong correlation between water and sanitation but to literacy levels as well. In addition, it stressed improving the country’s food safety protocols and implementing regulations.

While Mohammad believes that her daughter is under a curse, one reason could be that the unpasteurised cow’s milk she gives her daughter may not be properly boiled at home. “I was unable to breastfeed her,” she said. Further, she confessed to diluting it with unboiled tap water to make it last longer.

Doctors say giving Pakistani babies a lease of life is simple and costs nothing. “Exclusive breastfeeding up to at least six months of age (right now it is only 43%), attaining 90% coverage of RI across Pakistan and improving water and sanitation quality,” according to Dr Akram.

Bacteria Don’t Respect Geographic Borders

The XDR typhoid bacteria propagating in Pakistan has crossed borders and reached as far as the UK, Canada and the US. Earlier this year, a team of Pakistani and US researchers published their findings in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, stating that with numerous typhoid bacteria variants circulating in Pakistan have also been identified in Southeast Asia and Eastern and Southern Africa and have been introduced into the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States by travellers.

The Lancet study said strains from South Asia had spread 200 times to other countries since 1990. When these superbugs grow and spread, they can cause infections that are hard to treat. Sometimes they can even spread the resistance to other bacteria they meet.

The future looks frightening. While the need for improving water and sanitation cannot be overemphasised, along with the need for vaccinating children, newer and stronger antibiotics need to be developed and fast as typhoid may surface in deadlier ways than now since very few antibiotics remain effective against the bacteria.

Note: This story was supported by the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Internews

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Excerpt:

Childhood vaccination, complemented with clean drinking water and improved hygiene practices, are the key to eradication of typhoid XDR, not indiscriminate use of antibiotics, say Pakistan health experts.

APMDD and allies demonstrate on the streets in the Philippines. Credit: Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD)

By Bhumika Muchhala and María José Romero
NEW YORK / BRUSSELS, Jul 6 2023 (IPS)

One message that was repeated throughout last month’s summit on a so-called “New Global Financing Pact” was that developing countries urgently need mass financing to tackle the climate and biodiversity emergency. And there is not enough of it in public coffers.

Unfortunately, the false narrative that the only way to fill this gap is to ‘leverage’ more private finance also persisted. The resulting Paris Agenda for People and Planet stated: “meeting global challenges will depend on the scaling up of private capital flows.” This should be achieved in large part by revamping the role of multilateral development banks (MDBs).

Last December, the World Bank Group (WBG), the biggest MDB, launched its so-called “evolution” process, with the support of G7 governments. This set the institution to work on increasing its lending by deepening its reliance on the financial market.

The dogged reliance on private capital as saviour appears to be steeped in capitalist realism. It is believed to be implausible for the public sector to deliver the scale of financing needed to address the climate and development crisis.

Private capital, which can be leveraged using public money, securitised and reproduced is favoured as the pragmatic choice. However, while the financing gap to deliver on the sustainable development goals is very real, the neat narrative buttressing private capital obscures two empirical realities.

First is the absence of rich countries’ political will to deliver on agreed commitments, from the 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income in development aid made in 1970 to the US$100 billion per year climate financing agreed in 2009.

Second, the ongoing systemic wealth drain from developing to rich countries. Since 1982, developing countries as a whole have transferred an estimated US$4.2 trillion in interest payments to global north-based creditors, far outstripping aid flows and concessional lending during the same period.

Additionally, tax-related illicit financial flows cost countries hundreds of billions of dollars in lost tax income every year. Debt servicing is draining approximately 25 per cent of total government spending in developing countries as a whole, hijacking both climate and SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) financing.

The allure of private finance

Last month, in a new attempt to ‘leverage’ private capital, the WBG launched the Private Sector Investment Lab, a partnership with the private sector that aims to “rapidly scale solutions that address the barriers preventing private sector investment.”

Furthermore, it announced “an expanded toolkit for crisis preparedness, response, and recovery” that includes providing “new types of insurance” to backstop private sector projects. This follows a not-so-new pattern articulated in the WBG’s Evolution Roadmap draft published in April

While the WBG is set to expand its mandate to incorporate “sustainability” considerations, the approach is still rooted in a heady cocktail of de-risking instruments such as risk guarantees, blended finance and first-loss positions by governments, and in tweaking national regulatory frameworks to enable a business-friendly environment.

The goal is as singular as the solution: to make investment more profitable for the private sector. The (optimistic) rationale: ‘incentivising’ private capital will ‘crowd in’ economic growth and climate, biodiversity and development financing. This assumes that it is possible to equate commercial goals and the public interest, which is not always the case without creating financial barriers that undermine access to public services, such as user fees.

It also ignores that risks are transferred from private to public actors, further increasing debt vulnerabilities, and the developmental dilemma posed by prioritising private profits over distributive goals and state sovereignty.

In ongoing discussions about the Roadmap, it is yet to be seen if the WBG will incorporate sufficient provisions within its plans to ensure the recipient state’s right to regulate in the public interest for a rights-based economy that upholds distributive justice. That is, economic, climate and gender equity.

Solutions with legitimacy

The largest coalition of developing countries in the United Nations (known as the “Group of 77”), representing 134 nations, have been calling for reform of the international tax, debt and financial architecture for many years.

These calls, enshrined in resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly, includes establishing a multilateral legal framework that would comprehensively address unsustainable and illegitimate debt, including through extensive debt restructuring and cancellation, and agreeing on a UN Tax Convention with equitable participation of developing countries to address tax abuse by multinational corporations and other illicit financial flows.

As was made clear last month in several developing countries’ calls, a reform agenda should not be limited to merely boosting MDBs’ coffers – via financial innovation techniques – but rather include governance reform that meaningfully augments the voice and vote of developing countries in macroeconomic decision-making, which is the litmus test for legitimate and democratic economic governance.

Furthermore, for many in civil society, for the WBG to “evolve” in a credible way it must also seek to independently evaluate the development impact of its policy prescriptions for developing countries over recent decades. Civil society organisations are stating this again in official feedback on the Evolution Roadmap submitted to the Bank this week.

The ways in which the mythology of the private financier is construed dangerously omits the concrete reforms for historical economic justice, and state sovereignty, that the global south are demanding. This disjuncture calls for a clear-eyed questioning of the allure of private finance. Here lies the difference between new forms of extraction as opposed to change towards redistributive justice.

https://www.eurodad.org/civil_society_calls_for_rethink_of_world_banks_evolution_roadmap

Bhumika Muchhala is Political Economist and Senior Advisor at Third World Network
and María José Romero is Policy and Advocacy Manager at the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad)

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Credit: Silvia Rodríguez/AFP via Getty Images

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jul 5 2023 (IPS)

When Guatemalans went to the polls on 25 June, distrust and disillusionment were rife. First place in the presidential contest was claimed by none of the candidates: it went to invalid votes, at 17 per cent. Many didn’t bother, resulting in an abstention rate over 40 per cent.

But an unexpected development brought some hope: Bernardo Arévalo, leader of the progressive Movimiento Semilla, made it to the runoff.

Arévalo’s promise to fight against systemic corruption and bring back the numerous justice operators – people such as judges, prosecutors and public defenders – currently in exile to help clean up institutions is causing great concern for those who profit from the current state of affairs. The fact that Arévalo could become Guatemala’s next president has made the election results an instant object of contention.

Corruption and democratic decline

Guatemalan electoral processes aren’t pristine, but that isn’t where the most serious problems lie. Civic freedoms are steadily deteriorating and state institutions have been weakened by predatory elites and coopted by organised crime. Transparency International finds evidence of strong influence by organised criminals over politics and politicians, with some criminals themselves in office.

No wonder Guatemalans have a low level of confidence in state institutions. In the latest Latinobarómetro report, the church was by far the most trusted institution, winning the trust of 71 per cent of people, followed at some distance by the armed forces and police. But only nine per cent of people trust political parties, and trust is also very low in Congress, electoral bodies and the judiciary.

At 25 per cent, satisfaction with the performance of democracy is extremely low – as is the number of people who think the country is ruled for the benefit of all rather than just elites.

The run-up to the vote

Those denouncing corruption, collusion, illegal private sector practices and human rights abuses have increasingly been subjected to smear campaigns, surveillance, harassment and criminalisation by state authorities. Many have been pushed into exile. Rising violence against journalists and human rights defenders, including killings – the latest being that of journalist Orlando Villanueva – recently led the CIVICUS Monitor to downgrade its civic space rating for Guatemala to the second-worst category, repressed.

Restrictions on civic freedoms increased in the run-up to elections, ranging from smear campaigns to criminalisation. On 14 June, José Rubén Zamora, head of the newspaper elPeriódico, which had exposed more than 200 corruption cases, was sentenced to six years in prison for alleged money laundering. Zamora had been subjected to harassment and intimidation for years and had survived an assassination attempt.

An observation mission carried out by Reporters Without Borders and others ahead of voting warned that the absence of basic press freedoms made it impossible to guarantee a legitimate electoral process.

The process was indeed marred by multiple irregularities, starting with the disqualification of several contenders, including Indigenous leader Thelma Cabrera and her running mate, Jordán Rodas Andrade, the only left-wing candidacy polls showed stood a fighting chance. The candidate who led opinion polls, conservative business leader and TikTok star Carlos Pineda, was also disqualified.

What happened on 25 June

With two dozen candidates competing in the presidential race, it was no surprise that none reached the 50 per cent threshold required to avoid a runoff. What was unexpected was Arévalo’s good performance.

The front-runner, Sandra Torres of National Unity of Hope, is a political insider, Guatemala’s first lady between 2008 and 2011. Now standing for the third time in a row, she received 16 per cent of the vote. If elected, she would become Guatemala’s first female president. But she’s by no means a champion of women’s rights: she’s a vocal anti-abortion activist and her running mate is an evangelical pastor.

Runner-up Arévalo is an unusual politician at the head of an unusual party. Originally an academic with social-democratic views, he’s currently a member of Congress, where he leads a five-member progressive caucus. His running mate, low-key feminist Karin Herrera, is a microbiology researcher and university professor.

Unlike many Guatemalan parties, Arévalo’s party wasn’t created as a vehicle for someone’s presidential ambitions or corrupt interests: it was the creature of a group of concerned people that grew out of mass anti-corruption protests that broke out in 2015. In 2019, its presidential candidate was disqualified. But it found its footing among middle class groups, young people and women, particularly in Guatemala City.

The aftermath

Opinion polls had placed Arévalo eighth or ninth among the many contenders, so his performance caught elites off guard.

There’s no guarantee he’ll win the run-off. He’d have to gain the votes of the many who abstained or cast blank and invalid votes. But the fact that Arévalo might win has galvanised those who currently profit from the corrupt status quo, and they’re trying to push him out of the race. A majority of pro-establishment parties, including Torres’s party, have submitted complaints demanding a recount. Their supporters converged outside the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), quickly pushing further and calling for a rerun.

While various incidents were recorded on election day – including instances of vote buying, mostly by parties linked to the ruling alliance – international and domestic observers alike concluded that the results were valid and the gap of more than 200,000 votes between Semilla and the next contender, the outgoing president’s party, was insurmountable.

Mirador Electoral, a civil society platform, denounced pressures on the TSE as an attempted ‘electoral coup’. The European Union’s observer mission and the Organization of American States have called for the will of voters to be respected. Arévalo condemned it all as an intimidatory manoeuvre and called for the TSE, the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court to act quickly and responsibly.

Instead, the Constitutional Court ordered the TSE to suspend official certification of results until complaints are resolved. Some fear an attempt to annul the elections will come next.

Guatemala stands at a crossroads. On the eve of voting it seemed on the verge of autocracy. An unexpected result hinted at the possibility of a much brighter path – one that fills many with hope but scares those who see their wealth and power endangered. The coming days and weeks will witness an arm-wrestling match between the past and the future, with three potential outcomes.

In the worst-case scenario, the runoff continues to be delayed by legal appeals and the task of appointing a president ultimately falls to Congress. In the second-worst scenario, a vote-by-vote recount is conducted instead of a simple cross-check of tally sheets, fraud occurs along the way and the ruling party’s candidate takes Arévalo’s runoff spot. Either way, the past wins.

Only if the recount is properly conducted, the results are corroborated and the runoff is held on 20 August will the future have a fighting chance. The corrupt establishment may still beat Arévalo – but this decision belongs to no one but the citizens of Guatemala.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

 

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