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The European Union is facing increasingly complex and protracted crises and massive humanitarian consequences of the Syrian and Yemen conflicts and long-standing political, economic and social crises in Africa. Shifting geopolitics and global failures in the diplomatic sphere to prevent and resolve violent conflict, which the EU has also contributed to, or more recently failures in global health governance, have created and exacerbated humanitarian need. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated existing humanitarian crises and is likely to cause additional humanitarian emergencies in other countries, has added to an already full agenda of challenges for the new leadership of the European Commission.

The new European Commission has set out to address global challenges as a “Geopolitical Commission” , linking internal and external policy and enhancing European leadership across a number of policy areas, including humanitarian aid. The envisaged role for humanitarian aid consists of working together with development and security actors to better respond to protracted crises. Yet, although the EU has been advocating and implementing the integrated approach for the past 20 years, many of its core challenges remain unresolved. Given the EU’s current strong focus on its internal interests (e.g., migration management, security, and recently crisis management in response to COVID-19 within the EU’s borders), tensions could arise between humanitarian needs and principles and other EU priorities.

This brief analyses current issues in the EU’s humanitarian aid and makes recommendations for responding to the challenges ahead. Specifically, it addresses the tensions between the Commission’s ambition to be a geopolitical actor and to better respond to multidimensional crises through a ‘nexus approach’ and the strong needs-based humanitarian assistance the EU provides. The analysis is based on a structured review of academic and policy sources, complemented by interviews with Brussels-based humanitarian aid policymakers.

The European Union is facing increasingly complex and protracted crises and massive humanitarian consequences of the Syrian and Yemen conflicts and long-standing political, economic and social crises in Africa. Shifting geopolitics and global failures in the diplomatic sphere to prevent and resolve violent conflict, which the EU has also contributed to, or more recently failures in global health governance, have created and exacerbated humanitarian need. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated existing humanitarian crises and is likely to cause additional humanitarian emergencies in other countries, has added to an already full agenda of challenges for the new leadership of the European Commission.

The new European Commission has set out to address global challenges as a “Geopolitical Commission” , linking internal and external policy and enhancing European leadership across a number of policy areas, including humanitarian aid. The envisaged role for humanitarian aid consists of working together with development and security actors to better respond to protracted crises. Yet, although the EU has been advocating and implementing the integrated approach for the past 20 years, many of its core challenges remain unresolved. Given the EU’s current strong focus on its internal interests (e.g., migration management, security, and recently crisis management in response to COVID-19 within the EU’s borders), tensions could arise between humanitarian needs and principles and other EU priorities.

This brief analyses current issues in the EU’s humanitarian aid and makes recommendations for responding to the challenges ahead. Specifically, it addresses the tensions between the Commission’s ambition to be a geopolitical actor and to better respond to multidimensional crises through a ‘nexus approach’ and the strong needs-based humanitarian assistance the EU provides. The analysis is based on a structured review of academic and policy sources, complemented by interviews with Brussels-based humanitarian aid policymakers.

The European Union is facing increasingly complex and protracted crises and massive humanitarian consequences of the Syrian and Yemen conflicts and long-standing political, economic and social crises in Africa. Shifting geopolitics and global failures in the diplomatic sphere to prevent and resolve violent conflict, which the EU has also contributed to, or more recently failures in global health governance, have created and exacerbated humanitarian need. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated existing humanitarian crises and is likely to cause additional humanitarian emergencies in other countries, has added to an already full agenda of challenges for the new leadership of the European Commission.

The new European Commission has set out to address global challenges as a “Geopolitical Commission” , linking internal and external policy and enhancing European leadership across a number of policy areas, including humanitarian aid. The envisaged role for humanitarian aid consists of working together with development and security actors to better respond to protracted crises. Yet, although the EU has been advocating and implementing the integrated approach for the past 20 years, many of its core challenges remain unresolved. Given the EU’s current strong focus on its internal interests (e.g., migration management, security, and recently crisis management in response to COVID-19 within the EU’s borders), tensions could arise between humanitarian needs and principles and other EU priorities.

This brief analyses current issues in the EU’s humanitarian aid and makes recommendations for responding to the challenges ahead. Specifically, it addresses the tensions between the Commission’s ambition to be a geopolitical actor and to better respond to multidimensional crises through a ‘nexus approach’ and the strong needs-based humanitarian assistance the EU provides. The analysis is based on a structured review of academic and policy sources, complemented by interviews with Brussels-based humanitarian aid policymakers.

Hanga Ádám klubja, a Barcelona is bejelentkezett a spanyol kosárlabda-bajnokság szezonzáró minitornájának a megrendezésére.

MEPs will discuss with Commission, Frontex, UNHCR, Council of Europe and NGOs the migration situation in Libya and on the Central Mediterranean route.
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

MEPs will discuss with Commission, Frontex, UNHCR, Council of Europe and NGOs the migration situation in Libya and on the Central Mediterranean route.
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

MEPs will discuss with Commission, Frontex, UNHCR, Council of Europe and NGOs the migration situation in Libya and on the Central Mediterranean route.
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

MEPs will discuss with Commission, Frontex, UNHCR, Council of Europe and NGOs the migration situation in Libya and on the Central Mediterranean route.
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2020 - EP

Zusammenfassung:

Die Corona-Pandemie führt voraussichtlich zur heftigsten Rezession seit der Weltwirtschaftskrise ab 1930. Die Steuerpolitik kann maßgeblich zu ihrer Milderung und Bewältigung beitragen. So können Erleichterungen bei Abschreibungen und Verlustverrechnung die Unternehmen bei der Wiederbelebung des Wirtschaftslebens unterstützen. Eine temporäre Mehrwertsteuersenkung stärkt den privaten Konsum, soweit sie an die VerbraucherInnen weitergegeben wird. Nach der Krise kann die deutlich gestiegene Staatsverschuldung durch einen Solidaritätszuschlag auf hohe Einkommen und eine Abgabe auf hohe Vermögen zurückgeführt werden.

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Apr 27 2020 (IPS)

Thandika Mkandawire (1940-2020) had a wicked sense of humour. But he was so considerate that he often made himself the butt of his jokes which typically had a moral. When others struggled to pronounce his surname, he would help them out, “Me kinda weary”.

Thandika Mkandawire. Credit: CODESRIA

But as tired as he might have been, he would often summon up the energy for yet another struggle. As Thandika was never one for self-pity, I shall always be ashamed that I did not know that he had succumbed to his third battle with cancer on 27 March.

Loving Africa, loving life
Blessed at birth with two Pan-Africanist names, he was always generous with me, for which I shall always be most grateful. Through example, he showed that a progressive pan-Africanist could be anti-imperialist without being racist, ethno-populist or jingoist.

Although both trained as economists, we rarely ‘talked shop’, and then usually about some new controversy in economics, preferring instead to banter about everything else which interested us, where there was far more coincidence than I ever expected.

His intellectual reputation had preceded him when we first met a quarter century ago in Dakar, listening to West African instrumental music as I tried to meet filmmaker, author and former railway worker, Ousmane Sembene. Later I learnt that Thandika was even an impresario of sorts for Senegalese singing sensation, Youssou N’Dour.

In Buenos Aires for a UNESCO conference years later, we were on a panel with the late Brazilian First Lady Ruth Cardoso and then Senator Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Again, he reminded me of his joie de vivre, tangoing in La Boca and listening to the music of Astor Piazzolla and Daniel Barenboim. In Johannesburg more years hence, he introduced me to South African pianist extraordinaire, Abdullah Ibrahim.

A life in exile
Having experienced racist settler colonialism, African despotism and other social injustices first-hand, Thandika’s experiences undoubtedly shaped his choices and thinking. From an early age, his family was forced to move — first from his mother’s Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, to Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia, and then to his father’s Malawi, then Nyasaland, where he had his secondary education.

Thandika became active in nationalist student politics, then served as assistant editor of Malawi News for the newly formed Malawi Congress Party. Then accused of sedition and inciting violence, he was sentenced to 18 months hard labour after a farce of a trial. On appeal, he was released after three months breaking rocks in a colonial prison.

He later went to study journalism and economics in the US, but could not return after several student activists, including Dr Guy Mhone of the International Labour Office (ILO), had their passports withdrawn by Malawian dictator Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda in 1965.

Stranded for a period in Ecuador, he became a political refugee in Sweden. After a difficult transition, he taught economics in Swedish at the University of Stockholm with Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal. His appreciation of social democracy and the now much maligned ‘welfare state’ grew during this unplanned extended sojourn.

African researchers unite
After a decade in Sweden, Thandika returned to his beloved continent with grants to visit several research institutions. One planned six-month trip later extended to 13 years, including a decade (1986-1996) helming the Council for the Development of Social Science Research (CODESRIA), following the renowned Samir Amin and then Abdulla Bujra.

Advancing African sovereignty required protecting and advancing progressive intellectual development with African scholars at the forefront. CODESRIA saw academic freedom as necessary for African universities to fulfil their crucial role in development.

Thandika’s tenure as Executive Secretary was marked by tremendous organizational innovation, and mobilization of the researchers themselves, rather than their institutions, around emerging themes, often even before they became fads elsewhere.

Against the tides
Despite a quarter century of African economic stagnation from the late 1970s, Thandika rejected the widespread mood of ‘Afro-pessimism’ among Western scholars of African development, including ostensibly radical social scientists.

Instead, he argued that the African malaise was an outcome of its unique colonial and post-colonial histories rather than due to something inherently African.

He also consistently rejected the neoliberal development ‘solutions’, strategies and policies strongly recommended, if not demanded as conditionalities by international financial institutions and like-minded foreign economic advisors and consultants from the 1980s.

Thandika reminded us how well Africa had done economically and socially, e.g., in extending education and health provision, in the early years after independence before the counter-revolution against development economics.

Almost single-handedly, he countered the narrative that African states were too corrupt to bring about development, urging Africans to look to East Asian and other developmental states while rejecting authoritarianism as necessary for such development.

Social development and the UN
From 1998 to 2009, Thandika served as Director of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in Geneva where his considerable mobilization and fund-raising skills, honed at CODESRIA, injected new life into UNRISD as it entered the new century.

The uniquely independent, but unfunded research institute had first been established by later Nobel economics laureates Jan Tinbergen and Myrdal in the mid-1960s, to mobilise researchers to work on pressing social issues in the course of economic development.

Under Thandika’s leadership, UNRISD provided the analytical heft to the ILO (International Labour Organization) initiated campaign to address inequality and universal social protection, leading to the social dimensions of the Sustainable Development Goals, instead of the Millennium Development Goals’ narrow World Bank inspired focus on poverty and targeted social safety nets.

Thandika was also instrumental in helping establish International Development Economics Associates (IDEAS), led by Professor Jayati Ghosh from Delhi, as a South-based network of heterodox development economists, hosting the founding conference in Cape Town days before 9/11 in 2001.

Leaving UNRISD, Thandika became Professor at Stockholm’s Institute for Future Studies and then first Chair of African Development at the London School of Economics. Africa’s best-known imperialist must surely have squirmed in his grave when Rhodes University recognized Thandika’s work with an earned doctorate, i.e., not honoris causa.

Viva Thandika! A luta continua
Thandika had a life well lived indeed, much richer than most of us can even imagine. Sadly, persistent patterns of intellectual hegemony and his iconoclastic predilection and democratic insistence are likely to prevent the typically universal implications of much of his oeuvre from being more widely appreciated.

Thankfully, despite, or perhaps because of various hardships, including long exile, his wide ranging, progressive intellectual legacy extends beyond his ideas and writings to include the initiatives and opportunities he selflessly created for African intellectuals at CODESRIA.

While he published some of his most significant work after UNRISD, being the perfectionist that he was and still rethinking so much, there was much more in the pipeline which he hesitated to put out, which I hope his family will let Codesria publish as works in progress with his erstwhile colleague and intellectual biographer Yusuf Bangura as editor.

The post Thandika Mkandawire, Pan-Africanist Par Excellence appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Die Ausschüsse werden die wirtschaftlichen Folgen von Covid-19 debattieren und über eine neue Reifenkennzeichnung sowie Maßnahmen zur Unterstützung des Agrarsektors abstimmen.

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2020 - EP

Les grandes épidémies du passé • La grippe de Hong Kong dans l'Albanie verrouillée d'Enver Hoxha
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/ Bilten, Albanie, Coronavirus, Société, Economie

Les grandes épidémies du passé • La grippe de Hong Kong dans l'Albanie verrouillée d'Enver Hoxha
L'Albanie fait face au coronavirus avec un système de santé à l'agonie
Coronavirus en Albanie : désamorcer la psychose ou censurer les voix critiques ?
Balkans : les Églises et les mosquées face à l'épidémie de coronavirus

/ Bilten, Albanie, Coronavirus, Société, Economie

Wolfgang Schäuble will dem Schutz des Lebens nicht alles unterordnen, einige Länder bereiten sich auf eine Lockerung der Einschränkungen vor, und Frankreich unterstützt die Air France.

Une voiture s'est retrouvée dans le lac près du port de Neuchâtel dimanche. Des passants et des policiers ont volé au secours du conducteur.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres briefs the media on the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: UN/Mark Garten

By Alexander Trepelkov
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 27 2020 (IPS)

The SDGs, with their universal scope, interlinked nature and focus on leaving no one behind will be more essential than ever during and after this crisis.

The SDGs encourage investments in critical public goods like minimum levels of social protection and the provision of services like health care, clean water and education which help to build resilience and enhance the mechanisms people have to cope with the immediate and longer-term impact of shocks.

The most recent estimates indicate that some 3 billion people are without basic handwashing facilities at home and 4 billion people lack any kind of social protection.

The SDGs are a commitment to leave no one behind, and this includes ensuring everyone is able to take measures to reduce their exposure to the disease and have the means to cope and recover.

If anything, the SDGs will become more important in the days and months ahead. The goals and targets set in 2015 are precisely the areas where progress needs to be made to build resilience and guard against future crises and where we will need to work to build back after the immediate tragedy subsides.

Preliminary projections from the UN system indicate that COVID-19 could lead to the first increase in global extreme poverty in over 20 years, since the Asian financial crisis of 1981. It could push 40 to 60 million people into extreme poverty and could double the incidence of food insecurity in the world.

The challenge for improving people’s lives after this crisis will be greater than ever, but the SDGs will help guide the path forward to ease suffering.

Do any goals stand out at the moment as most pressing?

Because the SDGs are all interconnected, interventions can be taken in ways that achieve one goal while also leveraging positive synergies among other goals to have a wider reach. UN DESA launched the Global Sustainable Development Report last September and a key message there was that taking advantage of synergies and addressing trade-offs among goals is the only way to achieve the 2030 Agenda.

Strengthening human well-being was identified in the report as an entry point for maximizing progress across the Agenda and there are examples that investing in education in science and technology can help build capacities for responding to pressing challenges like climate change and also like the current pandemic.

The report also emphasizes the need for increasing access to social protection as economies change and people need to cope with disasters, including health related; and the need for increasing support for workers to transition to new types of work when livelihoods are dependent on unsustainable sectors.

All of these are policy arenas that will be at the forefront of decision-makers’ attention as countries grapple with responses to Covid-19 and try to build stronger social and economic systems to reduce future vulnerabilities.

Are they unrealistic? What about the 2030 deadline in light of the pandemic?

The science and knowledge needed to achieve the 2030 Agenda is well advanced and from a science perspective, the COVID-19 pandemic may even encourage greater collaboration and knowledge sharing for the public good.

There are also some surprising trends in areas of the 2030 Agenda where progress has been slow. There is evidence that lockdown polices and the resulting reductions in economic activity have seen CO2 emissions decline substantially.

The conditions of these declines have been tragic and with loss of human lives and livelihoods. But there are questions now as to whether some of the shifts in human activity in response to Covid-19 government implemented guidelines could open space for dialogue about behaviour changes that can support longer term climate action.

So, we have the evidence needed to take action and possibly the space to make significant policy changes. But to be successful, all stakeholders should be involved in dialogue and inform the decision-making processes.

Two annual events that DESA organizes can provide a model for multi-stakeholder engagement and decision-making: the Science, Technology and Innovation Forum (STI Forum) and the High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF).

The post SDGs: the Challenge to Improve Lives After the COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Alexander Trepelkov is Officer-in-Charge of the Division for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA)

The post SDGs: the Challenge to Improve Lives After the COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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