By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Jun 20 2023 – While leaving one’s country and becoming a refugee is a last resort, it is a decision that many, like Steve Kitsa, have had to make. As conflict becomes increasingly protracted in many African countries, many others will take this step.

“In a matter of life and death, I fled the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) five years ago and left my elderly mother behind. One day we were seated in a group of young men, chatting and enjoying the morning sun, when a lone gunman in uniform approached us and started firing away unprovoked. Such incidences had become too common in the eastern region, and some of my friends were killed,” Kitsa tells IPS.

Kenya hosts one of the largest refugee populations in Africa. Kitsa is one of more than 520,000 registered refugees and asylum seekers. But human rights defender Irene Grace, who fled Uganda two years ago, says the number is much higher because borders are porous.

Nevertheless, official records show that about 287,000 refugees come from Somalia, 142,000 from South Sudan, 50,000 from DRC, and 32,000 from Ethiopia; many live in Dadaab and Kakuma camps.

Others, like Kitsa, have found their way into the urban centers of Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa, and Eldoret. Outdated statistics from 2017 indicate that more than 67,267 refugees live in Nairobi.

“There is a lot of exploitation because we need the locals to survive. Along the highways, you will find many young men hawking peanuts. You can tell they are from DRC because of the kind of Swahili they speak. They sell these peanuts under the hot sun, all day, every day, in exchange for a plate of food and somewhere to sleep as the profits go to the host. Most of us are desperate to go to France,” he explains.

Irene Grace fled Uganda for promoting the rights of the LGBTQI community as the country clamped down on their rights. As the government-endorsed crackdown against the community intensified, so did threats against her life.

“The issue of human rights defenders in exile is one aspect of the refugee situation that is hardly ever talked about. The risk is very high because you are under an alias in a foreign country, and if murdered, you are likely to remain unidentified for a long time, and it might take years to connect the dots. The question of who bears the duty of protection for us remains unanswered,” Grace says.

Her fears and concerns reflect the 2022 report findings by the global civil society alliance, CIVICUS, and the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), highlighting the decline in civil rights in Kenya. According to the report, the government was using excessive force to quieten dissent.

Kenya was placed on the CIVICUS Monitor’s human rights ‘Watchlist’ in June 2022. The Watchlist highlights countries with a recent and steady decline in civic freedoms, including the rights of free speech and peaceful assembly.

Kenya was rated Obstructed by the CIVICUS Monitor. There are 42 countries in the world with this rating. The rating is typically given to countries where power holders heavily contest civic space and impose a combination of legal and practical constraints on the full enjoyment of fundamental rights.

In 2021, Front Line Defenders released a report accusing the governments of Uganda and Kenya of giving the South Sudanese National Security Service (NSS) intelligence agency the freedom to target refugee human rights workers who fled the country.

“It is very difficult to continue with activism in such a hostile environment, on top of the many other challenges confronting us, such as a lack of documentation and access to services. Some of us left our families behind, exposed and unprotected. Over the eight years, I have lived in Kenya, I have received many threatening calls from South Sudan, but I know the information of my whereabouts came from within this country,” Deng G, an activist from South Sudan, tells IPS.

“Our situation worsens when local activists are targeted. In exile, you must connect with local networks to survive and continue with your activism. I am aware of activists in Kenya currently being held without trial for protesting against the high cost of living.”

KHRC continues to express concerns over the misuse of laws to undermine peaceful protest and recently responded with speed when five activists from the Social Justice Center, a Nairobi-based grassroots group, were arrested during a peaceful protest against the controversial Finance Bill 2023.

A pre-independence Public Order Act requires activists to notify authorities of protests at least three days in advance. Police have mistakenly understood the provision as a requirement for protests to be approved or denied, using it as an excuse to deem protests ‘unpermitted.’ Even though the right to peaceful assembly is guaranteed in Kenya’s constitution, it is continually undermined, says CIVICUS and KHRC.

Irene Grace says ongoing hostilities have derailed efforts to promote the safety and security of LGBTQI asylum seekers and refugees in the Kakuma Refugee Camp complex in northwestern Kenya whose lives are at risk. She says they are experiencing discrimination, and physical and sexual violence, among other forms of human rights violations.

“I am unable to travel there to determine how we can mobilize and improve their safety, working hand in hand with grassroots activists in Kenya. There are corrupt security officers, and once they discover you are hiding in the country, you become a target. They want you to pay them to turn a blind eye as you go on with your activities,” she says.

Kitsa says the issue of bribes is a most pressing challenge for many refugees seeking to integrate with the locals.

“They usually threaten to send you to the refugee camps despite having refugee documentation allowing you to live among the locals. They can create many problems for you.”

Against this backdrop, Irene Grace says activism is being suppressed from multiple angles, and human rights activists, local and those operating from exile, must now go back to the drawing board to find safer, impactful ways to speak truth to power and take the powers that be head-on.
IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);  

By Tanja Sejersen, Nicola Richards & Victoria Fan
BANGKOK, Thailand, Jun 20 2023 – Each year, the births of 64 million children under the age of five and deaths of 8.4 million people are invisible to governments in Asia and the Pacific. Most countries in the region are yet to achieve universal civil registration, leaving many people without a legal identity and, as a result, invisible to the State.

These people often face challenges in accessing basic services, such as education and healthcare, in securing employment and social benefits, and in protecting their human rights. In addition, deficient civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems lead to significant gaps and lags in up-to-date population and health data, crucial for designing and monitoring effective public policies and allocating resources.

Recognizing its importance, countries reached agreement on the Asia Pacific CRVS Decade in 2014 and set out a vision to achieve universal civil registration in the region by 2024. An applied CRVS research agenda was launched to help meet this this challenge.

Applied research on CRVS helps to generate and disseminate evidence on what strategies work, and what doesn’t, as well as how governments and partners can improve systems to better deliver on commitments to get everyone in the picture.

By documenting experiences in communities, countries and regions, the potential benefits of successful interventions and innovations can be replicated and possible shortcomings addressed.

Given the importance of applied research for improving CRVS, ESCAP organised the first ever Asia-Pacific CRVS Research Forum on 3-4 April 2023. With more than 30 speakers representing 15 countries, 24 research papers and almost 400 registered participants, the forum revealed many interesting facets of CRVS while opening eyes to the multitude of initiatives to ensure better and more inclusive systems across the region.

Many presentations emphasized how different initiatives are making real-life impacts on individuals and communities. There was a clear emphasis on community engagement, equity and ‘reaching the hardest to reach’, such as integrating gender-equity in CRVS legal reviews, addressing barriers to civil registration for hard-to-reach populations in Pakistan and gender disparities in premature mortality in the Philippines.

On-the-ground innovations were on display: a first-of-its-kind CRVS survey in Nepal that worked with both service providers and communities to understand barriers and enablers to registration; evidence from Fiji on the clear effectiveness of incentives on birth registration completeness; and the development of customized mortality audit and inquest systems in Thailand and Sri Lanka to improve the quality of cause of death data.

Much more work is needed to drive CRVS systems forward in the face of increasing challenges, with research playing a key role. In particular, the forum identified a stronger focus on building inclusive and resilient CRVS systems, including in conflict and humanitarian settings where there is both an acute need for civil registration along with increased difficulties in providing services.

As countries around the world adjust to competing government priorities during times of economic and social challenges, there is a critical need to maintain momentum on strengthening CRVS systems as the basis for realising human rights and ensuring access to basic social services including health and education.

Further, CRVS systems are essential for generating timely mortality data whose importance for pandemic preparedness and response has been recently emphasized. As demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, research is central to ensure continued innovation and improvement, and to provide opportunities to reflect and learn.

We hope in the future to develop this work further to embed and develop critical applied research capacity within countries and at the implementation level – to ensure we can really get everyone in the picture.

Tanja Sejersen is a Statistician; Nicola Richards is Consultant, ESCAP; Victoria Fan is Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);  

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jun 20 2023 – There is still a long way to go before the LGBTI population in Central America stops being discriminated against and begins to make progress in gaining recognition of their full rights, including the possibility of changing their name to match their gender identity, in the case of trans people.

“The issue of the rights of LGBTI people is extremely precarious. There is no recognition of our rights, obviously including the identity of trans people in our country,” O’Brian Robinson, general coordinator of Negritudes Trans Honduras, told IPS from Tegucigalpa.”The non-recognition of our identity also affects us in all social spheres, in the areas of ​​employability, healthcare and schooling; people are forced to live on the fringes of society.” — O’Brian Robinson

In the heavily conservative Central American countries, public policies with a strong moralistic bias predominate on issues such as the right to abortion or the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) population.

That is the reason for the strong institutional resistance to the passage of a gender identity law recognizing the rights of this community, without discrimination. In none of the six countries in the region – Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama – has such legislation been enacted.

The vast majority of the LGBTI population experiences marginalization and social rejection that in many cases leads to physical violence and even murder – phenomena that are not exclusive to this region.

A June 2022 Amnesty International report stated that El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Honduras are among the countries in the Americas with “high levels of hate crimes, hate speech, and marginalization, as well as murders and persecution of LGBTI activists.”

As in other regions of the world, the LGBTI community in Central America has been marginalized and is the victim of frequent human rights violations, including murders and other hate crimes. One of the chief demands is the approval of laws that allow transgender people to legally change their name so it matches their gender identity and expression. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The right name

Regarding the fight for a name that matches an individual’s gender identity and expression, Robinson pointed out that daily aspects such as carrying out bank transactions, undergoing a medical consultation or enrolling in an academic course are difficult for a trans person in Honduras.

And this is especially true if the legal name on their document is the one they no longer use, which is generally the case due to the obstacles they face in obtaining an ID that reflects their transgender identity.

“The non-recognition of our identity also affects us in all social spheres, in the areas of ​​employability, healthcare and schooling; people are forced to live on the fringes of society,” added the 29-year-old activist.

These daily tasks can be carried out, but often after facing ridicule, contempt, and arguments with civil servants who do not understand that State institutions are there to serve everyone, without distinction.

In Honduras, it is forbidden to change your name, according to article 61 of the National Registry of Persons Law, with only three exceptions: that it is unpronounceable, that it is the name of some object, or that it violates decency and good customs.

This third category makes it impossible for a trans person to change their name.

According to the Amnesty International report, the concept of transgender encompasses people who identify as such and also includes transsexuals, transvestites, gender queer or “any other gender identity that does not meet social and cultural expectations regarding it.”

Robinson added that LGBTI, and specifically trans, organizations have been pushing for changes in the legal regulations since 2010 in order to pass a law that brings visibility to and protects people with anything other than a heterosexual gender expression and sexual identity.

In 2021 they also promoted a reform of the registration law, which would open the door to a legal name-change process for trans people.

More than 4,000 signatures were collected in support of the proposed bill. But it was rejected by the authorities, who alleged that only 200 of the signatures were real and the rest were false, which Robinson said was untrue and a “ridiculous” argument.

In Guatemala and El Salvador, trans people can change their names, but that is because the legal regulations allow anyone to do so if they wish and can afford to.

“The Civil Code in Guatemala has always allowed everyone to change their name, but from a heterosexual perspective,” Galilea Monroy, director of the Multicultural Network of Trans Women of Guatemala, told IPS.

Monroy, a trans woman, said that through this mechanism around 500 people from that community have been able to change their names, with financial support from international organizations.

But a name change costs around 600 dollars in Guatemala and about 4,000 dollars in El Salvador.

Monroy also pointed out that the name change does not include modifying the “sex” in the personal identity document, and in her case, her ID continues to say she is a “man”. The same is true in El Salvador.

Galilea Monroy is the executive director of the Multicultural Network of Trans Women of Guatemala, which pushes for respect for the rights of trans people in a nation where, like the rest of Central America, it is difficult to work for changes on behalf of LGBTI people, and where hate crimes against this community are frequent. CREDIT: Courtesy of the Multicultural Network of Trans Women of Guatemala

A region of hatred and death

In El Salvador, transgender activist Karla Avelar, with the support of several Salvadoran human rights organizations, filed a lawsuit against the government on Jan. 31 for not providing a legal mechanism allowing her name to match her gender identity on her ID.

The case came to light on May 17, during a conference in San Salvador in which the organizations and Avelar participated by means of videoconference.

In February 2022, the Constitutional Chamber, a five-judge court that is part of the Salvadoran Supreme Court, ruled that the legislature had one year to pass a law that would allow trans people to change not only their names but the gender on their ID.

But parliament, which since 2021 has been controlled by Nuevas Ideas, the party of President Nayib Bukele, failed to meet the deadline.

Avelar also held the government responsible in her lawsuit for failing to investigate or prosecute those responsible for the violence against her and her mother, which forced them to seek asylum in a European country in 2017.

In addition, the lawsuit mentions the forced displacement that she and her mother suffered because they had to flee the violence, including gang violence.

“El Salvador has a history of violence and discrimination against the LGBTI community that mainly affects transgender people,” Avelar said in an online call from the conference held in San Salvador by the organizations backing her case.

The violence suffered by Avelar, 45, included an attempt on her life in 1992.

In a March 2021 ruling on the case of Vicky Hernández, a Honduran trans activist murdered in June 2009, allegedly by agents of the State, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered a series of reparations for the LGBTI community to be fulfilled by Honduras in the area of human rights.

Among the provisions to be complied with, the Inter-American Court included the “right to recognition of legal personality, to personal liberty, to private life, to freedom of expression, to their name and to equality and non-discrimination,” as included in several articles of the American Convention on Human Rights, known as the San José Pact.

This international treaty, in force since 1978, makes Inter-American Court rulings final and binding on the States parties, which currently number 23 as some countries have pulled out. But Honduras has not complied with the requirements in the ruling.

Trans women, the most prone to violence

Transgender women are the most prone to suffering attacks, whether verbal or physical, the Amnesty International report says, because due to the lack of job opportunities they tend to engage in sex work on the streets, unlike trans men.

This was corroborated by the Guatemalan activist, Monroy, who pointed out that around 90 percent of trans women engage in sex work and are thus victims of all kinds of abuse and attacks.

“Most of us trans women have to do sex work because we don’t have social coverage or basic rights such as access to education, work, decent justice, not to mention a pension,” Monroy stressed.

She added that around 90 percent of transgender women engage in sex work on the streets of Guatemala, and the rest work in trades such as hairdressing, or are in the informal sector.

To this must be added the transphobic attitudes that prevail among the population of Central American countries.

“Discrimination is latent in social spaces, in parks, in restaurants, in nightclubs, and in many cases they reserve the right of admission when they identify you as being part of the LGBTI community, and much more so if you are trans,” Monroy said.

She added: “It’s horrible when they tell you: ‘there is no service here’, or there is, but they tell you ‘sit there in the corner where nobody will look at you’.”

She said that far from promoting laws in favor of gender identity, in Guatemala 20 lawmakers “who are totally religious are pushing for approval of Law 5940, which does not recognize gender identity and in which they want to implement the famous conversion therapies.”

By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Jun 20 2023 – Oil palm has brought significant benefits and prosperity to Liberia. The export of crude palm oil is a major source of foreign exchange earnings for the government. The palm oil crop covers more than 1 million hectares, hundreds of thousands are employed in the palm oil sector, and at least 21 percent of the farming households produce palm oil.

Opportunities for the country’s palm oil and other palm products in the international markets are considerable—creating a temptation to prioritize development over environmental concerns.

In 2020, policymakers in the Inter-Ministerial Commission on Palm Oil Concessions in Liberia faced a significant challenge: developing a policy path that pursued quick short-term profits and faced long-term negative consequences to the environment, lives, and livelihoods—or a beneficial approach for people and planet.

Forests Belong to Humanity

“When decisions are too short-term, narrow, and short-sighted, we do not take into account the long-term impact of our action. We need to recognize that some goods are common goods or public goods, such as forests. They do not belong to one person or one company; they belong to humanity as a whole,” says Francisco Alpizar, Wageningen University and Research.

This was the case for Liberia’s palm oil sector, whose key stakeholders include government, the private sector, NGOs, business associations, smallholder associations, and households that directly or indirectly rely on it as their lifeline.

“From an economic perspective, the prices of goods and commodities should reflect the true cost to societies, not just the immediate cost of producing them but also the environmental impact the production of those goods and services carries for societies,” Alpizar says.

The Liberian National Oil Palm Strategy and Action Plan (NOPSAP) was facilitated by the Global Environment Facility-funded Good Growth Partnership. Here policymakers in Liberia decided to use the Targeted Analysis Scenario (TSA) to design a mutually beneficial policy path for communities, sectoral government agencies, and palm oil concessionaires.

Targeted Analysis Scenario Benefits All

As they developed the National Oil Palm Strategy and Action Plan (NOPSAP) facilitated by the Global Environment Facility-funded Good Growth Partnership, policymakers in Liberia decided to use the Targeted Scenario Analysis (TSA) to design a mutually beneficial policy path for communities, sectoral government agencies, and palm oil concessionaires.

UNDP developed the TSA to respond to the growing demand from decision-makers and stakeholders for more policy-relevant sustainable development analysis to support national SDG implementation facing diverse policy, management, and investment choices.

As an innovative analytical approach, the TSA captures and presents the value of ecosystem services within decision-making to help make the business case for sustainable policy and investment choices. By doing so, the TSA allows policymakers to calculate these costs and make decisions that harmonize with the environment.

In Liberia, policymakers needed economic data that compared the outcomes of continuing with conventional palm production with the results of taking a different route to make sound, informed decisions leading to sustainable palm concessions.

At the time, the situation in the West African country was characterized by contradictory forest management and concessions policies. The Commission had to balance the eagerness of communities and smallholder producers to engage in palm oil concessions because they brought employment and socioeconomic benefits and concerns in the global market about the environmental risks of palm oil production.

UNDP’s TSA provided an answer, enabling the Commission in Liberia to include all the relevant social, environmental, and economic impacts. TSA offered a systematic approach covering all aspects of the sector.

The TSA improves the decision-making process by capturing and presenting the value of ecosystem services and sectoral production to make policy decision-making more holistic. The tool applies to any sector, scenario, context, or country.

“TSA can, for instance, be applied for decision-making at the national level, when taking a national perspective, regional, company or even household level. For each and every one of those decisions, we need a careful analysis of what the current situation looks like and how it will look in the future and, what would be the alternative situation,” Alpizar explains.

Business-as-Usual Versus Sustainable Ecosystem Management

One is considered a business-as-usual scenario, and the other a sustainable ecosystem management scenario.

“When you compare one against the other, with a long-term perspective and focusing on the relevant indicators for the decision makers or the things that the decision maker cares for, then you can provide a better picture of the decision that is in front of us, and that is what targeted scenario analysis is.”

He says targeted scenario construction of business-as-usual versus sustainable ecosystem management outcomes is presented to the decision maker. When this is done, in principle, the decision maker will have a powerful decision-making tool to make informed decisions based on evidence.

“If we put ourselves in the feet of a decision maker, that is, for example, deciding whether to implement a series of policies to make the agricultural sector more sustainable, the business-as-usual scenario means you continue with the current practices. A sustainable ecosystem management scenario would be one in which you change a series of practices or actions, and with that, in principle, you achieve a different outcome,” Alpizar explains.

He gives an example of producing pineapples under a business-as-usual scenario with an impact on surrounding lands, agrochemicals, deforestation, land use change, competing diseases, or diseases that spread to the surrounding area, which might be viable but over a short period of time. The alternative scenario is to create and implement a more long-term, sustainable approach.

“Through UNDP’s application of TSA methodology, you can carefully construct the two scenarios by first asking this question: As the decision maker, what do you really care about? Is it employment, taxes, production, or reducing social unrest? Based on the answer, the analyst can construct a targeted scenario,” Alpizar says.

Returning to Liberia, the TSA was able to show that Smallholder Production (SPO) scenario and environmental sustainability were in the best interests of the concessionaire and the Liberian economy – with substantially greater benefits compared with the business-as-usual scenario (USD 333 million versus USD 188 million over 20 years).

When these results were discussed with the multistakeholder National Oil Palm Platform of Liberia, it was accepted and paved the way toward sustainable palm oil development in Liberia.

Across the world, TSAs have been conducted to assess the economic value of ecosystem services for various strategic economic sectors such as hydropower, agriculture, and tourism under the business-as-usual and sustainable ecosystem management scenarios to create a sustainable development path where humanity is in harmony with the environment.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);