By Rafael Machado Parente and Rodrigo Valdes
WASHINGTON DC, Dec 20 2023 – Crime and violence have long been a top-of-mind concern for households across Latin America and the Caribbean. The region accounts for nearly half of the world’s intentional homicide victims, despite representing just over 8 percent of the global population, United Nations data show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smarter spending in security

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

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

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

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

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

Source: International Monetary Fund (IMF)

IPS UN Bureau

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec 20 2023 – The World Bank insists commercial finance is necessary for achieving economic recovery and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but does little to ensure profit-hungry commercial finance serves the public interest.

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

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IPS UN Bureau

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By Emilio Godoy
AUSTIN, Texas, US, Dec 20 2023 – The city of Austin, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, had 945,000 residents in 2021 and on average each household owned two cars, hundreds of them electric. Among the manufacturers of these electric vehicles are companies such as the US Tesla, Ford and General Motors (GM).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Global Player

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mass failure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mining Fever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make-up or depth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Busani Bafana
KEZI, ZIMBABWE, Dec 20 2023 – Five years ago, farmer Sehlisiwe Sisanda would walk into a nearby forested area to fill a scotch cart with huge wood logs for cooking and heating; a pile of firewood would last her a week during the summer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saving Health, Maybe Trees Too

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gender Considerations Crucial to Energy Alternatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leleti Maluleke, researcher, Good Governance, Africa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clean Energy is Key to Climate Justice 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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