By Edgardo Ayala
NAHUIZALCO, El Salvador , May 6 2024 – A group of children participating in an immersion program in Náhuat, the language of the Pipil people and the only remaining pre-Hispanic language in El Salvador, are the last hope that the language will not die out.

“This effort aims to keep Náhuat alive and that is why we focus on the children, for them to continue and preserve this important part of our culture,” Elena López told IPS during a short snack break for the preschoolers she teaches.”This effort aims to keep Náhuat alive and that is why we focus on the children, for them to continue and preserve this important part of our culture.” — Elena López

López is part of the Náhuat Cuna project, which since 2010 has sought to preserve and revive the endangered indigenous language through early immersion. She is one of two teachers who teach it to children between the ages of three and five at a preschool center in Nahuizalco, a municipality in the department of Sonsonate in western El Salvador.

At risk of disappearing

“When a language dies, the basis of indigenous cultures and territories becomes extinct with it,” says the report Revitalization of Indigenous Languages, according to which the 500 Amerindian languages still spoken in Latin America are all in a situation of greater or lesser threat or risk.

In Mesoamerica, which includes Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, 75 indigenous languages are spoken, says the study by the Fund for the Development of the Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean (FILAC).

With the exception of Mexico, Guatemala is the most linguistically diverse in this group of countries, with 24 native languages. The most widely spoken is K’iche’, of Mayan origin, and the least is Xinca, of unknown origin.

Brazil is the most ethnically and linguistically diverse country in Latin America, with between 241 and 256 indigenous peoples and between 150 and 186 languages.

A picture of some of the children learning Náhuat in the town of Nahuizalco, in western El Salvador, through an early language immersion program, in an effort by Don Bosco University to keep the endangered language alive. Teacher Elsa Cortez sits next to them. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Around 25 percent of these languages are at risk of extinction unless something is urgently done, the report warns. It is estimated that Latin America is home to more than 50 million people who self-identify as indigenous.

“These languages are losing their usage value…families are increasingly interrupting the natural intergenerational transmission of the languages of their elders, and a slow but sure process of moving towards the hegemonic language is observed, with speakers making Spanish or Portuguese their predominant language of use,” the report states.

The causes of the danger of the disappearance of these Amerindian languages are varied, the report points out, such as the interruption of intergenerational transmission, when the language is no longer passed on from generation to generation.

And that is exactly what the Náhuat Cuna project aims to revert by focusing on young children, who can learn from Náhuat speakers who did receive the language from their parents and grandparents and speak it fluently.

Two boys pretend to purchase and sell fruits and vegetables speaking in Náhuat, as part of the teaching exercises at Náhuat Cuna in western El Salvador, a preschool for new generations of Salvadorans to learn the nearly extinct Amerindian language. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala /IPS

López is one of these people. She belongs to the last generation of speakers who acquired it naturally, as a mother tongue, speaking it from a very young age with her parents and grandparents, in her native Santo Domingo de Guzmán, also in the department of Sonsonate.

“That’s how I was born and grew up, speaking it at home. And we never stopped speaking it, among my sisters and brothers, but not with people outside the house, because they discriminated against us, they treated us as Indians but in a derogatory way, but we never stopped speaking it,” said Lopez, 65.

Indeed, for reasons of racism and classism, indigenous populations have been marked by rejection and contempt not only from the political and economic elites, but also by the rest of the mestizo or mixed-race population, which resulted from the mixture of indigenous people with the Spaniards who started arriving in Latin America in the sixteenth century.

“They have always looked down on us, they have discriminated against us,” Elsa Cortez, 43, the other teacher at the Nahuizalco Náhuat Cuna, told IPS.

And she added: “I feel satisfied and proud, at my age it is a luxury to teach our little ones.”

Both López and Cortez said they were grateful that the project hired them as teachers, since they had no prior teaching experience, and in a context in which discrimination and social rejection, in addition to ageism, make it more difficult to find formal employment.

Before joining the project, Cortez worked full time making comales, which are circular clay griddles that are placed over a wood fire to cook corn tortillas. She also sold baked goods, and continues to bake bread on weekends.

López also worked making comales and preparing local dishes, which she sold in her neighborhood. Now she prefers to rest on the weekends.

All is not lost

When IPS visited the Náhuat Cuna preschool in Nahuizalco, the three-year-olds were performing an exercise: they stood in front of the rest of the class of about ten children and introduced themselves by saying their first name, last name and other basic greetings in Náhuat.

Later they identified, in Náhuat, pictures of animals and elements of nature, such as “mistun” (cat), “qawit” (tree) and “xutxit” (flower). The students started their first year in the center in February, and will spend two years there.

The five-year-olds are the most advanced. Together, the two groups totaled about twenty children.

Jorge Lemus  (blue shirt), director of El Salvador’s Náhuat/Pipil Language Revitalization Program and the driving force behind the Náhuat Cuna project, which teaches the language to children between the ages of three and five, is photographed with indigenous women of the Pipil people in Nahuizalco in western El Salvador. CREDIT: Don Bosco University

At the end of their time at the Cuna, they will go to regular school in Spanish, with the risk that they will forget what they have learned. However, to keep them connected to the language, the project offers Saturday courses where they begin to learn grammar and how to write the language.

There is a group of 15 teenagers, mostly girls, who started at the beginning of the project and speak the language fluently, and some even teach it online.

The initiative is promoted by the Don Bosco University of El Salvador, and supported by the municipalities where they operate, in Nahuizalco and Santo Domingo de Guzmán. The Santa Catarina Masahuat branch will also be reopened soon.

Santo Domingo de Guzmán is home to 99 percent of the country’s few Náhuat speakers, who number around 60 people, Jorge Lemus, director of El Salvador’s Náhuat/Pipil Language Revitalization Program and main promoter of the Náhuat Cuna project, told IPS.

“In three decades I have seen how Náhuat has been in decline, and how the people who speak it have been dying out,” stressed Lemus, who is also a professor and researcher of linguistics at the School of Languages and Education at Don Bosco University, run by the Salesian Catholic order.

According to the academic, the last three indigenous languages in El Salvador in the 20th century were Lenca, Cacaopera and Náhuat, but the first two disappeared by the middle of that century, and only the last one survives.

“The only one that has survived is Náhuat, but barely, as there are perhaps just 60 speakers of the language. When I started working on this there were about 200 and the number continues to shrink,” said Lemus.

The only way to keep the language alive, he said, is for a new generation to pick it up. But it will not be adults, who could learn it as a second language but will continue speaking Spanish; it must be a group of children who can learn it as native speakers.

The expert clarified that, although they come from the same linguistic trunk, the Náhuat spoken in El Salvador is not the same as the Nahuatl spoken in Mexico, and in fact the spelling is different.

In Mexico, Nahuatl has more than one million speakers in the Central Valley, he said.

In El Salvador, in 1932, the Pipil people stopped speaking their language in public for fear of being killed by the government forces of General Maximiliano Hernández, who that year brutally cracked down on an indigenous and peasant uprising demanding better living conditions.

At that time, society was dominated by aristocratic families dedicated to coffee cultivation, whose production system plunged a large part of Salvadorans, especially peasants and indigenous people, into poverty.

Lemus argued that for a language to make a decisive comeback and become a vehicle for everyday communication would require a titanic effort by the State, similar to the revival of the Basque language in Spain, Maori in New Zealand or even Israel’s resuscitation of Hebrew, which was already a dead language.

But that is not going to happen in El Salvador, he said.

“The most realistic thing we want to achieve is to keep the language from disappearing, and for the new generation of Náhuat-speaking people to grow and multiply. If we have 60 speakers now, in a few years we will hopefully still have 50 or 60 speakers, from this new generation, and they will keep it alive in the communities and continue speaking it,” he said.

For her part, López wants to continue working towards this goal in order to leave the country her legacy.

Speaking in Náhuat, the preschool teacher said: “I really like teaching this language because I don’t want it to die, I want the children to learn and speak it when I am dead.”

By Kingsley Ighobor
UNITED NATIONS, May 6 2024 – The United Nations Office of Rule of Law and Security Institutions (OROLSI) supports the promotion of the rule of law, security, and peace in conflict-affected countries.

In an interview with Kingsley Ighobor of Africa Renewal, Alexandre Zouev discusses OROLSI’s initiatives in Africa, rule of law on the continent, recent coups and their ramifications, and youth’s role in fostering peace and development.

The following are excerpts:

What’s the Office of the Rule of Law and Security Institutions about?

We deal mostly in five major areas, which are: the Police Division, Justice and Corrections Service, Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Section, Security Sector Reforms, and Mine Action Service.

Alexandre Zouev

We work for our beneficiaries globally, but especially in Africa because most of our peacekeeping operations and many special political missions are in Africa.

How would you assess the current state of the rule of law in Africa?

As you know, lately, we’ve witnessed some global geopolitical tensions that don’t help the rule of law. Over the last one to two years, the rule of law eroded globally, in many, if not the majority of countries. Latest data indicate that up to 6 billion people globally live in a country where the rule of law is weakened. We are concerned about this trend.

Talking about Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, the rule of law deteriorated in more than 20 countries. However, I must note that about 14 African countries managed to strengthen their rule of law over the last 12 months, including Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania and Cote d’Ivoire.

Do you ascribe the deterioration of the rule of law in African countries to geopolitical challenges?

Of course, global challenges to peace and security have implications for the rule of law. In terms of organizing elections or managing the judiciary or penitentiary, many African countries still depend on external technical assistance.

In many of these situations, there are also internal drivers such as a lack of access to justice, the absence of adequately trained law enforcement and an independent judiciary. So, it’s a combination of regional and global instability and internal factors.

There appears to be a resurgence of military coups, especially in West Africa.

You are right. We have witnessed the military taking power, especially in the greater Sahel Region. It doesn’t help the rule of law if, instead of a civilian justice system, you have military forces playing a role in political and judicial systems.

How are you helping these countries address these challenges?

As I said earlier, Africa is our major focus, especially sub-Saharan Africa. And it’s due to different reasons: some gaps in the rule of law in some countries and because of certain development challenges. Generally, poverty is very much linked to criminality and ill-functioning judiciary systems. Budget deficits and lack of effective fiscal management will prevent any state from allocating adequate resources to the rule of law sector. In an ideal situation, the rule of law should be very well-resourced but not every state can afford it.

Do you also work with, for example, civil society organizations in countries?

We invest efforts in working with civil society organizations. In our view, women and youths are very important agents of peace. We have many strategic frameworks with the African Union (AU). The AU and the EU are two major regional organizations partnering with UN Peacekeeping, including my office.

At the sub-regional level, we have different degrees of engagement. For example, we partner with the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), United Nations Office for West Africa and the Sahel(UNOWAS), Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS), Southern Africa Development Commission (SADC), and other subregional organizations.

Téné Maïmouna Zoungrana, winner of the 2022 Trailblazer Award for Women Justice and Corrections Officers, trains prison officers on managing incidents in prisons. They rehearse intervention techniques to control inmates in case of an incident. Credit: MINUSCA/Herve Cyriaque Serefio

How important are security sector reforms (SSR) to the rule of law?

It’s a small but very important part of my office because SSR deals with sometimes sensitive military and security issues with important political implications. And not all governments want to be scrutinized.

To support SSR requires reliable statistics. For example, how much is being spent on the military, civil defense, secret services? When states request, we can help bring to them best practices and ways in which to build the capacity of their security sector. You do this kind of work with full respect to independent decision-making by host countries, their sovereignty, confidentiality of processes, and non-disclosure of information to third parties.

Do you support countries where there are no peace operations?

Absolutely. OROLSI has a system-wide service provider mandate. We are increasingly focusing on prevention, which is much more cost effective. One of the main tools we developed for that is the institutional development advisory programme. We piloted this programme in the Sahel region. We deploy institutional development advisors to help national governments and the UN system address the main challenges facing the rule of law and security institutions.

So, the IDAs are not transactional or mission-driven like assistance. We rely on the resident capacity within the UN system. We work with other UN partners, especially United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)— OHCHR because, in many cases, the rule of law requires the promotion of a culture of human rights. So, IDAs help integrate inter-agency collaboration. It has so far proven very successful.

Many countries confront violent extremist groups such as Boko Haram. What role do you play in helping tackle this problem?

Peacekeeping was not established in the UN system for counter-terrorism operations. Therefore, we collaborate closely with the Office of Counterterrorism (OCT), and the Counterterrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED), which was established by the Security Council.

Almost all UN agencies and departments are involved in the prevention of violent extremism. And we are no exception. Our comparative advantage lies in building the capacity of host states to counter terrorism and prevent violent extremism through strengthened rule of law and security institutions and programmes to assist affected populations including through community policing and DDR.

If you look at some terrorist organizations such as ISIS, it’s not only about men and women fighting with arms; they have their families, sometimes even children, who are indoctrinated. Some left their countries, and to reintegrate them is not easy.

Do you see positive outcomes from your work in Africa?

Generally, we are getting a lot of resources from the assessed budgets of the United Nations and extra-budgetary contributions of our donors, but it’s not sufficient.

Investment in any kind of reform or capacity building in the rule of law sector is a multi-year exercise; you cannot do it overnight, in one week, or one month. We are going in the right direction, but maybe not with the speed that I would like.

Bangui, Central African Republic, 20 July 2023: The Appeals Chamber of the Special Criminal Court (SCC) delivered its judgement in the so-called “Paoua” case, on 20 July 2023 in Bangui. Credit: MINUSCA / Francis Yabendji-Yoga

Do the closures of peacekeeping missions in Africa, such as in Mali, complicate your work?

What complicates our work is not the closure or liquidation of missions; it’s how it happened in a hostile environment and under unrealistically short timelines. evacuating, liquidating, phasing out and drawing down missions can be challenging. However, we successfully closed our missions in Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, and Mozambique.

Countries like Mali and Sudan are, maybe, more challenging environments. To close our mission in Mali, which was one of the largest missions with about 13,000 personnel, thousands of vehicles, and armored carriers, the government gave the Security Council only six months. It was almost mission impossible, but we managed to do it.

What role do you think young Africans can play in fostering peace and development of the continent?

As you know, the Secretary-General has an Envoy on Youth. I believe in investment in our future, which young people represent. It doesn’t matter if it’s in Africa, Asia, or Europe, it’s important to involve young people—for the sake of not only my generation but also that of my children and grandchildren.

When young people are educated, they become important agents of change. I am not necessarily talking about political or legal education. Sometimes, it may be engagement in sports or cultural events.

Can you envision an Africa without war?

Dr. Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream.” I, too, have a dream that one day we will shut down this shop [his office]. If there are no wars and no conflicts, there will be no need for peacekeeping.

Looking into certain developments in sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb in the north of Africa, you saw what happened in Libya over the last few years; you see what’s going on in Sudan; in Somalia, we still have the confrontation between al Shabaab and the Somali government.

Realistically, we cannot stop these conflicts overnight. So long as they exist, we should invest more in certain types of peacekeeping operations, perhaps AU-led. I believe that African problems can be solved by Africans.

We need partnerships with regional organizations such as the EU and the AU, and other sub-regional organizations in Africa. The private sector should play a special role, including African business leaders. Some of them already invest in peacebuilding and sustainable economic systems.

We need to get the best out of all of us.

Source: Africa Renewal, United Nations

Africa Renewal is a United Nations digital magazine that covers Africa’s economic, social and political developments, and the challenges the continent faces and solutions to these by Africans themselves, including with the support of the United Nations and international community.

IPS UN Bureau

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, May 6 2024 – On 22 April, Dominica’s High Court struck down two sections of the country’s Sexual Offences Act that criminalised consensual same-sex relations, finding them unconstitutional. This made Dominica the sixth country in the Commonwealth Caribbean – and the fourth in the Eastern Caribbean – to decriminalise same-sex relations through the courts, and the first in 2024.

Similar decisions were made in Antigua and Barbuda, St Kitts and Nevis and Barbados in 2022 – but progress then threatened to stall. Change in Dominica revives the hopes of LGBTQI+ activists in the five remaining English-speaking Caribbean states – Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines – that still criminalise same-sex relations. Sooner than later, one of will be next. A small island has made a big difference.

Winds of change

The criminalisation of consensual gay sex in the Anglophone Caribbean dates back to the British colonial era. All former British colonies in the region inherited identical criminal laws against homosexuality targeting either LGBTQI+ people in general or gay men in particular. They typically retained them after independence and through subsequent criminal law reforms.

That’s what happened in Dominica, which became independent in 1978. Its 1998 Sexual Offences Act retained criminal provisions dating back to the 1860s. Section 16 of that law made sex between adult men, described as ‘buggery’, punishable with up to 10 years’ imprisonment and possible compulsory psychiatric confinement.

The offence listed in section 14, ‘gross indecency’, was initially punishable by up to five years in jail if committed by two same-sex adults. A 2016 amendment increased the penalty to 12 years.

As in other Caribbean countries with similar provisions, prosecutions for these crimes have been rare in recent decades, and have never resulted in a conviction. But they’ve been effective in stigmatising LGBTQI+ people, legitimising social prejudice and hate speech, enabling violence, including by police, obstructing access to essential social services, particularly healthcare, and denying people the full protection of the law.

Change has begun only in the past decade, but it’s been rapid. Bans on same-sex relations were overturned by the courts in Belize in 2016 and Trinidad and Tobago in 2018. More soon followed.

The legal case

In July 2019, an unnamed gay man identified as ‘BG’ filed a legal case challenging sections 14 and 16 of the Sexual Offences Act. The defendants named in the complaint were the Attorney General, the Bishop of Dominica’s capital Roseau, the Anglican Church and the Methodist Church. The Dominica Association of Evangelical Churches was also listed as an interested party.

The lawsuit was supported by Minority Rights Dominica (MiRiDom), the country’s main LGBTQI+ advocacy group, and three international allies: the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, the University of Toronto’s International Human Rights Program and Lawyers Without Borders. The law was challenged as discriminatory and an enabler of violence against LGBTQI+ people.

The High Court heard the case in September 2022, and on 22 April 2024, Justice Kimberly Cenac-Phulgence issued a ruling setting out the reasons why sections 14 and 16 violated the applicant’s constitutional rights to liberty, freedom of expression and privacy, and were therefore null and void.

The backlash

LGBTQI+ advocates around the world welcomed the court ruling, as did UNAIDS – the United Nations agency leading the global effort to end HIV/AIDS. But resistance wasn’t long in coming.

Religious institutions, which hold a lot of influence in Dominica, were quick to decry gains in LGBTQI+ rights as losses in moral values. The day after the ruling was announced, Dominica’s Catholic Church published a statement reaffirming its position that sex should only take place within a heterosexual marriage and, while expressing compassion towards LGBTQI+ people, reiterated its belief in the centrality of traditional marriage and family. The Seventh-day Adventists expressed alarm about the potential of the court ruling to lead to same-sex unions and marriages. Some faith leaders voiced outright bigoty, with one prominent figure calling sexual acts between persons of the same sex an ‘abomination’.

The road ahead

Having decriminalised same-sex relations, Dominica is now ranked 116th out of 198 countries on Equaldex’s Equality Index, which rates countries according to their LGBTQI+ friendliness. There’s clearly much work to be done. Outstanding issues include protection against discrimination in employment and housing, marriage equality and adoption rights. LGBTQI+ activists will also continue to push for the recognition of non-binary genders, the legalisation of gender change and the prohibition of conversion therapy.

The Equality Index makes clear that, as in all the Caribbean countries that have recently decriminalised same-sex relations, changes to laws remain far ahead of social attitudes, with considerable public homophobia. As the instant conservative reactions to the court ruling suggest, changing laws and policies isn’t nearly enough. Shifting social attitudes must now be a top priority.

Dominican LGBTQI+ activists know this, which is why they’ve been working to challenge prejudice and foster understanding since long before launching their legal challenge – and why they see the court victory as not the end of a journey but a stepping stone to further change.

The challenge for Dominica’s LGBTQI+ civil society is to replace the vicious circle of legal prohibition, which has reinforced social stigma, with a virtuous one in which legal progress normalises the presence and social acceptance of LGBTQI+ people, which in turn enables effective access to legally enshrined rights.

But they’ll take heart from being part of a broader regional and global trend. While working to ensure rights are realised domestically, they’ll also offer a powerful example that change can result to the circa 64 countries around the world that still criminalise gay sex, including the five holdouts in the Commonwealth Caribbean. More progress will come.

Inés M. Pousadela 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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By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, May 6 2024 – Nearly seven months into the Gaza war, the UN warns that to rebuild and restore the buildings lost in this period, it would take several decades, and to revitalize Palestine’s economy, it would be a great undertaking. Meanwhile, the great losses in housing and public services and the economic stall only threaten to push even more Palestinians into poverty.

Last week, the UNDP and the Economic and Social Commission in Western Asia (ESCWA) released an update to their joint report, ‘The Gaza War: Expected Socio-Economic Impacts on the State of Palestine,’ first released in November 2023. The initial report projected that the war would see a projected loss of over 12 percent in Palestine’s GDP and an increase in the poverty rate of over 25 percent if it persisted for a three-month period as metrics for the losses that the state of Palestine would incur as a result of the war.

The latest report reveals the predicted losses that Palestine will suffer after nine months of the conflict. According to projections that estimate the war’s duration up to a nine-month period, the poverty rate could exceed 60 percent. As Director of the Regional Bureau for the Arab States for UNDP Abdallah Al Dadari explained to reporters, an additional 1.8 million people have fallen into poverty in Palestine since the beginning of the war.

Under the UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI), it’s projected that at six months, Palestine will have seen a significant drop, reaching 0.677 compared to 0.716 in 2022, which sets back human development by 17 years. This will only decrease based on certain metrics, such as reduced life expectancy, a decline in the gross national income (GNI), and reduced years of schooling.

In Gaza alone, the setback in development exceeds more than 30 years under this scenario, as it suffered a drop of 0.598 percent in 2023, compared to 0.705 percent in 2022. Should the war persist for nine months, the HDI will likely see a decrease of 0.551 percent, which sets Gaza back to the 1980s.

Almost all economic activities in Gaza have taken a sharp decline since the start of the war, the report stated, with all major sectors reporting significant losses during the last quarter of 2023. This has had ripple effects across the entire occupied Palestinian territory. The unemployment rate in Palestine reached 57 percent in the first quarter of 2024, as over 507,000 jobs were lost across the territory, including 160,000 workers from the West Bank.

Palestine’s GDP has also declined by 22.5 percent for the year 2023 and could further decrease by 51 percent in 2024. The war has undoubtedly aggravated the socioeconomic costs that will impact post-war recovery and development across the state of Palestine.

“Every additional day of fighting is only adding to the cost of rebuilding,” Al Dadari told reporters during a virtual briefing. Since the war began in October 2023, the destruction and damage to physical infrastructure, amounting to USD 341.2 million in education (schools and universities), USD 503.7 million in WASH, and USD 553.7 million in health facilities, directly affect basic needs provision in Gaza. The report notes that foreign aid for reconstruction and recovery of basic service infrastructure will be essential for the re-establishment of these services, and it will take decades and considerable financial resources to restore socioeconomic conditions in Gaza to pre-war levels.

Over thirty of Gaza’s hospitals have been destroyed since the war began, and over 400 schools and universities have been totally or partially destroyed under military fire.

Al Dadari emphasized the importance of bringing immediate emergency relief into Gaza that would help bring in emergency shelters. He remarked that a 3-year programme would cost up to USD 3 billion, with the overall cost ranging anywhere from USD 40 to 50 billion to rebuild the lost infrastructure in the long term. To even make room for the temporary emergency shelters and facilities that will be needed, efforts will need to be made to clear out the reported 37 million tons of debris in Gaza.

In addition to addressing the immediate needs of civilians in Gaza, UNDP will also be focused on planning a reconstruction plan with the full support of the UN and its organizations. “Our main concern is to be ready on any possible day to bring in the shelters and any necessary services. That is what we are doing in resource mobilization,” said Al Dadari.

“Unlike previous wars, the destruction in Gaza today is unprecedented in scope and scale, and coupled with the loss of homes, livelihoods, natural resources, infrastructure, and institutional capacities, it may have deep and systemic impacts for decades to come,” said ESCWA Executive Secretary Rola Dashti.

“Unprecedented levels of human losses, capital destruction, and the steep rise in poverty in such a short period of time will precipitate a serious development crisis that jeopardizes the future of generations to come,” said UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Olaide Bankole was born and raised in Nigeria, and he observed how climate change was evident in the country with temperature rises and rainfall variability and how drought, desertification, and sea level rises have been affecting its people. He is also aware of how rising sea levels threaten southern Nigerian cities like Lagos and coastal […]