Sawantwadi in Maharashtra, on the western coast of India, bordering Goa, has always been known for its wooden toys. A picturesque town amid hills and lush greenery, Sawantwadi retains an old-world charm to this day.  The regal Sawantwadi Palace holds pride of place, with colleges, schools, and temples cloistered around the periphery of the lake, […]

By External Source
Jun 14 2024 (IPS-Partners)

For 1,000 days girls in Afghanistan have been banned from secondary school education. We must now stand up and speak out together for the girls and women of Afghanistan with a clarion call to the de facto authorities and world leaders to end the ban on girls’ secondary education in Afghanistan.

The cost of inaction is unimaginable. As we speak, 8 out of 10 school-aged girls and young women are out of school in Afghanistan, and 1.5 million girls are impacted by the ban on secondary education.

Every day, more and more out-of-school girls are being forced into marriage for lack of any other future prospects. In fact, the ban on Afghan girls’ education after grade six is correlated with a 25% increase in the rate of child marriage, according to a new UN Women report. The ban is also associated with an increase of the risk of maternal mortality by at least 50%. Mental health distress and depression is also soaring, and so are suicide attempts.

In all, 4.2 million children are out of school. The ban on female teachers, severe restrictions to aid groups, a return to religious teaching and other factors aren’t just hurting the girls of Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch found a significant decline in the quality of boys’ education across 8 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.

For 1,000 days Afghan girls have lived under a veil of oppression and gender apartheid. For 1,000 days, they have seen their human rights ripped from their hands. Imagine the long-term impact this will have on the people of Afghanistan. Imagine the long-term impacts this will have on our global community.

As we look to end hunger and poverty in Afghanistan and beyond, the impact of investments in education is readily apparent. For each extra year of schooling there is a 10% increase in hourly earnings. It can lift-up entire economies. For each year of additional schooling, a nation can expect up to 18% return in GDP.

This is also our investment in peace, not just in Afghanistan, but for nations everywhere. Each year of education reduces the risk of conflict by 20%, according to the World Bank. And it’s our investment in girls and women everywhere. Increases in schooling for women can cut children mortality under five by as much as half, and for every $1 we spend on girls’ education we generate $2.80 in return.

For 1,000 days, we have seen the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child cast aside in blatant violation of international law and our shared humanity. We refuse to give up on the girls and boys of Afghanistan.

The UN system, international non-profits and other key strategic partners are working quickly to retool education investments to focus on community-based education and localized action to deliver on the humanitarian imperative. Without this support, an entire generation of Afghan girls face increased risks of child marriage, sexual violence and other grave violations of their human rights.

In 2023, Education Cannot Wait investments in Afghanistan reached nearly 200,000 children – girls and boys – through community-based education programmes. We must scale up this support with increased funding and increased political pressure to deliver the inherent human right of a quality education to every girl and every boy in Afghanistan.

As the world mourns this inhumane and immoral 1,000-day ban on girls’ education, global leaders, advocates, influencers and courageous Afghan girls have stepped up to share their call for an end to gender apartheid in Afghanistan through Education Cannot Wait’s ground-breaking #AfghanGirlsVoices Campaign.

As one girl put it: “I am overwhelmed by a profound sense of sorrow and injustice, knowing that we, as women, are denied the fundamental right to education.” The world must unite behind the girls of Afghanistan. Share #AfghanGirlsVoices today.

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 Jayendu De and Genet Zinabou
WASHINGTON DC, Jun 14 2024 – Bangladesh has made major gains for its population, the world’s eighth largest with more than 170 million people. Per capita incomes, one of the best measures of broad economic well-being, have risen seven-fold in the past three decades while poverty has been reduced to a fraction of former levels.

Such progress has been driven in part by greater labor force participation by women, most notably in the garment industry, and has been accompanied by other meaningful improvements in women’s empowerment.

Our recent analysis, however, shows there are still large gaps between women and men. Notably, women’s labor force participation is only half the rate of men.

Prior IMF research shows that closing this gap could increase the country’s economic output by nearly 40 percent. Women also remain less likely than men to obtain tertiary education, and they face greater barriers in accessing financial services. Remedying both factors could raise the entire economy’s productivity.

At the same time, efforts to close gender gaps face headwinds from Bangladesh’s extreme vulnerability to climate change and natural disasters. Like other economic shocks, climate shocks generally affect the already poor and vulnerable the most. This means that Bangladeshi women, who on average have fewer resources than men, are likely to be disproportionately impacted.

Our analysis further highlights several factors that render women in Bangladesh uniquely exposed to the effects of climate change and natural disasters:

• Women’s employment in Bangladesh is highly concentrated in agriculture and informal work. Climate change very directly affects agricultural production, whereas informal workers are often particularly vulnerable to climate shocks as they lack access to social insurance programs.
• International and internal migration are important climate adaptation strategies, availed mostly by men. Bangladeshi men are 16 times more likely to be employed overseas than women, who tend to be primary care givers for children and the elderly, leaving them less mobile and more likely to remain living in areas highly exposed to climate change.
• Women in Bangladesh carry primary responsibility for collecting drinking water and cooking fuel. As warming temperatures, rising sea levels, deforestation and more frequent cyclones and droughts render these tasks more time-consuming, women’s time poverty is expected to be exacerbated.

Bangladesh already recognized the need to integrate gender perspectives in its 2009 Climate Change Strategy. Following this, the government adopted the first Climate Change and Gender Action Plan 2013, which it updated in March 2024.

Renewed efforts will be needed to ensure successful implementation of the plan and achieve simultaneous progress on climate action and gender equality.

To this end, policymakers should capitalize as much as possible on the synergies between women’s empowerment, economic growth, and increased resilience to climate change.

Policies that support women’s labor force participation deserve particular attention, including those that expand their access to skills development and higher education, ease unpaid care burdens by expanding affordable childcare, reduce informality, and address gender norms that discourage women from seeking formal jobs and higher pay.

Boosting health and education spending would help empower women while raising labor productivity and making the whole population more resilient to climate change.

Persistent gaps between women and men in access to finance should be tackled by instilling confidence in formal finance, strengthening women’s property rights and carrying out financial literacy campaigns targeted at women.

Bangladesh was an early adopter of gender responsive budgeting and has more recently introduced climate budget tagging, a tool for tracking climate-related spending in the national budget.

However, insufficient integration of gender and climate considerations during the initial strategic phase of budget formulation means that the system in Bangladesh currently functions primarily as an ex-post accounting exercise.

Improvements in this area combined with more systematic impact assessment of government programs would enable more efficient channeling of public resources toward achieving the country’s gender equity and climate goals.

Lastly, women should not be thought of as mere beneficiaries of climate action. Rather, just as women played an integral role in the development of the garment industry and Bangladesh’s growth success in recent decades, they should be empowered to play an active role in the country’s green transition.

The IMF’s engagement with Bangladesh, including the country becoming the first in Asia to access our new Resilience and Sustainability Trust, aims to support policy efforts in many of these directions.

Jayendu De is the IMF Resident Representative in Bangladesh. Genet Zinabou is an economist in the Fiscal Affairs Department, IMF.

Source: International Monetary Fund (IMF)

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 Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Jun 14 2024 – There’s been recent change in violence-torn Haiti – but whether much-needed progress results remains to be seen.

Acting prime minister Garry Conille was sworn in on 3 June. A former UN official who briefly served as prime minister over a decade ago, Conille was the compromise choice of the Transitional Presidential Council. The Council formed in April to temporarily assume the functions of the presidency following the resignation of de facto leader Ariel Henry.

Upsurge in violence

Haiti has seen intense and widespread gang violence since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021. Henry was finally forced out as the conflict escalated still further. In February, two major gang networks joined forces. The gangs attacked Haiti’s main airport, forcing it to close for almost three months and stopping Henry returning from abroad.

Gangs took control of police stations and Hait’s two biggest jails, releasing over 4,000 prisoners. The violence targeted an area of the capital, Port-au-Prince, previously considered safe, where the presidential palace, government headquarters and embassies are located. Haitian citizens paid a heaver price: the UN estimates that around 2,500 people were killed or injured in gang violence in the first quarter of this year, a staggering 53 per cent increase on the previous quarter.

Henry won’t be missed by civil society. He was widely seen as lacking any legitimacy. Moïse announced his appointment shortly before his assassination, but it was never formalised, and he then won a power struggle thanks in part to the support of foreign states. His tenure was a blatant failure. It was when the gangs seemed on the verge of taking full control of Port-au-Prince that Henry finally lost US support.

Now the USA, other states and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) have thrown their weight behind the Council and a Kenya-led international police force, which has recently begun to deploy.

Contested developments

Gang leaders can be expected to maintain their resistance to these developments. The most prominent, ex-police officer Jimmy Chérizier, demands a role in any talks. But this looks like posturing. Chérizier likes to portray himself as a revolutionary, on the side of poor people against elites. But the gangs are predatory. They kill innocent people, and it’s the poorest who suffer the most. The things the gangs make their money from – including kidnapping for ransom, extortion and smuggling – benefit from weak law enforcement and a lack of central authority. Gang leaders are best served by maximum chaos for as long as possible, and when that ends will seek an accommodation with favourable politicians, as they’ve enjoyed before.

Political squabbling suits the gangs, which makes it a concern that it took extensive and protracted negotiations to establish the Council. The opaque process was evidently characterised by self-interested manoeuvring as politicians jockeyed for position and status.

The resulting body has nine members: seven with voting rights and two observers. Six of the seven come from political groupings, with the seventh a private sector representative. One observer represents religious groups and the other civil society: Régine Abraham, a crop scientist by profession, from the Rally for a National Agreement.

The Council’s formation was shortly followed by the arrival of an advance force of Kenyan police, with more to follow. It’s been a long time coming. The current plan for an international police force was adopted by a UN Security Council resolution in October 2023. The government of Kenya took the lead, offering a thousand officers, with smaller numbers to come from elsewhere. But Kenya’s opposition won a court order temporarily preventing the move. Henry was in Kenya to sign a mutual security agreement to circumvent the ruling when he was left stranded by the airport closure.

Many Haitians are rightly wary of the prospect of foreign powers getting involved. The country has a dismal history of self-serving international interference, particularly by the US government, while UN forces have been no saviours. A peacekeeping mission from 2004 to 2017 committed sexual abuse and introduced cholera. This will be the 11th UN-organised mission since 1993, and all have been accused of human rights violations.

Civil society points to the Kenyan police’s long track record of committing violence and rights abuses, and is concerned it won’t understand local dynamics. There’s also the question of whether resources spent on the mission wouldn’t be better used to properly equip and support Haiti’s forces, which have consistently been far less well equipped than the gangs. Previous international initiatives have manifestly failed to help strengthen the capacity of Haitian institutions to protect rights and uphold the rule of law.

Time to listen

Haitian civil society is right to criticise the current process as falling short of expectations. It’s an impossible task to expect one person to represent the diversity of Haiti’s civil society, no matter how hard they try. And that person doesn’t even have a vote: the power to make decisions by majority vote is in the hands of political parties many feel helped create the current mess.

The Council is also a male-dominated institution: Abraham is its only female member. With gangs routinely using sexual violence as a weapon, the Council hardly seems in good shape to start building a Haiti free of violence against women and girls.

And given the role of international powers in bringing it about, the Council – just like the Kenya-led mission – is open to the accusation of being just another foreign intervention, giving rise to suspicions about the motives of those behind it.

The latest steps could be the start of something better, but only if they’re built on and move in the right direction. Civil society is pushing for more from the government: for much more women’s leadership and civil society engagement. For the Kenya-led mission, civil society is urging strong human rights safeguards, including a means for complaints to be heard if the mission, like all its predecessors, commits human rights abuses. This shouldn’t be too much to ask.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society 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 Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jun 14 2024 – Government and private initiatives and programmes to address the climate crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean are in fact a vast array of fake solutions, according to a new regional map made by environmental organisations in several of its countries.

The map “offers an overview to understand the dynamics and the deceptive language of fake solutions, which allow big polluters to obtain allocations to continue their activities and contribute to global warming,” Ivonne Yánez, president of Ecuador’s Acción Ecológica, told IPS.

Made by the Latin American and Caribbean Platform for Climate Justice, a network of environmental groups, the map shows the fake solutions of dozens of projects for green energy and the production of its inputs, and for storing carbon in forests, other ecosystems and agricultural systems.

There are also geoengineering projects to prevent climate change, and climate change adaptation based on ecosystems, infrastructure and engineering projects.

“The map offers an overview to understand the dynamics and the deceptive language of fake solutions, which allow big polluters to obtain allocations to continue their activities and contribute to global warming”: Ivonne Yánez

“More than a format, it is a tool for visibility, a pedagogical tool that joins very diverse players, such as scholars, researchers, NGOs and activists gathered in the Platform,” said Liliana Buitrago, a researcher at the Observatory of Political Ecology of Venezuela, which released the map in May, to IPS.

The network “states that transition initiatives coming from the territorial fabric and communities, outside the frameworks imposed by the green economy, corporate greenwashing and corporate capture” of carbon emissions, “are urgent,” Buitrago said.

Presenting the map, Yánez explained that “what green capitalism seeks is not only to appropriate nature’s ability to cleanse itself, to recreate life, to photosynthesise”.

“Through fake solutions, it also takes advantage of and appropriates what indigenous peoples have done for thousands of years, which is protecting and taking care of forests, or peasants that care for the soil. And for what? To carry on an escalation of fossil fuel extraction,” said the activist.

In March 2021, environmentalists from Greenpeace threw green paint on the fuselage of an Air France plane at Paris airport to protest the company’s purchase of carbon credits. Major firms purchased the offsets without backtracking on the expansion of carbon-intensive operations. Credit: Fenis Meyer / Greenpeace

Carbon, an unscathed villain

An analysis of the 83 cases that make up the first map – 100 more will appear in future editions – shows that 70 per cent of fake solutions to the climate crisis are privately funded, and that indigenous communities and small farmers are the most affected.

The most common among fake solution categories are projects to store carbon in forests, other ecosystems and agricultural systems, in 50 per cent of cases.

REDD+ projects (Reducing Emissions – mainly carbon dioxide, CO2 – from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries) account for 33 per cent of the cases.

The REDD+ framework allows countries to issue and market carbon offset certifications “that are put in the financial system at the disposal of companies that want to use them as licenses to continue polluting and generating emissions”, criticizes Yánez.

Wind energy projects, and new forestry plantations justified by carbon sequestration, comprise 10 and 11 per cent of the projects on the map.

The Platform considers the recent launch of blue carbon credits (debt issues that finance ecosystem conservation projects) in oil-producing Trinidad and Tobago, for work in the southwest of Tobago and in the Caroni swamp in Trinidad, as a form of greenwashing.

In Brazil, among several cases, Portel-Pará is shown at the head of four carbon storage projects in 7,000 square kilometres of forests and other ecosystems, through land negotiations and agreements on deforestation boundaries with communities in the northern Amazonian state of Pará.

The Latin American platform Alianza Biodiversidad criticises that these projects create carbon credits that are bought by large firms that continue to pollute, such as Repsol (oil), Air France, Delta Airlines and Boeing (aviation), Amazon and Aldi (commerce) or Samsung and Toshiba (technology).

View of a solar farm in Namasigue, southern Honduras. In several countries in the region, large solar and wind energy installations force the displacement of communities, due to alterations in land tenure and use, with impacts on water and crops. Credit: Scatec / Cepad

Displaced people, a cliché

Looking at the map from North to South, the fake solutions start in Mexico, with the example of lithium mining in 13 salt flats in the states of Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí (north-central Mexico) by the Canadian firm Advance Gold Corp.

This project has caused displacement of peasant populations, pollution, and changes in land ownership and use.

Projects for solar photovoltaic power plants in Quetzaltepeque (eastern Guatemala) and Namasigüe (southern Honduras), run by private consortiums with capitals from the Norwegian firm Scatec, have in common the displacement of peasant and fishing populations, loss of habitats and biodiversity.

In Colombia, the San José ranch received funding from the Green Climate Fund and Dutch banks for a project in the eastern department of Vichada to expand its cattle herd from 9,000 head on 8,000 hectares to 750,000 animals on 180,000 hectares.

The company is singled out in the Fund for sequestering more carbon than it emits, but the Platform questions the cattle expansion’s contribution to climate and highlights risks to a neighbouring reservation of the Sikuani people.

Helicopter view of the last, diminished glacier in the Venezuelan Andes, whose end is being delayed with plastic sheeting. Some climate action initiatives are not only misguided in their goals and approaches, but can also become pollution hotspots. Credit: Minec

Energy with colour

In Costa Rica, a hydroelectric “green energy” facility was proposed in 2013 in the southwestern canton of Pérez Zeledón. It lacked the necessary documentation, had falsified land-use permits by the mayor’s office, and would cause foreseeable pollution and loss of habitats and biodiversity.

The state environmental technical secretariat granted it expedited permits but, in the face of public criticism and rejection, the government cancelled the project.

In Jamaica, a “green energy” project has been underway since 2016, 90 kilometres west of Kingston. A wind farm of 11 wind turbines, with funding from the United States and Canada, is supposed to cover three percent of the island’s electricity demand and reduce emissions by 66,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.

The map points out that, at the same time, Jamaica is handing out concessions for bauxite mining and aluminium reduction, a key material for energy transition but whose production causes desertification, disease, and deepens extractivism.

The Dominican Republic hosts the largest photovoltaic power plant in the Antilles, the Girasol solar park, in the southern municipality of Yaguate, west of Santo Domingo. It has 268,200 panels installed, with an investment of 100 million dollars by the Cayman Islands-based firm Haina Investment.

The map shows the changes in territorial dynamics, the relationship of locals with the environment, and the impact caused in the lands from which minerals are extracted to produce the installed technology.

Monocultures and deaf ears

In 2006, oil-producing Venezuela presented a project for ethanol production with sugar mills, using sugar cane grown on 300,000 hectares in the southwestern plains. This never came to fruition but showed an inclination to favour monoculture for fuels instead of diversified food production.

The map also shows the country recently initiated a project to slow down the extinction of its last glacier, more than 4,000 metres above sea level on Humboldt Peak, in the southwestern Andes, by covering it with polystyrene mesh.

The project ignored recommendations from the University of the Andes concerning risks in its implementation, plastic pollution of air, water and soil, and because it will not prevent the glacier from melting due to global warming.

The Luxembourg-based Arbaro Fund, active in seven countries in the South, bought 1,080 hectares of land in three Ecuadorean provinces and is planning another 500 hectares for monoculture tree plantations, whose management aims, in theory, to protect the environment and capture CO2.

The same fund acquired 9,000 hectares in the central department of San Pedro in Paraguay, and two thirds will be planted with eucalyptus trees. The Platform warns that the project legalises land grabbing, with devastating effects on the environment and on indigenous and small farming communities.

Some 100 civil society organisations alerted the Green Climate Fund in 2020 about the harm small farmers may suffer from land regime change and pollution, plus the loss of habitats, biodiversity and agro-diversity. However, Arbaro Fund received 25 million dollars to support its plantations.

A view of Yasuní National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where a nationwide public consultation determined a major oil field was to be left in the ground undeveloped. Environmental groups see these measures and initiatives as part of a successful climate drive. Credit: Snap

New searches

A stark contrast to the “fake solutions” on the map are initiatives such as Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s decision to set a deadline on his country’s dependence on fossil fuels, or the rejection of certain oil and mining operations decided in a referendum by the people of Ecuador.

“The people’s decision to leave oil in the ground is a clear contribution to the fight against climate change, as is the decision to ban mining in the Andean Chocó, which is rich in biodiversity,” Yánez stressed.

In the referendum held on 20 August 2023, 59 per cent of Ecuadorians voted to prevent oil exploitation in the Yasuní national park in the Amazon. In Quito, 68 per cent of the vote vetoed gold and copper prospecting in the Andean Chocó area, west of the capital.

Buitrago believes that, “far from being solutions to the problem, fake solutions are ways of perpetuating the extractivist and exploitative model of accumulation that has caused the climate crisis”.

That is why the map, by showing contrasts and criticisms of fake solutions, “also seeks to state that other organisations can make the real ones visible”, said Yánez.