By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 23 2025 – Thirteen years of extended conflict, economic downturns, and multiple earthquakes, has left Syria in the midst of a severe humanitarian crisis. Hostilities remain abundant across all of Syria’s governorates, with each facing widespread civilian displacements and damage to critical infrastructures. Following the change of government in December of 2024, Syrian refugees have begun returning from neighbouring countries. However, this return has been marred with insecurity due to the sheer scale of unexploded ordnance, which has resulted in numerous civilian casualties.

December 2024 saw the end of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime due to a series of offensive missions coordinated by the Syrian opposition. Subsequently, the Syrian Transitional Government, headed by Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir, has facilitated the transfer of power and will act as the head of state until 1 March 2025.

According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the end of Assad’s rule led to an eruption of hostilities across Syria, mainly concentrated in eastern Aleppo, Al-Hasakah, Ar-Raqqa, Quneitra, and regions along the Tishreen Dam. Between January 16 and 18, at least three civilians were killed and 14 injured from extensive shelling in Menbij, Ain al-Arab, and surrounding areas. On January 17, a bombing led to the damaging of several civilian infrastructures, including shops, ambulances, and healthcare centers.

Intensified violence had also led to the Tishreen Dam becoming damaged and non-functional for the past six weeks, depriving 413,000 people in Menbij and Ain-al Arab of water and electricity. The Menbij National Hospital has also been compromised due to lootings, with medical equipment, ambulances, and generators being at low stock, making healthcare efforts increasingly difficult. Repair efforts have been impeded due to persisting insecurity.

Heightened insecurity and displacement has plunged Syria into a state of economic emergency. Devaluation of Syrian currency and inflation have made the cost of food and other basic goods nearly inaccessible for the vast majority of the Syrian people. Poverty in Syria has been described as “near universal” by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), with approximately 90 percent of Syrians being financially insecure.

Living conditions for the majority of Syrians have exacerbated significantly in the past two months. The World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that approximately 13 million people struggle with extreme hunger. Additionally, IRC estimates that over 100,000 children under five years old suffer from acute malnutrition.

636 displacement shelters have had their water, sanitation, and hygiene services suspended due to underfunding, leaving approximately 636,000 people without access to clean water. OCHA states that the situation is particularly dire in northeast Syria, with 24,600 internally displaced persons (IDPs) residing in 204 collective shelters in dire need of water, latrine service, heating, winter clothing, and mental health support.

Poor sanitation and overcrowding in displacement shelters has led to the emergence of a cholera outbreak in Syria. Disease outbreaks have been a persistent threat in Syria since the eruption of hostilities and have significantly worsened in late 2024. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there have been over 200 confirmed cases of cholera in Syria.

WHO, in collaboration with UNICEF, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and local health authorities, launched a 10-day oral cholera vaccination campaign in Syria and managed to reach 100 percent vaccine utilization. However, due to compromised water systems and inadequate sanitation infrastructure, Syrians remain particularly vulnerable to future outbreaks. Humanitarian organizations such as UNICEF and WHO have begun winterization efforts to protect Syrians in displacement shelters from the spread of influenza-like illnesses.

According to a 2025 situation overview from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are currently about 7.2 million internally displaced people in Syria, as well as 6.2 million refugees, primarily based in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Türkiye, and Jordan. Additionally, rates of displacement have increased significantly since the transition of power, with approximately 627,000 people, including 275,000 children, having been displaced across the country, especially in Idlib and Aleppo.

In a situation report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), it has been confirmed that over 125,000 Syrian refugees have returned from neighbouring countries as of December 2024, with most of these returnees being concentrated in the Aleppo, Ar-Raqqa and Dara’a governorates.

Returnees and displaced Syrians are particularly vulnerable to unexploded ordnance. According to estimates from UNICEF, there are over 300,000 mines spread across the country. In December of 2024 alone, there have been at least 116 instances of children being killed or injured by unexploded ordnance, averaging about 4 cases per day. According to the humanitarian organization Humanity & Inclusion, approximately 14 million people are at risk of being injured or killed by explosive munitions.

“Girls and boys in the country continue to suffer the brutal impact of unexploded ordnance at an alarming rate. It’s the main cause of child casualties in Syria right now and has been for many years, and will continue to be. Every step they take carries the risk of an unimaginable tragedy,” said Ricardo Pires, UNICEF Communication Manager for Emergencies.

The United Nations and its partners remain on the frontlines of this crisis to assist vulnerable populations in Syria as they navigate this transitional period. UNICEF’s Syria Humanitarian Action for Children (HAC) appeal for 2025 seeks 488 million dollars in funding in order to scale up responses. So far, only 11 percent of this fund has been secured.

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By Luke Cooper
LONDON, Jan 23 2025 – Trump’s trade policy blends aggressive tariffs, legal manoeuvring and transactional diplomacy. But could he really blow up the global trade system?

The Trump team make the mistake of thinking about the global economy as a series of bilateral trade relationships when it is actually a complex and highly integrated system of connections.

President Donald Trump won his re-election on the promise of fighting an unprecedented trade war against the rest of the world.

He has proposed a universal tariff on all goods imports to the United States of between 10-20 per cent, rising to 60 per cent for shipments from China and even higher in some areas. After winning the election, Trump initially doubled down further on this rhetoric, threatening a 25 per cent tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada.

The Trump transition team are divided over these proposals but appear to be sticking to the idea of some form of universal tariff. Reports suggest though that they plan to target strategic industries such as defence manufacturing and metallurgy, medical supplies and pharmaceuticals, and energy production.

This would still amount to a radical disruption of the global trading system. It would also lead to retaliatory action from the United States’ larger trading partners and violate the terms of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

America cannot simply ‘decouple’ from China

Economic and geopolitical competition with China has become an obsession of the American political elite. The Trump administration first introduced tariffs on China in 2018, and these were kept by his successor and extended further in 2024.

One of the reasons that the Trump administration are edging towards the idea of using universal tariffs is the failure of China-focused tariffs to bring down the overall US trade deficit in goods, which has exceeded $1 trillion each year from 2021 to 2024.

The Trump administration’s focus on Mexico and Canada reflects the fact that they, along with China, are by some distance America’s major source of goods imports, each accounting for in excess of $400 billion in 2023.

But the Trump team make the mistake of thinking about the global economy as a series of bilateral trade relationships when it is actually a complex and highly integrated system of connections.

The decline and plateauing of the US-China trade relationship since 2018 disguises how supply chains adapted with Chinese components routed into final line assembly in Southeast Asian states. American industry is itself embedded in such networked production.

Richard Baldwin and Rebecca Freeman calculate that ‘Chinese inputs into all the inputs that American manufacturers buy from other foreign suppliers… is almost four times larger than it appears to be’ in trade statistics.

In a still highly integrated world economy, China’s competitive production and its dominance of goods exports make it an unavoidable partner — and its sluggish domestic economy increases its dependency on its export strength. For the United States to tackle the rerouting of goods through third countries to avoid tariffs would require complex rules of origin tests that would be challenging and expensive to implement.

The imbalance that the Trump administration highlights is certainly real. It has long been recognised that the United States economy is heavily skewed towards consumption over production — and that the opposite is the case for China.

The gross savings rate – the proportion of national income not spent on consumption – in China is more than double the level of the US. China’s low consumption and high savings provide the basis for huge investments in production with the goods then needing to be consumed elsewhere.

This relationship shapes the world economy: the US consumes an enormous amount of goods, and China provides many of these goods. By 2030, China is expected to account for an astonishing 45 per cent of all global industrial production — an increase from just six per cent a quarter of a century ago. Trade imbalances on this scale pose a problem for the global economy.

For many years, lonely voices on the left argued that the goal of trade efficiency – e.g. the plentiful cheap industrial products China offers – should be balanced against other objectives like supporting jobs and environmental protection.

But today, the idea that trade should not be ‘free’ but conditional on the political choices we make enjoys much wider support. Numerous conservatives that are hawkish on competition with China now agitate very loudly against American economic dependency on its supply chains.

While this American turn has raised important questions about supply chain resilience, the relationship between trade and human rights, and how to design industrial policies that deliver the outcomes we want, Trump’s brand of ‘strongman’ nationalism offers no serious answers.

Trump’s heterogeneous coalition

The Trump administration would like to lower the price of the dollar to boost US goods export performance, but the blunt single instrument that they favour – tariffs – will not bring this about. As David Lubin argues, while tariffs increase the cost of imported goods in the American market, this in no way equates with weakening the dollar.

The general strength of the US economy and the importance of its market for global exporters mean that tariffs will create downward pressure on the currencies of states that are subject to them. Added to this is the inflationary effect of tariffs and Trump’s expansive fiscal policy – i.e. his huge tax cuts – which will incline the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates.

So, rather than a weakened dollar the result would be the opposite: a dollar with even more buying power. Unless the Trump administration start from an analysis that the trade deficit is closely related to the combination of two internal imbalances, the American imbalance towards consumption over investment and the reverse in China, their policies will simply not work.

To bring about the kind of rebalancing in global trade that the Trump administration claims to want would require multilateral cooperation — the antithesis of ‘America first’. It points to thinking holistically about the global economy and its rules — addressing not only goods trade but also services, finance and capital movements.

Some in the Republican Party are asking these questions. The conservative think tank American Compass has identified financial liberalisation as the critical source of trade imbalances. Vice President J. D. Vance has even argued that the role of the dollar as a global reserve currency is a ‘massive subsidy to American consumers but a massive tax on American producers’.

However, any move to greater control of capital movements would put the Trump administration on a collision course with Wall Street, which seems unlikely. The Trump camp includes a coterie of far-right-moving billionaires like Elon Musk who see his authoritarianism as a vehicle for their brand of economic libertarianism, which conveniently supports subsidies and government spending when it benefits their interests.

These backers would recoil at the idea of capital controls. Trump has also threatened huge tariffs on any states that pursue de-dollarisation and his Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent has confirmed the administration will maintain the dollar’s position as a global reserve currency. A more moderate proposal is to reach out to Beijing to agree on a plan for dollar devaluation.

Shahin Vallée suggests Trump could launch a multilateral initiative to strike a deal on a package of coordinated measures. However, this would require reducing the US budget deficit — an effort that becomes much harder in the context of the administration’s plans for huge tax cuts.

The Trumpian method of politics

All of these proposals assume, however, that the Trump administration is capable of developing policies with some sense of the general interest in mind. Trump’s own statements provide little grounds for anticipating this.

Consider how his team have previously hinted at exploiting ideological divisions within the European Union. Trump’s propensity to link trade policies with non-trade issues, such as immigration and drug enforcement, could be applied to European states to offer quid pro quos that seek to circumvent the EU institutions.

While EU states share a Common External Tariff, Trump may be inclined to offer unilateral tariff reductions to his far-right co-thinkers in exchange for deals that benefit his networks and have nothing to do with a trade. As Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is a landlocked state, it could not match any US tariff concession (given that all goods it received would have to pass through another EU member state), but he may have something else to offer team Trump.

In the United States, it is also highly likely that the tariffs would be riddled with exemptions and opts-outs, providing obvious avenues for kleptocratic deal-making with corporate lobbyists.

Trump should not be read then as a champion of ‘Main Street against Wall Street’. Or as the head of a political faction aimed at mobilising the powers of American statecraft to redesign its domestic economy and external trade relations.

Instead, it might be better to analyse Trumpism – and the ideologically heterogeneous networks and actors that constitute it – as representing an oligarchisation in which institutions are captured to secure sectional advantages for supporters, exchanging political for economic power and vice versa.

The transactionalism fundamental to this approach to politics seems likely to carry over into the administration’s trade policy with potentially chaotic and contradictory effects.

Luke Cooper is an Associate Professorial Research Fellow in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Director of PeaceRep’s Ukraine programme. He is the author of Authoritarian Contagion (Bristol University Press, 2021).

Source: International Politics and Society (IPS), published by the Global and European Policy Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hiroshimastrasse 28, D-10785 Berlin.

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By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Jan 23 2025 – Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, carries his frustration as visibly as he carries his passport.

To travel across the continent he calls home, he needs 35 visas—each a bureaucratic hurdle and a reminder of the barriers to free movement and trade in Africa.

“As someone who wants to make Africa great, I have to apply for 35 different visas,” Dangote lamented at a recent Africa CEO Forum in Kigali, Rwanda. His words echo the larger frustration of a continent grappling with the paradox of cementing regional integration while battling closed borders.

Nearly a decade after African leaders envisioned a borderless continent, the dream is largely unfulfilled.

Visa Woes

The 2024 Africa Visa Openness Index, launched recently in Botswana, is revealing: only four countries—Benin, The Gambia, Rwanda, and Seychelles—offer visa-free access to all Africans. Ghana has joined the list after it announced visa-free travel to all Africans in January this year.

Published by the African Development Bank and the African Union, the visa-openness index measures how open African countries are to citizens of other African countries based on whether or not a visa is required before travel and if it can be issued on arrival. There has been some progress since the first edition of the report, with several African countries instituting reforms to simplify the free movement of people across the continent.

About 17 African countries have improved on their visa openness, while 29 are instituting reforms on the issuance of visas for Africans, the Index shows. In 28 percent of country-to-country travel scenarios within Africa, African citizens do not need a visa to cross the border, a marked improvement over 20% in 2016

However, the cost of inaction is clear. Intra-Africa trade is at a low 15 percent of total trade, compared to 60 percent in Asia and 70 percent in Europe, according to research by the Economic Commission for Africa. Visa openness could boost intra-Africa trade and tourism while facilitating labour mobility and skills transfer and propel Africa to economic growth. For now, closed borders remain Africa’s stop sign to free movement.

Zodwa Mabuza, Principal Regional Integration Officer at the AFDB, noted during the launch of the 2024 Index on the sidelines of the 2024 Africa Economic Conference that visa openness was not about permanent migration but the facilitation of tourism, trade and investments.

“This is the sort of movement that we are promoting, in particular because we are promoting the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA),” Mabuza said.

Stop In the Name of Crime

Fears of illegal migration, terrorism, and economic disruption keep borders closed, despite evidence that such fears are often overblown, said Francis Ikome, Chief Regional Integration and Trade at the Economic Commission for Africa.

Ikome warned that without free movement of African people across the continent, AfCFTA is ‘dead on arrival’.

“We cannot discuss the concerns of security again, even though I think there is over-securitization of migration. When we talk about migration, we see security,” said Ikome. “When you are a foreigner and an African moves to the immigration officer, they see problems even before they look at your passport. Migrants are job creators; there are a lot of university dons, accountants and other skills that migrants bring to the table.”

Free Passage Paradox

Since the launch of the AfCFTA, a majority of African countries have not ratified the Free Movement of Persons Protocol launched in 2018 by the African Union and signed by 33 member states. Only four countries have ratified the Protocol.

Migration researcher Alan Hirsch highlighted that some richer African countries are more protective of their borders and several of the most open countries are island states or poor countries that do not expect immigration or can control it more easily. He said trust is needed between countries, which takes time and effort.

“The reluctance of some countries is related to their concerns about the quality of documentation and systems in some countries, fears relating to security issues as there are terrorist organisations in some parts of Africa, and fears that the visitors are economic migrants in disguise and will not leave,” Hirsch told IPS.

“There is a lot of progress in the regional communities in Africa. Borders are opening frequently on a bilateral or multilateral basis, as the visa openness index shows,” said Hirsch, an Emeritus Professor at The Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town.

Sabelo Mbokazi, Head of Employment, Labour and Migration at the African Union Commission, suggests that countries that promote free movement must be incentivised to do better.

“Who are we serving with all these visa restrictions? Are we serving the people or the politics of the day? Are we serving populations or our popularity? Are we serving the people around the continent or for profit? These are the paradoxes we see in Africa,” he said, citing that intra-African migration was at 80 percent, with 20 percent going to Europe or America but Europeans who came to Africa moved more easily than Africans.

That some Africans do not have passports and some are nomads, visa-free travel could be a logistical nightmare that many countries would do without. Africa has toyed with the concept of an African passport, which was launched in 2016. The passport has been issued only to African heads of state, foreign ministers and diplomats accredited by the AU.

“Regional passports, such as the ECOWAS passport for the large West African community and the EAC passport for the growing East African community, were developed in recent times and are doing very well. It was probably too soon for an all-African passport, “ Hirsch said.

In analysis, stopping African travellers in their tracks is counter to regional integration aspirations, argues Joy Kategekwa, Director, Regional Integration Coordination Office, at the AfDB.

“The paradox of integration in Africa is we talk about pan-Africanism; we have a passion for it but we keep Africans closed out of it behind the visa.”

Tied to the free movement of persons has been the poor implementation of the Yamoussoukro Decision to liberalize air transport. Air connectivity in Africa is a nightmare.

Hirsch is optimistic that Africa can boost its development through trade and migration, admitting that opening African skies takes time.

“In addition to the African ‘free skies’ initiative and the free movement of persons protocol, there is the AfCFTA,” he said. “All three initiatives were agreed to in 2018. The AfCFTA is making some progress and could help pave the way for the other two initiatives.”

The stakes are high. The AfCFTA, meant to unite 1.3 billion people under a single market, risks failure. With closed borders and skies, a visa-free Africa is a dream deferred.

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By Jo Becker
NEW YORK, Jan 23 2025 – The International Day of Education, January 24, reminds us of the power of education to transform children’s lives, and to build vibrant, sustainable societies.

One of the most important—and simplest—things that governments can do to ensure children’s education is to make it free. In the 1990s, when many countries began to eliminate school fees at the primary level, they saw dramatic results.

Malawi, for example, abolished primary school fees in 1994, and within a year, enrolment had surged by 50 percent, with 1 million additional children enrolled. After Kenya abolished primary school fees in 2003, 2 million new children enrolled.

The sudden influx of new students strained education systems, challenging countries to train additional teachers, build more schools, and to ensure quality. But today, virtually all of the world’s children enjoy free primary education, and nearly 90 percent of children globally complete primary school.

Fewer than 60 percent of the world’s children complete secondary school, and about  half miss out on pre-primary education, which takes place during the early years when children’s brains are rapidly developing, and provides profound long-term benefits. Existing international law—dating back more than 70 years—only guarantees free education for all children at the primary level

But it’s a different story for children at the pre-primary and secondary level, where cost often remains a significant barrier to schooling.

Fewer than 60 percent of the world’s children complete secondary school, and about  half miss out on pre-primary education, which takes place during the early years when children’s brains are rapidly developing, and provides profound long-term benefits. Existing international law—dating back more than 70 years—only guarantees free education for all children at the primary level.

In Uganda, for example, our recent investigation with the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights found that most children miss out on pre-primary education entirely, because the government provides no funding for early childhood education, and families are unable to afford the fees charged by private preschools.

Without access to pre-primary, children typically don’t perform as well in primary school, are twice as likely to repeat grades, and are more likely to drop-out. Many of these children never catch up to their peers, exacerbating income inequality.

According to the World Bank, every dollar invested in pre-primary education can yield up to $14 in benefits. Early education boosts tax revenues and GDP by improving children’s employment prospects and earnings, and enables parents—especially mothers—to increase their income by returning to work sooner.

In Uganda, a recent cost-benefit analysis found that 90 percent of the cost of government-funded free pre-primary could be covered just through the expected reduction of repetition rates and inefficiencies at the primary school level. It concluded that “investments in early childhood have the greatest rate of return of any human capital intervention.”

As part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), all countries have agreed that by 2030 they will provide access to pre-primary education for all, and that all children will complete free secondary education. But political commitments to free education are simply not enough, and progress is too slow.

A growing number of countries see the expansion of free education beyond primary school as an essential investment.

Ghana, for example, became the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to expand free education to the kindergarten years in 2008, guaranteeing two years of free and compulsory pre-primary education.

In 2017, it committed to full free secondary education, and according to the latest statistics, now has the third-highest enrolment rate in Sub-Saharan Africa in both pre-primary and secondary school. Its free secondary education policy has reduced poverty rates nationally, particularly for female-headed households.

It’s no surprise that UNESCO reports that countries with laws guaranteeing free education have significantly higher rates of children in school. When Azerbaijan adopted legislation providing three years of free pre-primary education, for example, participation rates shot up from 25 percent to 83 percent in four years.

Given the proven benefits of free education, it’s baffling that approximately 70 percent of the world’s children live in countries that still do not guarantee free pre-primary and free secondary education by law or policy.

In July 2024, the UN Human Rights Council approved a proposal from Luxembourg, Sierra Leone, and the Dominican Republic to consider a new international treaty to explicitly guarantee free public pre-primary (beginning with one year) and free public secondary education for all children

To be sure, a new treaty will not immediately get every child in school. But it will provide a powerful impetus for governments to move more quickly to expand access to free education and an important tool for civil society to hold them to account.

Negotiations for the proposed treaty are expected to begin in September. Governments should seize this moment to advance free education for all children, without exception.

Jo Becker is children’s rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.