“This includes the full and proper participation of women in all the mechanisms contemplated by the [Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan]”, said Nicholas Haysom, who is also Head of the UN Mission there (UNMISS).
SRSG Haysom at UNSC: Renewed legislative activity is noticeable following completion of the formation of the reconstituted transitional legislature, at national & state levels – political differences are fought out in Parliament rather than outside of it; this is welcome progress pic.twitter.com/4jFsqLILez
Despite delays, he said progress has been made. The parties overcame a critical impasse to reach a breakthrough agreement on a single joint command structure for the Necessary Unified Forces on 3 April.
The formation of the reconstituted transitional legislature at national and state levels, is now completed, and renewed legislative activity and debate is noticeable.
“The fact that at least some of the political differences are fought out in Parliament rather than outside of it, is a welcome development,” he added.
Further, he said the National Constitutional Amendment Committee’s recent mandate extension will now allow for the review of the National Elections Act – a prerequisite for launching the electoral and legislative frameworks – Parliament’s adoption of a national budget for the year 2021/22, after a nine-month delay, will allow for more advances.
A call for leadership, resources
“What is needed is national leadership, resources and a visible commitment by South Sudan’s leaders to fulfil their responsibilities under the peace agreement,” he clarified. He pressed parties to take the steps necessary to exit the transitional period.
Specifically, he urged them to agree on a roadmap – as called for by the African Union, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the Reconstituted Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission and the United Nations – for the completion of outstanding tasks.
These include the graduation and deployment of the Necessary Unified Forces, the approval of pending legislation for the constitution-making process and national elections, and critical reforms of the security, judicial and financial sectors.
Cattle raiding, abductions, revenge killings
“The sheer magnitude of the tasks ahead requires the international community’s full and unrestricted attention,” he assured.
Turning to the scale of simmering violence across the country – which now spreads from north to south and east to west – he said that in Eastern and Central Equatoria, Unity, Warrap and Jonglei states, as well as the Abyei Administrative Area, violence civilians have endured multiple attacks, fuelling a cycle of cattle raiding, abductions, revenge killings, and gender-based violence.
He said that in this year alone, more than 80 per cent of civilian casualties have been attributed to intercommunal violence and community-based militias.
While UNMISS is deploying an increasingly mobile and robust posture, “quite frankly, we cannot be everywhere.” The three-year strategic vision requested by the Security Council, continues to be the framework for its integrated efforts, he assured ambassadors.
Humanitarian ‘deterioration’
Ghada Mudawi, Acting Director of the Operations and Advocacy Division at the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said “most humanitarian indicators have deteriorated” since late 2021.
As localised violence continues, displacement and fighting over resources such as cattle have followed. Women and girls are at serious risk of gender‑based violence.
Famine risk
“When it gets as bad as in South Sudan, the spectre of sever hunger and even famine results,” she pointed out, noting that South Sudan now faces a fourth year of above-average rainfall that has disrupted the agricultural season and constrained food production.
In addition, she said at least 500,000 people will likely be impacted by floods in 2022.
With over two million South Sudanese internally displaced and 2.3 million living as refugees, she urged the Government to address the issues keeping people in a holding pattern of displacement: insecurity, the presence of explosive hazards, a lack of basic services and unresolved housing, land and property issues.
Against that backdrop, she assured that humanitarian partners are “committed to stay and deliver”.
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 20 (IPS) – The 164-member World Trade Organization (WTO) has implicitly rubber-stamped a widely-condemned policy of “vaccine apartheid” which has discriminated the world’s poorer nations, mostly in Africa and Asia, depriving them of any wide-ranging intellectual property rights.
As Max Lawson, Co-Chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance and Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam, said at the conclusion of the WTO’s ministerial meeting last week: “The conduct of rich countries at the WTO has been utterly shameful”.
“The European Union (EU) has blocked anything that resembles a meaningful intellectual property waiver. The UK and Switzerland have used negotiations to twist the knife and make any text even worse. And the US has sat silently in negotiations with red lines designed to limit the impact of any agreement.”
The Geneva-based WTO, whose members account for nearly 98 percent of world trade, takes decisions by consensus resulting in a rash of compromises on some of the disputed issues.
Lawson said: “This is absolutely not the broad intellectual property waiver the world desperately needs to ensure access to vaccines and treatments for everyone, everywhere. The EU, UK, US, and Switzerland blocked that text.”
This so-called compromise, he argued, largely reiterates developing countries’ existing rights to override patents in certain circumstances. And it tries to restrict even that limited right to countries which do not already have capacity to produce COVID-19 vaccines.
“Put simply, it is a technocratic fudge aimed at saving reputations, not lives”, he warned.
Summing up the conclusions of the meeting, the New York Times said last week that WTO members agreed to loosen intellectual property rights “to allow developing countries to manufacture patented Covid-19 vaccines under certain circumstances.”
”The issue of relaxing intellectual property rights for vaccines had become highly controversial. It pitted the pharmaceutical industry and developed countries that are home to their operations, particularly in Europe, against civil society organizations (CSOs) and delegates from India and South Africa.”
Oxfam’s Lawson said: “South Africa and India have led a 20-month fight for the rights of developing countries to manufacture and access vaccines, tests, and treatments. It is disgraceful that rich countries have prevented the WTO from delivering a meaningful agreement on vaccines and have dodged their responsibility to take action on treatments while people die without them.”
“There are some worrying new obligations in this text that could actually make it harder for countries to access vaccines in a pandemic. We hope that developing countries will now take bolder action to exercise their rights to override vaccine intellectual property rules and, if necessary, circumvent them to save lives.”
In a statement released last week, the People’s Vaccine Alliance, said waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines have sparked worldwide debate, from Washington to Beijing and Davos to the World Trade Organization.
“Waiver advocates say that prioritizing the intellectual property rights of vaccine developers (many of whom have received governmental support) is making the vaccination rollout slow and unaffordable for billions of people in less-wealthy nations”.
Supporters of the status quo say a waiver would chill investment in the very pharmaceutical research that led to the vaccines’ creation, the Alliance said.
The Alliance also pointed out that In October 2020, South Africa and India proposed a broad waiver of the Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement covering COVID-19 vaccines, tests, and treatments.
The EU, UK, and Switzerland blocked that proposal. The US supported an IP waiver for only vaccines. The final text agreed is a watered-down waiver of one small clause of the TRIPS agreement relating to exports of vaccines. It also contains new barriers that are not in the original TRIPS agreement text.
Ben Phillips, author of ‘How to Fight Inequality’ told IPS that rich countries had acted to protect the monopolies of big pharmaceutical companies to determine production levels of pandemic-ending medicines.
In doing so, he said “they are not only causing deaths in developing countries, they are causing deaths in their own countries’ too. It’s not Northern interests vs Southern interests. It’s a handful of oligarchs who cannot share vs 8 billion people who want to be safe from pandemics.”
“Almost everyone in every country in the world”, he said, “would be better off if big pharmaceutical companies made slightly less obscene profits so that enough doses of pandemic-ending medicines could be made by multiple producers across the world to reach everyone who needs them on time.
The Covid-19 crisis has exposed the rot of the system of monopolies over production of vital medicines. Everyone can see it, and it will fall. How quickly it falls is the only question left. People are organizing nationally and internationally and they won’t let this pass again,” Phillips declared.
Mandeep S. Tiwana, Chief Programmes Officer at CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organizations (CSOs), told IPS “unequal access to vaccines is a global scandal that flies in the face of the economic, social and technological progress we claim to have made as humanity”.
He pointed out that CSOs around the world have long called for equity in health care and an end to excessive profiteering by the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of people’s well-being.
“We need to closely examine the reasons for the lack of political will to meaningfully address these issues.”
Meanwhile, in a statement last March, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said more than 10.5 billion vaccine doses have been administered globally, “enough to protect the entire world population from severe symptoms, hospitalization and death.”
But despite this achievement, Bachelet insisted that the “grim reality” was that only around 13 per cent of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated, compared with almost 70 per cent in high-income countries.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) ,has insisted that inaction risked penalizing the planet’s most vulnerable people and countries.
“We are at an inflection point in history”, he said. “We have the tools to end the acute phase of the pandemic, if we use them properly and share them fairly. But profound inequities are undermining that chance.
“Countries with high vaccination rates are reopening while others with low vaccination rates and low testing rates have been left behind. The result is more than 60,000 deaths per week, along with an increased risk of the emergence of new variants.”
The Guinean peacekeeper was killed by an improvised explosive device, which detonated during a UN Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) mine detection operation.
“The Secretary-General conveys his heartfelt condolences to the family of the victim and his brothers in arms, as well as to the people and authorities of Guinea,” Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq said in a message on behalf of the UN chief.
Possible war crime
Mr. Guterres recalled that under international law, attacks targeting UN peacekeepers may constitute war crimes.
He called on the Malian authorities to “spare no effort” in identifying the perpetrators so that they can swiftly be brought to justice swiftly
“The Secretary-General reaffirms the solidarity of the United Nations with the people and authorities of Mali in their pursuit of peace and security,” the message concluded.
Not the first IED attack
At the same time, the UN Special Representative for Mali and MINUSMA head, El-Ghassim Wane, also firmly denounced the attack and extended his deepest condolences to the Government of the deceased peacekeeper and his family.
Since the beginning of the year, several attacks involving IEDs have been recorded against MINUSMA uniformed personnel, which have killed a number of peacekeepers and injured others.
“This latest incident illustrates, once again, the complexity of the environment in which the Mission operates and of the security challenges it faces on a daily basis,” said Mr. El-Ghassim Wane.
“I salute the commitment of our Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams who put their lives at risk to preserve those of their colleagues and the civilian population,” he added. “Their role is crucial to the conduct of our operations”.
The Special Representative reaffirmed the Mission’s commitment to continue to implement its mandate in the pursuit of peace and security in Mali.
For Isatou Ceesay and Tombong Njie, the term “witch hunt” is not metaphorical. Under the regime of former dictator Yahya Jammeh, they were both literally condemned as witches.
“He held people in custody, tortured them, and that was the end of them,” says Ms. Ceesay. “We were so embarrassed to go out. We are not witches,” adds Ms. Njie.
During his 22 years in power, former President Jammeh severely weakened the country’s institutions and security apparatus. The regime was characterized by harassment; torture; the murder of political figures, journalists, activists, and students; and significant sexual and gender-based violence against women and children.
Ms. Ceesay, Ms. Njie, and many other Gambians still carry the scars of the abuses of the witch hunt campaign, which began in 2009 and lasted several years. Victims struggled to escape the stigma associated with witches.
UNDP Gambia
Isatou Ceesay, a victim of the Gambian ‘witch hunt’ campaign.
Supporting a difficult transition
In 2016, the Gambians voted out President Jammeh, and the new President, Adama Barrow, was sworn into office in February 2017. However, the nation of two million people faced a severe political and social crisis with the absence of independent or effective justice institutions and rampant human rights abuses.
The political transition required urgent reforms to overhaul the country’s institutions, promote democratic governance, address past human rights abuses and establish respect for the rule of law.
One of the ways that the UN has helped to support this transition is through the UN Secretary-General’s Peacebuilding Fund, which provided funds aimed at critical areas, such as security sector and justice reform.
The UN’s close collaboration with the authorities, under President Barrow, laid the foundations for two major institutions in December 2017: The National Human Rights Commission and the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC), which is made up of eleven people, and designed to reflect the diverse ethnic, religious, and gender make-up of the country.
UNDP Gambia
Tombong Njie suffered as a result of the ‘witch hunts’ instigated by former President of The Gambia, Yahya Jammeh.
Bringing back hope to The Gambia
In January 2019, public truth and reconciliation hearings began, with victims and perpetrators giving their personal testimonies. The hearings and outreach activities generated great public interest and broad popular participation, including youth and civil society.
“The TRRC is very important. I have seen how it has helped people empathize with us, knowing that we were deliberately and wrongfully accused,” said Pa Demba Bojang, a victim of the witch hunt campaign.
“People now aspire to live in peace in this country. Victims’ lives have become better thanks to the help they got from the project. The project has brought back hope in The Gambia,” said another victim.
The hearings were broadcast live to on television, radio, and online platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. They would not have made for easy viewing, covering incidents of human rights violations, including torture, enforced disappearance, arbitrary arrests, unlawful detention/killings, and sexual and gender-based violence.
UNDP The Gambia
Ya Jai Bahoum, a victim of the repressive regime of Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh
Supporting the victims
The UN Peacebuilding Fund played a key role in enabling the hearings to take place. It enabled the Commission’s office to open, provided key equipment, technical support to the Commissioners and the staff, and helped ensure victims access to the TRRC proceedings, which involved reaching out to those in the most remote areas of the country.
Some 2,000 people benefitted from the Victim Participation Support Fund, which provided psychosocial support and essential medical interventions. In addition, 30 persons were provided with comprehensive witness protection.
Beyond the hearings, over 34,000 Gambians have involved in outreach missions on the transitional justice process, and taken part in workshops, held in close partnership with civil society organizations, religious and traditional leaders.
Since it began holding hearings, the Commission’ participatory and accessible process has helped to foster national reconciliation. “We were wrongfully accused. Some pointed fingers at us, but TRRC helped us overcome this shame,” said another victim of the witch hunt campaign.
Two young victims of human trafficking, who were rescued from the Dzaleka Refugee Camp, are receiving support at a shelter in Malawi. Credit: UNODC
by Baher Kamal (madrid)
Inter Press Service
MADRID, Jun 17 (IPS) – In addition to slave selling and buying deals in public squares, as reported time ago in ‘liberated’ Libya, a widespread exploitation of men, women, and children has been carried out for years at refugee camps worldwide.
One of them is a Malawi refugee camp, where such inhumane practice has been reported by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the Malawian Police Service.
“I even witnessed a kind of Sunday market, where people come to buy children who were then exploited in situations of forced labour and prostitution,” on 11 June said UNODC’s Maxwell Matewere.
The Dzaleka Refugee Camp, the largest in Malawi, was established in 1994 and is home to more than 50,000 refugees and asylum seekers from five different countries. It was originally designed to accommodate 10,000 people.
Most of the 90 victims so far rescued are men from Ethiopia, aged between 18 and 30, while there are also girls and women too, aged between 12 and 24 from Ethiopia, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
A trafficking processing hub
The UNODC report also explains that women and girls are exploited sexually inside the Dzaleka refugee camp, or transported for the purpose of sexual exploitation to other countries in Southern Africa, while male refugees are being subjected to forced labour inside the camp or on farms in Malawi and other countries in the region.
The camp is also being used as a hub for the processing of victims of human trafficking. Traffickers recruit victims in their home country under false pretences, arrange for them to cross the border into Malawi and enter the camp.
Everywhere
Other refugee camps, like the Rohingya ones in Myanmar, which host up to one million humans, are also being under scrutiny.
Add to this millions more of humans falling easy prey to traffickers and smugglers, victims of wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, not to mention around six million Palestinian refugees.
A whole continent on the move
Ever greater numbers of vulnerable people are risking their lives on dangerous migration routes in Latin America, forced to move by the global food security crisis spiralling inflation, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) said ahead of 2022 World Refugee Day.
“We are having countries like Haiti with 26% food inflation and we have other countries that really are off the charts even with food inflation,” said Lola Castro, WFP Regional Director in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).
The dramatic deterioration in people’s daily lives has given them little option but to leave their communities and head north, even if it means risking their lives, she explained.
“All of you are watching caravans, caravans of migrants moving, and before we used to talk about migration happening from the north of Central America, but now, unfortunately, we talk about migration being hemispheric. We have the whole continent on the move.”
The Darien Gap
One of the clearest signs of people’s desperation is the fact that they are willing to risk their lives crossing the Darien Gap, a particularly arduous and dangerous forest route in Central America that allows access from the south of the continent to the north.
“In 2020, 5,000 people passed by the Darien Gap, migrating from South America into Central America, and you know what, in 2021, 151,000 people passed, and this is 10 days walking through a forest, 10 days through rivers, crossing mountains and people die because this one of most dangerous jungles in the world.”
For these migrants the reason why they are on the move is simple, the WFP official explained: “They are leaving communities where they have lost everything to climate crisis, they have no food security, they have no ability to feed their people and their families.”
UN data indicates that of the 69 economies now experiencing food, energy and financial shocks, 19 are in the Latin America and the Caribbean region.
Highest ever number of displaced children
Conflict, violence and other crises left a record 36.5 million children displaced from their homes at the end of 2021, UNICEFestimates – the highest number recorded since the Second World War.
This figure, which was reported by UNICEF on 17 June, includes 13.7 million refugee and asylum-seeking children and nearly 22.8 million children who are internally displaced due to conflict and violence.
These figures do not include children displaced by climate and environmental shocks or disasters, nor those newly displaced in 2022, including by the war in Ukraine.
20 people on the run… every minute
Every minute 20 people leave everything behind to escape war, persecution or terror, according to UNHCR.
But while the world’s specialised bodies have been making legal distinctions between migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, stateless people, retruerness, etcetera, the fact is that all of them are victims of stargeering inhuman suffering.
100 million… for now
At the end of 2021, the total number of people worldwide who were forced to flee their homes due to conflicts, violence, fear of persecution and human rights violations was 89.3 million, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported ahead of this year’s World Refugee Day annual marked 20 June.
Armed conflicts in 23 countries
If ongoing conflicts remain unresolved and the risks of new ones erupting are not reined in, one aspect that will define the twenty-first century will be the “continuously growing numbers of people forced to flee and the increasingly dire options available to them.”
Regarding the conflict-driven wave of forced displacement, UNHCR citing World Bank data, reports that in all, 23 countries with a combined population of 850 million faced “medium or high-intensity conflicts.”
Poor countries host 4 in 5 refugees
Data from the UNHCR report underscored the crucial role played by the world’s developing nations in sheltering displaced people, with low and middle-income nations hosting more than four in five of the world’s refugees.
With 3.8 million refugees within its borders, Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees, followed by Colombia, with 1.8 million (including Venezuelan nationals), Uganda and Pakistan (1.5 million each) and Germany (1.3 million).
Relative to their national populations, the Caribbean island of Aruba hosted the largest number of Venezuelans displaced abroad (one in six), while Lebanon hosted the largest number of refugees (one in eight), followed by Curaçao (one in 10), Jordan (one in 14) and Turkey (one in 23).
Such horrifying practice was intensively widespread more than four centuries ago, mostly by European powers, who captured, chained and shipped millions of Africans to their descents’ country: the United States of America, as well to their colonies in Latin America and the Carribeans.
Today “we honour the memory of the millions of people of African descent who suffered under the brutal system of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade”.
This trade created and sustained a global system of exploitation that existed for more than 400 years, devastating families, communities and economies, the UN chief stated.
We remember with humility the resilience of those who endured the atrocities committed by slave traders and owners, condoned by slavery’s beneficiaries, added Guterres.
“The transatlantic slave trade ended more than two centuries ago, but the ideas of white supremacy that underpinned it remain alive.”
According to an alert from the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, almost 16,000 mostly women and children, have been displaced to Dori, after gunmen killed at least 79 people in the town of Seytenga, which is close to the border with Niger.
Door-to-door killers
“The new arrivals in Dori gave accounts of armed men going door-to-door to seek out and kill adult males, meaning that many witnessed the deaths of their husbands or fathers,” said UNHCR spokesperson Matthew Saltmarsh. “Almost two-thirds of those who fled Seytenga are under 18.”
Today, hundreds of people who fled the attackers have no option but to sleep rough on the roadside until shelter is found, the UNHCR official told journalists in Geneva.
Many others have been taken in by host and displaced families already in Dori, while others have found space in refugee reception and transit centres.
More Burkinabe are expected to arrive in Dori in the coming days, while some 15,500 have sought shelter across the border in Niger’s Tillabéri region, where resources are already scant.
Ongoing mass displacement
Burkina Faso’s displacement crisis is one of the world’s fastest growing humanitarian emergencies.
The number of internally displaced people reached 1.9 million at the end of April, UNHCR said, citing government figures.
Urgent needs addressed
With the Burkinabe authorities, UNHCR and partners have offered help to meet the most urgent needs. These include providing shelter and essential items, as well as water, sanitation and hygiene services (WASH) and psychosocial support.
But non-State armed groups have attacked water supplies and infrastructure in the country, including a recent attack on the main water supply to Dori, and WASH needs could rise rapidly, UNHCR warned.
To help those families sleeping rough, UN humanitarians have helped regional authorities to relocate them to three existing displacement sites in Dori. Additional plots have been identified to host potential future arrivals, too.
“UNHCR and partners are preparing to bolster supplies of emergency shelters and core relief items, including sleeping mats, soap and cooking utensils, for more than 1,000 families,” Mr. Saltmarsh explained.
Shrinking space
He noted that the town of Dori has grown threefold and is now home to almost 76,000 displaced Burkinabe, as well as some 20,000 refugees from Mali.
Although efforts have been made to provide State education and healthcare to the new arrivals, the UN agency warned that competition for resources – water and land for pasture and agriculture, plus rising inflation and fuel shortages – “are all testing peaceful coexistence between different communities”.
Other countries in the Sahel – Chad, Mali and Niger – also face a combination of violence, poverty and the effects of climate change. More than 2.5 million people have fled their homes in the Sahel region over the past decade.
To date, the $591 million humanitarian appeal for Burkina Faso is only 15 per cent funded.
The Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Assessment (CFSVA) shows that the combined effects of economic and political crises; conflict and displacement; climate shocks; and a poor harvest in the past agricultural season are among the key drivers of the emergency.
As millions of people are being “pushed deeper into hunger and poverty”, Eddie Rowe, WFP Representative and Country Director in Sudan, drew attention to another challenge.
“Funding levels are not matching the humanitarian needs and we must act now to avoid increasing hunger levels and to save the lives of those already affected,” he warned.
Predicted to worsen
The assessment projects that the situation is likely to worsen throughout the country’s lean season, which started this month and will continue through September.
By that time, up to 40 per cent of the population, or around 18 million people, may slip into food insecurity, which WFP and the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) had warned of earlier this year.
“In the 2021/2022 harvest year, Sudan was able to produce 5.1 million tons of cereal, enough to cover the needs of less than two thirds of the population,” said Babagana Ahmadu, FAO Representative in Sudan.
“If the ongoing agriculture season doesn’t receive robust support with agricultural inputs and livestock services, the number of food insecure people may dramatically increase to unprecedented levels and ultimately lead to more conflict and displacement”.
Protracted conflict to blame
With more than half of the country’s wheat imports stemming from the Black Sea region, the conflict in Ukraine has further driven up food and fuel prices – compounding the situation.
The CFSVA assessment illustrates that food insecurity exists in all of Sudan’s 18 states and has worsened in 16.
The 10 most affected localities are in Darfur, which have been ravaged by nearly two decades of protracted conflict and displacement.
The most affected is Kereneik, West Darfur, where renewed clashes at the end of April claimed the lives of at least 179 people, displaced around 125,000, and left up to 90 per cent of the population food insecure, according to the CFSVA analysis.
Call for action
An earlier WFP and FAO assessment on agricultural production, released last March, revealed that poor harvests in many parts of Sudan negatively affected food availability and livelihood opportunities.
Building upon this, the newly released CFSVA confirms the worsening food security situation in Sudan.
To address the sharp rise in food insecurity, FAO and WFP are calling for urgent action, including increased funding, in order to save lives and prevent a looming hunger crisis in Sudan.
Women display sorted gums and gum resins at a local market in Marsabit County. The women have greatly benefited economically through harvesting and selling non-wood products. Credit: Robert Kibet/IPS
by Robert Kibet (nairobi)
Inter Press Service
Nairobi, Jun 16 (IPS) – Clad in traditional regalia and necklaces of richly coloured beads that form magnificent patterns around their necks, an army of women from the pastoral Rendile community that resides at the heart of Marsabit, a county in Kenya’s arid north, is on a mission.
Shoulder-to-shoulder, they are walking towards economic freedom armed with relevant tools up the hill to tap gum and gum-resins from acacia trees.
“We face a myriad of challenges. First, we have to fetch water before harvesting gum from acacia trees. We then sort and dry it before taking it to the market for sale. From gums and gum-resin sales, I am able to meet my family’s needs. No need to sell my sheep and goats at a throw-away price,” says Caroline Sepina, a 47-year-old mother of six, as she carefully sorts the gum, which retails at $ 5 (Ksh 550) per kilogram.
Gums and resins are hardened plant exudates obtained from Acacia, Boswellia and Commiphora species in African drylands.
In Kenya’s drylands, human survival is continually faced with multiple challenges with minimal options for alternative livelihoods.
There are no men within the manyattas in Ndikir, a village located in the Marsabit sub-county. Because of the drought, men have had to move to the nearby Samburu county, searching for pasture and water for their livestock.
Here, the women are left behind, but unlike in the past, when they would be unemployed, they now have alternative livelihoods which complement their livestock.
According to Leuwan Kokton, assistant chief of the Ndikir sub-location, men usually migrate with the livestock to the nearby Samburu county to avoid severe drought, with a few livestock left to help cater for children’s upkeep and sometimes, medication.
“Through this economic venture, I do not have to sell sheep from my herds to cater for my household needs. All I need to do is just walk to the nearby trees and tap the non-wood products, then sell them at the market. This helps me preserve my sheep and goats,” Joseph Longelesh, a resident of Ndikir village told IPS in an interview.
The gums and gum-resins of commercial importance collected from the forests in Kenya include arabic, myrrh, hagar and frankincense. Kenya has resources of gums and resins with commercial production confined to the country’s drylands. Gum arabic comes from Acacia senegal or Acacia seyal, while commercial gum resins are myrrh from Commiphoramyrrha, Hagar from Commiphora holtziana and Frankincense from Boswellia neglecta S.
Traditionally, the resin of Myrrh Hagar is suitable for treating inflammation, arthritis, obesity, microbial infection, wounds, pain, fractures, tumours, gastrointestinal diseases, snake bites and scorpion stings.
Tommaso Menini, the managing director for African Agency for Arid Resource (AGAR), told IPS that gum and resin are directly connected to environmental conservation. The idea is to make the pastoral communities see an alternative source of livelihood apart from livestock.
“Hagar is now an incredibly sought-after product from mostly Chinese buyers because it is highly used in their traditional medicine. Having a nearly 1.4 billion Chinese population means that the demand is high,” Menini told IPS.
“In the last years, we have seen an increasing presence of Chinese buyers setting up a base in Kenya. Before, we had agents who would send several containers to China, but since they are setting up in Kenya, they are now driving prices up because there is more demand.”
For Janet Ahatho, assistant natural resources Director at Marsabit County, these non-wood products have been in existence. Still, the locals had not been exposed to its economic potential and how to exploit them for monetary gains.
“As a county government, we have mapped the areas and worked with the locals. The people who collect the products and sell them are the herders themselves. They have attached that kind of importance to these trees, hence helping in environmental conservation,” says Ahatho.
In Marsabit county, these non-wood products are commonly found in Laisamis, Moyale and North Horr sub-counties.
“Environment destruction is reduced because we have environmental management committees in each sub-county, and they are the ones engaging the collectors and the sellers of the product. They are trained to train the community on why it is important to conserve the tree species,” says Ahatho.
In 2005, the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development, through the technical cooperation programme of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), carried out resource assessment and mapping of gums and resins in Kenya.
Engineer Chidume Okoro, a Network for Natural Gums and Resin in Africa (NGARA) chairperson, says production is far from sustainable, particularly for frankincense, with debarking frequently damaging or killing trees.
According to Chidume, production of gum and resin in large quantities for commercial purposes should be done with great care, by training the locals on how to do it sustainably while saving the acacia trees.
“With much focus on exporting bulk raw materials and poor management of the resource, export markets are underexploited. Gender inequities and power imbalances exist and in some cases have led to unequal access and control over benefits from these natural resources,” Okoro told IPS.
Since exploring the non-wood products, Sepina says her children have always had balanced meals, and she can pay her children’s school fees.
Peatland Forest in DRC. Credit: Daniel Beltrá / Greenpeace
Opinion by Tal Harris, Raphael Mavambu (kinshasa)
Inter Press Service
KINSHASA, Jun 16 (IPS) – Nine of the 16 oil blocks to be auctioned in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) next month overlap Protected Areas, according to a review of official government maps by Greenpeace Africa.
Minister Didier Budimbu, who had previously insisted that “none” of the blocks overlaps Protected Areas, confirmed Greenpeace’s findings in a statement yesterday.
Plans to auction rainforest for oil were reactivated in April, five months after the signature of a $500 million forest deal signed with the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI) at COP26.
Greenpeace Africa and others have expressed alarm that three of the blocks overlap with the Cuvette Centrale peatlands, a biodiversity hotspot containing about 30 gigatons of carbon, equivalent to three years of global emissions. Oil drilling could release the immense stocks of carbon they store, warned Professor Simon Lewis of University College London.
That Protected Areas are also at risk became apparent last month when the Hydrocarbons Ministry itself published a video featuring a map of six of the 16 blocks : five of them are clearly shown to overlap Protected Areas.
The voice-over praises the “meticulousness” with which blocks had been “selected,” mindful of environmental “sensibilities,” and claiming input from unnamed environmentalists.
Peatland Forest in DRC. Credit: Daniel Beltrá / Greenpeace
Another official online source, the Environment Ministry Forest Atlas of the Democratic Republic of Congo, shows nine of the blocks overlapping Protected Areas, including a national park, nature reserves, and a mangroves marine park.
The Ministry’s statement to Greenpeace Africa asserts: “It’s been decided that Protected Areas containing mineral natural resources of high economic value will be degazetted.”
While it describes the overlaps as “very negligible,” a simple review of the map shows significant overlap in at least three cases, including that of Upemba National Park, part of which occupies about a third of the Upemba block.
Irene Wabiwa Betoko, International Project Leader for the Congo Basin forest at Greenpeace Africa said: “The auction of new oil blocks anywhere during a climate crisis that disproportionately affects African people is mad.
Greenwashing the auction of blocks overlapping peatlands and Protected Areas is the height of cynicism. Doing so with such amateurism is particularly disturbing.”
In its statement to Greenpeace Africa, the Ministry emphasizes that no areas inside UNESCO World Heritage sites are up for auction and that overlaps are restricted to other Protected Areas. Congolese law, however, makes no distinction, in terms of oil exploration, among Protected Areas.
Block 18, one of the few that doesn’t encroach on a Protected Area, is only about twenty kilometers from Salonga National Park, a UNESCO site. In July 2021, the DRC government succeeded in removing Salonga from the List of World Heritage in Danger after it promised to update UNESCO, no later than 1 February 2022, on “the progress made towards the definitive cancellation of the oil concessions” there.
Over two months after the deadline, the government reported that the park’s steering committee decided on 14 December 2021 to “initiate actions for the definitive cancellation.” Instead of finally acting, the government continues planning to act.
“The mouth that says all the right things about the climate and biodiversity crises works separately from the hand that signs the contracts that make them worse. This disconnect also characterizes DRC’s donors: their COP26 speeches in praise of the Congo rainforest have resulted in an agreement that is an open invitation to oil companies,” added Irene Wabiwa.
The agreement signed at COP26 does nothing to protect peatlands of the Cuvette Centrale from the oil and gas industry, and is hardly more demanding with regard to the integrity of Protected Areas.
Instead of banning extractive industries in them, the 2 November letter of intent seeks only damage control. It calls for a study “to determine to what extent the titles of hydrocarbons overlap with and/or have an impact on protected areas, with a view to adopting appropriate prevention or mitigation measures ”.
Greenpeace Africa calls on the DRC government to cancel the auction of new oil blocks: “Instead of auto-pilot steering Congo into a climate catastrophe, the government and the international community must invest in ending energy poverty by accelerating investments in clean and accessible renewable energies,” concluded Irene Wabiwa.
Tal Harris is International Communications Coordinator, Greenpeace Africa: and Raphaël Mavambu is Communications and Media Consultant, Greenpeace Africa.
Ingabire Muziga Mamy, Managing Director, Charis Unmanned Aerial Solutions Rwanda, provides drone services for spraying gardens with pesticides, among other farming activities in Rwanda. Technology is crucial to improving food security, researchers say. CREDIT: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS
by Aimable Twahirwa (kigali)
Inter Press Service
KIGALI, Jun 15 (IPS) – A few years ago, after coming up with a project of launching the first-ever unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in Rwanda, entrepreneur Mamy Muziga Ingabire identified the need to provide farmers with information related to their activity – such as the health status of crops.
“Major focus was to leverage drone technology to support smallholder farmers in increasing their productivity,” Muziga told IPS in a recent interview.
Muziga is the Managing Director of CHARIS Unmanned Vehicle Solutions, one of the Rwandan-based companies providing drone-based solutions.
Several solutions and applications have been introduced to provide Rwandan farmers with innovative technology for accessing timely information on climate change, crop health, and diseases affecting them for informed decisions. Using ICTs gives farmers more access to market information, weather, and nutrition.
Several solutions have developed during the implementation phase, including the project for the Nitrogen fertilisation of wheat crops using drone technology in Musanze, a district in Northern Rwanda.
A drone with fixed cameras and sensors is sent across the field, takes accurate images of the plantations and the land, and collects precise data. This data provides specific indicators that enable operators to know the crop’s health and what it needs as fertilizer to grow properly.
While entrepreneurs and officials hail gains smallholder farmers enjoy by using these technological solutions for a sustainable food value chain; researchers say it’s important to raise awareness about what these technologies can do for actors along the agriculture value chains.
The importance of science, technology, and innovation (STI) as an important driver of African integration was the main topic of a recent scientific conference in Kigali, Rwanda, attracting researchers, members of the private sector, civil society, and farmers’ organisations from across Africa.
The conference focused on new applications such as drones, precision agriculture, and mobile applications or other hardware systems to automate redundant processes and reduce dependency on human labour in the agriculture value chain.
To bridge the STI policy and practice gaps to transform agricultural development and food systems within the continent, researchers agreed that the current impacts of climate change on food security in Africa should not allow anyone to relax.
Dr Canisius Kanangire, the Executive Director African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), observed that agriculture in Africa is characterised by low productivity, reflected in insufficient food production.
“We need to find the innovative solutions to key issues affecting food systems (…) Climate change is still having a growing impact on the African continent, hitting the most vulnerable hardest, and contributing to food insecurity,” Dr Kanangire told IPS.
While researchers seek to enhance the utilisation and adoption of productivity-enhancing technologies, value-adding processes, and loss-reducing practices among smallholder farmers in Africa, some experts in food systems believe that scaling these innovative solutions is still challenging.
“It is not only for the scientific community to develop solutions, but there is also a way to look at how end users can cope with these technologies,” said Claver Ruzindaza, an agricultural extension professional in Kigali.
With current efforts to deliver hi-tech services through public and private partnerships, researchers seek to equip smallholder farmers in Africa with knowledge of agronomic techniques and skills to improve their productivity, food security and livelihoods using innovative technologies.
“We need to change this narrative which maintains the farmer into the poverty status at a point where a farmer is always synonymous to a poor person,” Kanangire said.
Despite the vast agricultural potential, the latest estimates by the African Development Bank indicate that African countries are experiencing one of the highest prevalence of undernourishment in the world. Official reports show that out of about 795 million people suffering from chronic undernourishment globally, 220 million live in Africa.
Nevertheless, AAFT has developed seed varieties that are more productive and resistant to diseases and droughts, which could increase farm productivity and food availability on the continent has been executed in Malawi and Zimbabwe, while it is currently being expanded in Uganda and Ghana.
Martin Bwalya, Acting Director for Knowledge Management and Programme Evaluation at the Africa Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD), told IPS that Africa needs to adopt innovations to reduce reliance on food imports.
“The continent is highly vulnerable because we are importing a massive amount. Close to 30 per cent of food in the continent is being imported,” Bwalya said.
As current efforts focus on mitigating the commodity disruptions caused by the Russia-Ukraine war, experts in Kigali unanimously acknowledged the importance of promoting intra-African trade. Growing Africa’s agribusiness sectors by using innovative solutions to help smallholder farmers to become more productive was crucial.
“This agricultural transformation in Africa requires the concerted effort of all stakeholders including policymakers, researchers, private sector and farmers,” Kanangire said.
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