Opinion by Jomo Kwame Sundaram (kuala lumpur, malaysia)
Inter Press Service
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Nov 08 (IPS) – Public-private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure and service provision are both costly and risky. Worse, PPPs typically fail to ensure universal, let alone fair access to public amenities.
Public-private partnerships?
PPPs usually involve long-term contractual arrangements in which private businesses provide infrastructure and services traditionally provided by governments. In recent years, PPPs have built or run hospitals, schools, prisons, roads, airports, railways, water and sanitation.
Jomo Kwame SundaramRisk-sharing between public and private sectors has long been widespread. In recent years, more than two dozen different types of PPPs have been identified. Such variations reflect differences in deals between governments and commercial partners.
Most international financial institutions (IFIs) advise governments to guarantee profits for their private partners. The IFIs continue to urge governments to ‘de-risk’ commercial providers to attract their investments.
Private investor preferences for specific types of PPPs may vary over time and with circumstances, often reflecting changing needs and priorities. As no one type fits all, changing circumstances and preferences have increased the variety of PPPs.
PPP problems
PPPs are far more complex than suggested by their cheerleaders’ narratives. Their negative impacts on infrastructure and public service delivery have been highlighted again by a Eurodad-led report. Public expenses rise as governments bear private costs and risks.
Following World Bank and other IFI advice, national authorities attract commercial financial investments by appealing to private greed. PPPs have been used to ‘de-risk’ such investment, by using their terms to ensure profits for private investors.
The report also exposed PPPs’ negative impacts for democratic governance. PPP arrangements typically lack transparency, and rarely involve prior consultation with affected communities. Thus, they have been more prone to corruption and abuse.
While private partners are guaranteed profits, their PPPs may still fail. In recent years, PPPs’ fiscal and other costs kept mounting as their shortfalls grew despite their rising profitability. As such problems grow, criticisms and dissent have risen.
Why PPPs fail?
PPPs have increasingly been touted as the magic solution to many problems, particularly financial constraints, poor management and delivery. PPPs have become popular among elites in the global South, where their ‘middle classes’ were enticed by the promise of better services and ‘trickle-down’.
The private sector is supposedly more efficient and better able to deliver public amenities including energy, education, health, water and sanitation. But better value for money has rarely ensued, as many studies show. Instead, the converse is more typical.
A 2020 study by the European Federation of Public Service Unions and Eurodad identified eight major reasons why PPPs in Europe have not improved outcomes.
First, PPPs rarely raised additional funds. Instead, they have typically incurred more public debt in the form of government guarantees, rather than direct borrowing. But such additional public debt has often been obscured from the public.
Second, private commercial loans generally cost much more than government borrowings. Third, public authorities, especially central governments, still bear ultimate responsibility, especially in the event of project failure.
Fourth, PPPs have rarely delivered better ‘value for money’ than reasonably managed public projects. Fifth, seeming PPP efficiency gains have been largely due to risky cost-cutting, e.g., in public infrastructure or healthcare provision.
Sixth, PPPs distort public policy priorities, typically requiring even more cost-cutting. Seventh, PPPs have rarely delivered both ‘on-time’ and ‘on-budget’. Eighth, PPP deals are typically opaque, rather than transparent, often involving abuses and corruption.
From early 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic exposed the long-term adverse effects of earlier austerity and underfunding of public health. More recently, inflation, stagnation and more extreme weather have exposed other vulnerabilities and their causes.
What can be done?
As the world faces multiple and interconnected crises, PPPs offer bogus, even dangerous solutions. Eurodad has made policy recommendations to national governments and development finance institutions (DFIs) to improve infrastructure and public service financing.
• Stop promoting PPPs. The World Bank, IMF, regional development banks and DFIs should all end the promotion of PPPs, especially for social services. Access to health, education, water and sanitation should not depend on capacity to pay.
• Fiscal and other major PPP risks should be publicly acknowledged. Governments should be warned of PPPs’ generally poor outcomes, and of the pros and cons of various financing arrangements. DFIs should all more effectively finance national plans for sustainable and equitable development.
Countries should be helped to find the best financing means to deliver responsible, transparent, gender-sensitive, environmentally and fiscally sustainable public infrastructure and social services consistent with national and multilateral obligations.
• Informed public consultations should always precede any infrastructure and public service provision agreement by PPPs. These should include ensuring the rights of all affected communities, including those to fair remedy or compensation.
• Exercise rigorous and transparent government regulation, especially for public spending, PPP contract values, project impacts, and long-term fiscal implications. The public interest must always prevail over commercial ones.
DFIs should only finance projects serving the public interest. Appropriate, publicly funded public services should be promoted, with transparent contracts for and accountable reporting on social service and infrastructure project delivery.
PPPs have often proved to be budgetary frauds, exacerbating, rather than reducing national fiscal deficits. Far from being the financial silver bullet they have been touted as, PPPs have proven to be blanks, making much noise, but with little real benefit.
Community Efforts Boost Wastewater Treatment in El Salvador
by Edgardo Ayala (chirilagua, el salvador)
Inter Press Service
CHIRILAGUA, El Salvador, Nov 07 (IPS) – Neither the central government nor most of El Salvador’s 262 municipalities have had the capacity to install enough wastewater treatment plants to prevent it from being discharged directly into the environment.
As a result, most of the rivers are polluted to such a degree that only 12 percent of them have good quality water, and the pollution translates into gastrointestinal and other diseases among the 6.7 million inhabitants of this Central American country.
But there are some towns and cities that are making efforts to keep running the treatment plants they have managed to set up, with financial support from international institutions.
One of these municipalities is Chirilagua in eastern El Salvador, along the Pacific Ocean in the south, the only ocean that bathes the coast of this Central American isthmus country.
The municipality operates a wastewater treatment plant built in the surrounding area as part of a 40-unit housing project called La Española that houses 40 families affected by Hurricane Mitch, which caused death and destruction in Central America in October 1998.
The project was largely financed with funds from the government of the southern Spanish region of Andalucía.
“The benefit is to the environment and to the families living around here, because the less the environment is polluted the healthier the population is,” Eduardo Ortega, in charge of the plant’s maintenance, told IPS.
The treatment plant filters the sewage that arrives at the station, using various processes, including ponds filled with volcanic soil and gravel.
“The aim is to keep the treated water from polluting the San Roman River,” said Edwin Guzman, head of the Environmental Unit of the municipality of Chirilagua.
Close to the municipality is another rural settlement also built by Spanish aid funds for survivors of Hurricane Mitch, called Flores de Andalucía, which includes its own treatment plant.
With greater capacity, this station also receives sewage from El Cuco, a fishing village three kilometers to the south on a beach that due to population growth has become a town with modest stores, hostels and restaurants that receive tourists attracted by its gray sand beaches and gentle waves.
In El Salvador, only 8.52 percent of wastewater receives some type of treatment, and much of the waste is dumped into the different bodies of water, polluting ecosystems and harming people’s health. Now some communities and municipalities have managed to install treatment plants that are run by local residents and improve their lives.
Afghan women carry stories of sorrow and resilience. Credit: Learning Together
Inter Press Service
Nov 06 (IPS) – The author is an Afghanistan-based female journalist, trained with Finnish support before the Taliban take-over. Her identity is withheld for security reasons“When the sun rises in the morning, I see the light but I don’t feel like I’m having a bright day. I think about how different these days are from our past days”.
These are the words of Sharifa, 48, an Afghan mother of five as she recounts her life story wrought by the Taliban when they regained power two years ago. Tears streamed down her face as she narrated her story in the two-room house of her family in the Dasht e Barchi Qala area, far from the capital city Kabul.
Sharifa lost her job as a cleaner because Afghan women were no longer allowed to work under the Taliban. Her two young girls had to stop school for the same reason.
“Will we have a future?” she asked. “We live in a country where all women and girls are deprived of all their legal rights, and we don’t know what will happen tomorrow”, her final concern is, “we are worried about the future of our children”.
To Sharifa and millions of Afghan women, the return of the Taliban, the extremist Islamic group that took over power in August 2021 portended nothing but misery for them.
“I think about the future, on the outside I may seem alive, but inside I feel dead”, she says, with tears streaming down her face.
For the past five years, the family led a quite peaceful and happy life without worries in the Dasht e Barchi Qala area in Afghanistan. Sharifa describes her husband as a kind and compassionate person.
After she lost her job, her husband became the sole breadwinner for the family of seven. It became necessary therefore, for their eldest son who had dropped out of school due to lack of money to work and bring in supplementary income.
Sharifa’s own education was cut short at the tenth grade due to the demands of raising a family. Given that situation, she was determined to do all in her power to provide adequate education to her five children – two boys and three daughters.
“I was a mother who, with all the problems and challenges in life, wanted all my children to have a higher education so that they could serve their country and family in the future”.
But all her hopes came crushing when the Taliban took power. It became clear that female students above the sixth grade could no longer continue their education. Women were also asked to stay home and cease working. Only the university was not banned.
But the saddest part for Sharifa was the loss of her daughter, the eldest of her children. At 24, she had completed 12th grade, and despite of the prohibition placed on girls’ education, was still plowing ahead with great determination to go the university.
Little did she know that the enemies of girls’ education were lurking around the corner. A bomb blast hit the Kaj educational centre in Kabul at precisely the time she was busy writing the university entrance examination. The educational centre held 500 students, 320 of them girls.
The blast had devastating consequences. Fifty female students were killed and 130 injured. Among the dead was Sharifa’s daughter.
“When I heard that the educational center was attacked, I was shocked, and rushed to the scene bare-footed to look for my daughter”, she said.
Dozens of families lost their loved ones that day but to their consternation, when they arrived at the scene, the dead and the wounded had already been transferred to hospitals. The Taliban had barred people from entering the centre except for ambulances.
The ISIS took responsibility for the attack, which was condemned widely around the world. Taliban officials also strongly condemned the attack and promised that the perpetrators would be punished, but nothing has been done since.
Sharifa says that the day she received her daughter’s body for burial, was the bitterest and most painful day because all her wishes were also buried with her daughter.
“From that day until today, I only breath, but I don’t feel alive”, she says.
In the midst of the grief however, Sharifa continues to demand for women’s rights and calls for support from the international community and the UN, to stop the Taliban from oppressing Afghan women.
“The women of Afghanistan have the right to play an active role in their society, in all different sectors, social, cultural, economic, and political fields”, Sharifa demands.
Keithlin Caroo speaks to young Saint Lucian on International Rural Women’s Day. Education is an important part of advocacy on behalf of women and girls. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS
by Alison Kentish (saint lucia)
Inter Press Service
SAINT LUCIA, Nov 03 (IPS) – Amid fears that global shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic have eroded progress toward gender equality, the Commonwealth Foundation has created an online platform that takes civil society’s recommendations for the empowerment of women and girls directly to policymakers.On August 22, 2023, Women’s Affairs Ministers from the Commonwealth huddled in a room at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas. For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, they were meeting in person.
The 13th Commonwealth Women’s Affairs Ministers Meeting was being held under the theme, Equality Towards a Common Future. It was taking place amid the acknowledgement by policymakers that issues like accelerating climate change, economic turmoil, political upheaval in some parts of the world, and the COVID-19 pandemic have taken a debilitating toll on progress toward the empowerment of women and girls.
Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis vowed that the gathering would be solutions-oriented.
“The time is now for our Commonwealth community to be unabashedly ambitious in our goals and plans. We need more than slogans – we need commitments,” he said.
As Dr Anne Gallagher, Director General of the Commonwealth Foundation, addressed the high-level forum, images of a recent online civil society gathering organized by the Foundation flashed on screens across the room. The key outcome of that event was a list of ten recommendations that civil society groups from across the Commonwealth want women’s affairs ministers to consider.
Recommendation number seven, “Measure better to target better,” appeared on the screen. It was one of the recommendations that drew animated discussion among delegates. It came from a young woman dedicated to helping women farmers in her part of the world.
The journey of a recommendation from an online forum to the Commonwealth’s highest decision-making body for women’s affairs is serving as an example of the importance of not just giving a voice to those who are on the ground, working with women and girls but ensuring that their concerns are heard by those charged with gender equality policy action.
A Virtual Roundtable
Keithlin Caroo was a panellist on the Commonwealth Foundation’s Critical Conversations series, a virtual discussion that seeks to find sustainable solutions to the most pressing issues for the 2.5 billion citizens of the Commonwealth.
For years, Caroo has been on a mission to help rural women in her home country, Saint Lucia, and has extended that support to the neighboring islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and St. Kitts and Nevis. She is the founder and executive director of Helen’s Daughters, a non-profit organization that she refers to as a ‘community,’ which has been changing the narrative on women in agriculture. Helen’s Daughters is built on the premise that while in small states, everyone is connected to agriculture, women are not sufficiently supported despite their pivotal role in the sector.
The organization helps rural women with market access and forges linkages for farmers with supermarkets, restaurants, hotels, and the public through a FarmHers Market. It runs a free Rural Women’s ‘Ag-cademy’ on the islands of Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which focuses on sustainable agriculture and entrepreneurship. It is the first all-women agri-apprenticeship programme in the Caribbean. The organization operates a structured care system that focuses on the holistic development of women, hosting training on trauma-informed care to peer-to-peer support and wellness retreats.
Before the virtual event, the Commonwealth Foundation had made it clear – recommendations from the forum would be put before decision-makers. When Caroo spoke, she did so on behalf of the women farmers who toil daily in a sector fraught with gender biases.
“This engagement was important because it shows that the voices of grassroots organizations are important to Commonwealth’s policymaking; however, what’s important for me is seeing to it that the recommendations translate from policy to actions on the ground,” she said in an interview with IPS.
“We recognized the lack of sex-disaggregated early on, and aside from our interventions, data collection, monitoring, and evaluation are key to our work. Lack of data places further burden on us because aside from crafting interventions relevant to our beneficiaries, we are also responsible for primary data collection, which takes more time and resources; however, we must craft interventions according to the current state of play rather than what is imagined. As I said during the roundtable- “We can only target better if we measure better.”
Voices like Caroo’s played an important role in ensuring a commonwealth-wide response to gender inequality.
The Process
With its theme Gender, climate change and health: how can we do better for women and girls? the virtual roundtable stoked discussion on cross-cutting issues such as violence against women, investing in women and access to education.
“The event was deliberately outcome-oriented: it included not just a debate and discussion but also a highly focused working session where all participants were charged with coming up with specific recommendations to present to this body. Not a shopping list of blue-sky ideas but practical steps that they felt reflect what Commonwealth civil society – what the 2.5 billion citizens of the Commonwealth, want their countries to do for women and girls when it comes to health and climate change,” said Gallagher.
She reminded the gathering that the Foundation is a link between Commonwealth Member States and the people they all serve. She urged the ministers to reflect on the ‘clear and urgent’ recommendations from civil society.
“For me, the clarity and simplicity of the ten recommendations signals an important truth: we all understand the challenges we are up against in relation to women’s rights and well-being, and also in relation to climate change. We all appreciate what must be done. But shifting the current trajectory in ways that make a real difference will require much more. It will require courage, commitment, and true solidarity within and between countries of the Commonwealth,” she said.
The Recommendations
Recommendation seven, “Measure better to target better,” might have struck a chord with attendees, but the other nine recommendations were also well received.
They are:
Acknowledge that the impacts of the climate crisis are not gender-neutral,
Empower women through gender-responsive climate policies and actions,
Improve access to education and training for women and girls,
Improve climate finance and bring women forward as leaders and decision-makers,
Value and promote women and girls as adaptation educators and agents of change,
Promote gender equality in access to healthcare
Act to reduce gender-based violence
Enhance women’s economic empowerment.
The meeting’s official outcome statement notes that the recommendations were welcomed and endorsed.
Their journey is not over – they are now part of the women’s affairs ministerial meeting recommendations that will be brought before Commonwealth Heads of Government at their 2024 meeting in Samoa.
“I thought this engagement was of particular importance because I had never been to a panel at this level that spoke on the intersection of gender, climate change and health or intersectionality in general. Far too often, we focus on these themes in silos,” Caroo said.
“We do not consider Helen’s Daughters an agricultural organization because we deal with gender, climate change, gender-based violence, health, economic empowerment, climate and environmental justice, several areas that contribute to the overall development of our FarmHers. I thought the roundtable was timely because our policymaking needs to take an intersectional approach.”
Opinion by Jomo Kwame Sundaram (kuala lumpur, malaysia)
Inter Press Service
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Nov 01 (IPS) – Governments the world over are worried about investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) rules. These allow foreign investors to sue them for billions over new laws or policies reducing their profits.
Typically favouring powerful transnational corporations (TNCs), ISDS blocks policy changes needed to address new challenges. Companies have successfully sued governments for policy changes which allegedly reduce their profits.
Jomo Kwame SundaramThe wicked of Oz
Tobacco giant Philip Morris tried to block the Australian government’s demand for ‘plain packaging’, with larger and more graphic health warnings on cigarette packs, by suing under ISDS and also in Australian courts. In the domestic case, Australia’s highest court ruled the legislation constitutional.
The company then transferred Philip Morris Australia to Philip Morris Asia in Hong Kong. Invoking ISDS in the bilateral investment treaty (BIT) between Australia and Hong Kong, it sued Australia. Luckily, the ISDS tribunal ruled it had no jurisdiction as considering the case would constitute an abuse of process.
More recently, Australian Clive Palmer has hired a former Attorney-General to demand nearly A$341 billion from state governments after moving his major mining companies to Singapore in 2019. His two ISDS claims invoke the Australia-New Zealand-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (ANZAFTA).
The first seeks about A$300 billion in compensation and for ‘moral damages’ after Australia’s highest court ruled in favour of the Western Australian (WA) state government. Palmer is challenging the 2022 WA legislation to indemnify the state, ensuring he would get nothing.
He is also demanding A$41.3 billion in compensation for rejecting exploration permits for the Waratah coal mine in Queensland. The licence was refused on environmental grounds, including increasing carbon emissions.
Palmer is expected to take a third ISDS case against Australia’s Federal and Queensland government decisions to reject his coal mine licence application due to its likely adverse impacts on the local environment, including waterways, and the Great Barrier Reef.
Even if the governments win these cases, they would still incur millions in legal expenses. The Philip Morris cases against Australia took five years, and cost A$24 million in legal expenses, of which only half was recovered by the government.
Evading ISDS?
After such costly experiences, almost a decade ago, Australia successfully demanded a ‘tobacco carve-out’ to the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s (TPP) ISDS provisions.
Australia’s new Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040, announced on 6 September 2023, promises to review existing free trade agreements (FTAs) with the region. This will include agreements containing ISDS clauses, including the ANZAFTA and other bilateral and plurilateral agreements.
Using side-letters, Australia has already opted out of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) ISDS provisions with both the UK and New Zealand.
Other ISDS second thoughts
The New Zealand government is now also against ISDS. While ISDS is part of several of its FTAs – e.g., the CPTPP and China-New Zealand FTA – its government has opposed ISDS provisions in FTA negotiations since 2018.
Hence, there is no ISDS in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the New Zealand-United Kingdom FTA, and the New Zealand-European Union FTA.
While it was considered too late to exclude ISDS entirely from the CPTPP at a late stage in negotiations, New Zealand has secured side letters with Australia, Brunei, Malaysia, Peru and Viet Nam. This means ISDS does not apply between New Zealand and these countries.
The current Chilean government is also concerned about ISDS. Hence, it has asked all other CPTPP governments for side-letters excluding ISDS between them, but only New Zealand has agreed so far!
Rich nations wary of ISDS
The US removed most ISDS provisions when the Trump administration replaced the old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2020.
ISDS was in the TPP because Obama administration negotiators wanted it. But most 2016 presidential aspirants to succeed him, including Democrats, rejected the TPP. Trump’s US Trade Representative (USTR) Lighthizer specifically cited ISDS as the reason for US withdrawal from the TPP.
Biden and his USTR have maintained Trump’s anti-ISDS stance instead of reverting to Obama’s position. ISDS is not in Biden Administration ‘economic cooperation’ agreements such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.
Meanwhile, the EU is urging withdrawal from the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) as its ISDS provisions will block needed European climate policies. Several EU and non-EU countries have already begun withdrawing from the ECT, arguing it constrains their ability to act against global warming.
Developing countries saying no
Many developing countries have already been withdrawing from their BITs while the RCEP does not include ISDS. So, the CPTPP, other BITs and FTAs’ ISDS provisions are out of date. Worse, they block addressing emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and global warming.
Countries should reject and even withdraw from BITs and FTAs with ISDS. After all, there is no evidence ISDS attracts foreign direct investment. More and more developing nations – including India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Ecuador, South Africa, etc. – have already withdrawn from such BITs.
Governments should urgently review and remove ISDS provisions in all existing BITs and FTAs, or withdraw from them, to avoid more costly ISDS cases. They must be more critical and careful in ensuring future economic cooperation agreements to ensure they really serve their current and future best interests.
Without land rights, women cannot make the necessary decisions to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
Inter Press Service
NAIROBI, Oct 31 (IPS) – Excluded by inheritance and ignored by big business, women farmers in Kenya are turning to innovative methods to become independent food producers and get the financial backing to ensure their success.
Creating resilience is crucial to adapting to climate change and ensuring climate justice.
Although women account for more than three-quarters of the agricultural labour force and manage 40 percent of small-scale farms, historically, they neither owned nor controlled the land because land rights were passed down to male relatives. It is a historic gender injustice whereby women could only access land through close male relatives.
But as the vagaries of drought wreak havoc in the agricultural sector due to more failed rainfall seasons – with 2022 alone showing signs of a serious hydrological and ecological drought – gender and climate experts, such as Grace Gakii, tell IPS that women’s decision-making powers are much needed to ensure that extreme weather patterns do not paralyse the agricultural sector.
“The agriculture sector is the backbone of Kenya’s economy. It accounts for an estimated 33 percent of the country’s GDP and employs at least 40 percent of its population and 70 percent of the rural population. Without land rights, women cannot make the necessary decisions to either adapt or mitigate climate change,” she says.
“In mitigation, they cannot, for instance, decide if and when trees are planted. In adaptation, they have no say in, for instance, shifting to more climate-resilient crops. We have no shortage of indigenous seeds to help us navigate the rainfall deficit we are increasingly experiencing. But women have historically been denied the power to make these decisions even though it is women who provide the day-to-day farm labour.”
The revolutionary SACCO scheme is increasingly putting land rights in the hands of women and enabling them to access much-needed tools to build climate-resilient farming systems. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS The agriculture sector is the backbone of Kenya’s economy. It accounts for an estimated 33 percent of the country’s GDP. Women play a critical role in the sector. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS The agriculture sector employs at least 40 percent of the country’s population and 70 percent of the rural population. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
Serah Nyokabi says the revolutionary Savings and Credit Cooperative Society (SACCO) is increasingly putting land rights in the hands of women and facilitating access to the tools needed to build climate-resilient farming and food systems.
“I am a member of Afya SACCO. We save and take loans at a low interest. I use the loans to hire land in Central Kenya for farming and buy items such as seeds, fertilizer and even water. We rely on rainfall, and these days you cannot tell when it will rain, and even when it rains, it is often not enough. I also hire people to help me around the farm because I am a full-time teacher. SACCOs also buy large pieces of land, subdivide, and sell to members. I bought a piece of land this way, and they allow you to pay in small amounts over a six-month period,” she tells IPS.
SACCOs are a cash pooling scheme by a group of people to save and borrow low-interest loans amongst themselves. Kenya’s SACCO sector is popular and on an upward trajectory. Recent reports show that accumulated total deposits of savings grew from USD 3.8 billion in 2021 to USD 4.2 billion in 2022 (Ksh 564.89 billion to Ksh 629.45 billion)– representing a 9.84 percent increase. In 2021, the total membership of regulated SACCOs was 5.99 million members compared to 6.42 million members in 2022, and this represented an increase of 7.02 percent.
Gakii says that regulated SACCOs represent about half of all SACCOs in Kenya, as many others are unregulated. She says there are at least 22,000 SACCOs and more than 14 million members overall in this East African nation, transacting billions every year amongst themselves. Some SACCOs, such as Afya SACCO, have thousands of members and others less than 100 members.
Others, such as the well-known Muungano (cooperative) Women’s Group, own prime land and a fully occupied commercial high-rise building in Ongata Rongai on the outskirts of Nairobi, have an all-female membership, and many others, such as Afya SACCO have both men and women as members. Muungano Women’s Group raises about USD 40,000 in rent per month from the Ongata Rongai commercial building, which is fully occupied, and members have also purchased prime land of their own.
“SACCOs are very important to women. They were shunned by banks because the profile of a Kenyan woman was too risky. The percentage of women in gainful employment was very low because many worked for their husbands or fathers in the informal settlements. Due to our customary laws that favour men over women, women did not own property or any assets and therefore lacked the collateral needed to take out bank loans. In fact, women could only open a bank account accompanied by a male relative, preferably her husband. SACCOs have helped women navigate these challenges as all they need is to save with a SACCO, produce three guarantors within the SACCO to take a loan or simply borrow against their own savings,” Gakii explains.
Although the percentage of women holding land title deeds is still very small, as only one percent of all land title deeds are in the hands of women alone and five percent held jointly with men, Gakii stresses that this is progress and is to be celebrated.
“We have another large category of women that hire land for commercial farming. This would not have been possible without the loans from schemes such as SACCOs,” she says.
Gakii says women need access and control over land to play a much-needed role in the five pillars of climate resilience, including threshold capacity, coping capacity, recovery capacity, adaptive capacity, and transformative capacity.
“I taught agriculture in secondary schools for many years, and during that time, I had access to the small farm at the school for practical sessions, but back home, I could only execute the instructions from my husband. He was an accountant, and I was essentially the farmer, but he made all the decisions. Women interact with the soil on a day-to-day basis, but they cannot make decisions about how to best address the climate crisis. The result is a serious food crisis. We have large tracks of fertile lands, but here we are with a begging bowl,” Nyokabi observes.
“We started by experiencing floods and droughts in close succession. In 2018, we had two extremes in one season, whereby March, April and May were very rainy, followed by a very dry season in October, November, and December. Last month we were repeatedly warned to prepare for El Niño in the October-November-December season, but now we have been told that there will be no El Niño. In fact, there is no rain at all, and yet we are in the short rain season where we plant in October and harvest in December-January. The person who is more likely to note these changes and see a pattern is the one who is doing the day-to-day farming activities, and so the role of women in building resilient farming systems cannot be ignored.”
With an estimated 98 percent of agriculture in Kenya being rainfed and as climate change becomes a most pressing issue as a result of cumulative rainfall deficits over many years, the role of women in building climate resilience cannot be overemphasized, as is the need for interventions that can facilitate women’s access to land rights and much-needed farm inputs.
Kenya: Agriculture by Numbers Women in Agriculture
Aradhiya Khan, 25, a transwoman, got her vaccination in the middle of the night in July 2021, when the centre was less crowded, and stood in the women’s line as there was none for her gender.
by Zofeen Ebrahim (karachi)
Inter Press Service
KARACHI, Oct 31 (IPS) – After months of warding off appeals from his employers to get vaccinated for the COVID-19 disease, Mohammad Yusuf, 24, working as a live-in domestic worker in Karachi’s Clifton area, finally relented and got his first shot.
“I believed that anyone who took the vaccine would die within two years,” he told IPS. He said he got this information from social media.
The people who finally convinced him were his parents living in the village of Rahil, in Sindh’s province of Umerkot district, where, according to Yusuf, “not a single case of COVID-19 has to date been found.” But because Karachi was rife with the virus then, his parents explained that he might catch the infection if he remained unvaccinated.
The other reason for his hesitancy was the fear that if he got COVID-19 and was hospitalized, he may die without saying goodbye to his family and be buried unceremoniously by strangers. “You either got well within ten days, or you’d die a very difficult and painful death with breathlessness, high fever, and then death,” is how he explained the disease and its symptoms.
Rakhi Matan, 40, a caretaker for the elderly, had heard, “If someone got COVID-19, the government would come and pick them up from their home and take them to a center, inject poison into you after which you died”. It was this fear that got her to vaccinate herself. But since the shot, she often falls sick and attributes it to the vaccine.
The country began its COVID-19 vaccination campaign first by inoculating health workers on February 2, 2021, a year after the first case was reported in February 2020. This was followed closely by senior citizens and gradually to everyone over 18 years of age.
According to data from the Ministry of National Health Services Regulations and Coordination (MoNHSR&C), by March 2022, of the total eligible population of a little over 143 million, more than 125 million had received their first jab.
Dr Rana Imran Sikander, executive director at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences and who was then heading the COVID-19 ward there, was the first person in Pakistan to receive the shot from the batch of 500,000 Sinopharm vaccines received from China.
It was also the time when “myths and conspiracies abounded,” leading to hesitancy and fear of side effects. The more far-fetched conspiracy theories circulating in his hospital included ‘Bill Gates wants to reduce the world’s population,’ ‘the United States is injecting microchips into humans to make them their slaves,’ ‘Gates wants to alter their DNA.’
“Seeing me well and alive gave a huge boost to my co-workers,” said Sikander, who luckily has not caught COVID-19 even once. It could also be because he had also volunteered a dose six months prior to the official shot for the vaccine trial, he said.
Gallup Pakistan carried out 13 surveys (from March 2020 to January 2022) to understand people’s attitudes towards the pandemic. It also recorded the change in their perception towards the disease and the vaccine over a two-year period.
“The most alarming finding was that for close to 60 percent of health professionals, social media was a key source of information, and as high as one in five doctors were not willing to take the vaccine,” Bilal I. Gilani, executive director at Gallup Pakistan, told IPS. A consistent perception among Pakistanis in general, during all these months, he said, was “that COVID-19 was a foreign conspiracy.”
Like epidemiologists study viruses and find solutions on how to control the spread of diseases, anthropologist Dr Heidi Larson studies misinformation and tries to contain it before it spreads like wildfire. She is, therefore, not surprised as to why Sikander’s colleagues were “hesitant or losing confidence in vaccines.”
She has been studying the trend of how rumors start, flourish, and then taper, for 13 years under her Vaccine Confidence Project that she started in 2010.
At a recent Global Media Dialogue, held earlier this month, organized by the Internews, Larson spoke to a group of journalists about how important it was for health workers and policymakers to “listen” to what people are saying and why and “even listen to the rumors,” and they will “reveal that they are not being heard”.
“That’s the cue to address the rumors,” she said. Already the findings say there is a drop in confidence around basic childhood vaccines, which she finds “pretty significant” and worrying as “we’ve never seen such a drop,” she said.
But how did the Pakistan government manage to get 130 million (above the age of 15) of the 250 million Pakistanis vaccinated for at least two doses in two years (by May 2022) after the pandemic? Given that the polio virus has continued to be found in Pakistan with communities refusing to get their children administered the oral vaccine, there was a fear among government officials it may face the same challenge with the COVID-19 vaccine.
Looking back to the two years of the pandemic, when he was the federal minister for planning and headed the National Command and Control Centre (NCOC) that had been set up to plan and contain the pandemic, Asad Umar said the two most important ingredients — “transparency and sharing of real-time data with the media when COVID-19 struck” was how they managed to dispel misinformation.
“By the time we were ready to vaccinate the people, the media had become our allies and played a huge role in supporting us in fighting misinformation and even disinformation.”
The other reason was that “for a change, all political parties were on board, and there was across-the-board consensus and confidence on the decisions made by the NCOC,” he said. The center disbanded as quickly as it was formed. “It’s a good model and needs to be institutionalized if we are to fight any future catastrophes, natural or health,” said Umar.
In July 2021, 76 percent of Pakistanis claimed that the government was controlling the COVID-19 situation well, according to a Gallup survey, although it diminished to just 41 percent by 2022.
It was “the oneness of message and consistency, coupled with an efficient vaccine delivery, which helped fight vaccine hesitancy,” said Dr Zaeem Ul Haq, a health and risk communication (real-time exchange of information, advice and opinions between experts and people who face a health hazard) expert who led communication and community engagement part of Pakistan’s response to the pandemic.
But to understand how the country succeeded in vaccinating millions of people, Haq said it was important to differentiate between vaccine-resistant (due to vested interests and political or religious beliefs difficult to convert) and vaccine-hesitant (if their questions around vaccines are appropriately answered can be converted) groups to be able to continue fighting misinformation. Unfortunately, in Pakistan, he said, these terms were used interchangeably and erroneously by the Pakistani media, which must be avoided, especially in the case of childhood immunization.
He shared that with simple and consistent messaging, combined with an age-appropriate, systematic administration of a vaccine, this reason-specific hesitancy declined in subsequent surveys.”
Dr Zafar Mirza, former special advisor to the prime minister for health, the government’s use of innovative approaches helped reach diverse and underserved populations.
“We put out pro-vaccination messages replacing the ringtones for nearly 150 million mobile phones, which made a huge impact,” he said. The Gallup survey found that by 2022, 84 percent of adult Pakistanis with mobile phone access had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Another task carried out successfully was by the brigade of female community health workers and vaccinators, who convinced people to get vaccinated.
“Through the over 8,000 vaccinators and health workers and 300,000 community leaders, we managed to reach a population of 35 million in the remotest parts of Pakistan,” said Mirza.
A toll-free helpline, the Sehat Tahaffuz-1166, launched just before the pandemic in November 2019 to provide guidance for polio and its vaccine, was used to disseminate information about COVID-19.
“At one point, we had 500 call agents and 30 doctors daily assuaging the apprehensions and concerns about the infection and later the vaccine itself,” Mirza told IPS. From approximately 300 calls per day in 2019, it reached to 25,000, although the agents have attended as many as 70,000 calls in a day, too, he added.
For its part, UNICEF helped the government in battling vaccine hesitancy on social media platforms. “Through regular static posts and short videos, we communicated verified information about the vaccine’s efficacy. We posted messages from doctors, religious leaders, youth representatives, celebrities, community leaders, and even vaccinated individuals on our social media accounts,” UNICEF’s communications specialist, A. Sami Malik, told IPS. In addition, it regularly organized live interactive sessions on FB, Twitter Space, and Instagram, with experts providing responses to people’s questions and concerns.
This is not the last of the pandemics. Scientists are already warning of the possibility of a COVID-19-like pandemic at the scale of 2.5 percent to 3.3 percent yearly and 47 percent to 57 percent in the next 25 years. While vaccine hesitancy may have lowered, it has not ended after the pandemic. In fact, it gets fueled every time there is a reemergence of measles and polio in Pakistan. While vaccines must be delivered to the public in a coherent and effective manner to ensure public confidence in them, it will pay dividends if, as Dr Larson says, countries in general and Pakistan in particular, can recognize “the importance of emotions in people’s decision-making and in their willingness to cooperate.”
African Lawmakers seek to learn from best practices on how to hold their respective Governments accountable in the implementation of the Addis Ababa Declaration on Population and Development and the International Conference on Population and Development commitments. Credit: APDA
by Aimable Twahirwa (kigali)
Inter Press Service
KIGALI, Oct 30 (IPS) – Asian and African parliamentarians have committed to accelerate the implementation of a people-centered development agenda as the African continent continues to face rapid demographic change with several challenges, such as youth unemployment and gender inequities.
During the African Parliamentarians’ Dialogue towards ICPD30 and AADPD10, which took place in October 2023 in Kigali, Rwanda, lawmakers shared measures their countries have undertaken by adopting new legislation seeking to provide opportunities for the youth while empowering women as a critical step for reaping the demographic dividend in Africa.
According to Professor Kiyoko Ikegami, the Executive Director of the Japan-based Asian Population and Development Association (APDA), a basic condition for building global partnerships is to use legislation to promote transparency, accountability, and good governance for the people.
Whereas Africa is expected to account for more than 90 percent of the future increase in world population, Ikegami stresses the need to boldly implement those changes as well as respond to newly emerging needs in the population structure.
Its framework for action, endorsed then by 179 governments at the global level, affirmed that inclusive, sustainable development is not possible without prioritizing human rights, including reproductive rights; empowering women and girls; and addressing inequalities as well as the needs, aspirations, and rights of individuals.
As stakeholders are now set to celebrate the 30th anniversary of implementing ICDP resolutions, Ikegami emphasizes the need for African and Asian nations to consolidate views on how countries should specifically carry out parliamentary activities for the global review process.
Professor Kiyoko Ikegami, the Executive Director of the Japan-based Asian Population and Development Association (APDA), says lawmakers play a critical role in enacting policies that advance sustainable outcomes guiding people-centered development. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS
“As the representative body of the people, lawmakers play a critical role in enacting policies that advance sustainable outcomes guiding to people-centered development progress,” Ikegami told IPS.
Although nearly 30 years since the landmark conference in Cairo, people-centered development has enabled numerous gains in different parts of Africa; experts still believe that the long-term solution to the pending population issues still requires elected representatives to be actively engaged in formulating and implementing appropriate policies and programmes.
“Lagging regions in Africa have employed various policies and instruments to put in place the comprehensive needs of people and communities, but there are several reasons why some countries can still do better,” she said.
Some participants at the African and Asian Parliamentarians’ Dialogue in Kigali emphasized the need to take lessons from experience towards implementing ICDP’s commitments stressing the lack of effective monitoring strategies.
Kwabena Asante-Ntiamoah, country representative in Rwanda for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) pointed out that demographic change is one of the key challenges in Africa, where there is unprecedented growth of the youth population.
“This current demographic structure with a large youthful population, he observed, can be leveraged for socio-economic transformation, with the right investments,” he said.
Jeanne Henriette Mukabikino, chair of the Rwandan Parliamentarians’ Network on Population and Development (RPRPD), told IPS that considering the current population growth, Africa should utilize its youthful population potential for its socio-economic progress.
Both Asante-Ntiamoah and Mukabikino are convinced that Africa’s young population brings many opportunities for economic growth despite deepening inequality within and across the continent.
Apart from conflicts and climate change, such as cyclones and droughts, which continue to contribute to food insecurity in Africa, some lawmakers see hope in positive trends at a time when Africa and Asia are working together to tackle global issues of population and development.
Donatille Mukabalisa, Speaker of Rwanda’s Chamber of Deputies, is convinced that the demographic dividend presents a unique opportunity for Africa to drive economic growth and poverty reduction. Credit: APDA
However, some lawmakers believe that despite progress made by several African countries in addressing population and development issues, these efforts are still threatened by multifaceted challenges, backsliding on the rights and choices of women and girls, and the polarization of the sexual and reproductive health and rights agenda.
The 2022 UNFPA’s State of World Population 2022 report indicates that nearly half of all pregnancies, totaling 121 million each year throughout the world, are unintended.
The report urges policymakers, community leaders, and all individuals to empower women and girls to make affirmative decisions about sex, contraception, and motherhood and to foster societies that recognize the full worth of women and girls.
Dr Celestin Fiarovana Lovanirina, member of the National Assembly of Madagascar, told IPS that with such a large population of young people, supportive policies and programs on inclusive youth development are critical more than ever.
“As legislators, we have a responsibility to make laws in a move to address such kind of issue that is presently affecting our population,” he said.
During the three-day parliamentary dialogue, which featured multiple sessions covering topics such as the ICPD30 review process and Addis Ababa Declaration on Population and Development (AADPD10), some participants shared experiences of their countries where for example, adopting a new law on minimum legal age of marriage for girls has been critical to harnessing the demographic dividend.
Latest estimates by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) show that in many parts of Africa, women and girls are still vulnerable to a disproportionate range of risks, particularly to their sexual and reproductive health.
The UN agency’s report shows that in most cases, girls are subject to child marriage, female genital mutilation, and limited education and are denied equal opportunities.
Experts point out that with more people in the labor force and fewer children to support, a country has a window of opportunity for rapid economic growth if the right social and economic investments and policies are made in health, education, governance, and the economy.
Madina Ndangiza, a member of the Rwandan parliament, shared her experience in adopting new laws to ensure that girls and boys enjoy the dignity and human rights to expand their capabilities.
“We believe that education is a cornerstone to protecting girls from child marriage … at 21 young girls are supposed to have graduated from university and are healthier to make their choice and participate more in the formal labor,” Ndangiza told delegates.
On the sidelines of the parliamentary dialogue, some lawmakers agreed that the lack of an implementation plan of policy has been a hindrance to many countries needed to capture demographic dividends.
However, Ikegami pointed out that beyond the current situation, most African and Asian countries are also experiencing a demographic transition which they should use to their advantage.
“This dialogue serves as a platform of exchanges between African and Asian lawmakers to assess how their framework legislation should create an enabling environment for decision-making, to harness the growing population to accelerate the achievement of development aspirations,” she said.
While the aging population is the most emerging issue in Asia, Ikegami points out that youth unemployment is an issue that might be a concern for Africa.
“Context and realities are different at each continent and country’s levels, but we are trying to create opportunities for lawmakers to learn from each other,” she said.
Fermina Quispe (fourth from the right, standing) poses for photos together with other farmers from the Women’s Association of Huerto de Nueva Esperanza, which she chairs and with which she promotes crop irrigation with solar pumps in her community, Llarapi Chico, located more than 4,000 meters above sea level in the municipality of Arapa in the southern Peruvian highlands of the department of Puno, a region badly affected by drought. CREDIT: Courtesy of Jesusa Calapuja
by Mariela Jara (lima)
Inter Press Service
LIMA, Oct 26 (IPS) – The lack of water is so severe in Peru’s highlands that farming families are forced to sell their livestock because they cannot feed them. “There is no grass or fodder to feed them,” says Fermina Quispe, a Quechua farmer from a rural community located at 4,200 meters above sea level.
Llarapi Chico, the name of her community, belongs to the district of Arapa in the southern Andean department of Puno, one of the 14 that the government declared in emergency on Oct. 23 due to the water deficit caused by the combined impacts of climate change and the El Niño phenomenon.
Arapa is home to 9,600 people in its district capital and villages, most of whom are Quechua indigenous people, as in other districts of the Puna highlands.
With a projected population of more than 1.2 million inhabitants, less than four percent of the estimated national population of over 33 million, Puno has high levels of poverty and extreme poverty, especially in rural areas.
According to official figures, in 2022 the poverty rate in the department stood at 43 percent, compared to 40 percent and 46 percent in 2020 and 2021, respectively – years marked by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The recession of the Peruvian economy could drive up the poverty rate this year.
In addition, Puno was shaken by the impunity surrounding nearly 20 deaths during the social protests that broke out in December 2022 demanding the resignation of interim President Dina Boluarte, who succeeded President Pedro Castillo, currently on trial for attempting to “breach the constitutional order”.
The United Nations issued a report on Oct. 19 stating that human rights violations were committed during the crackdown on the protests, one of whose epicenters was Puno.
Fermina Quispe is president of the Women’s Association of Huerto de Nueva Esperanza, which is made up of 22 women farmers who, like her, are getting involved in agroecological vegetable production with the support of the non-governmental organization Cedepas Centro.
The 41-year-old community leader spoke to IPS in Chosica, on the outskirts of Lima, while she participated in the Encuentro Feminismos Diversos por el Buen Vivir (Meeting of Diverse Feminisms for Good Living), held Oct. 13-15.
With a soft voice and a face lit up with a permanent smile, Quispe shared her life story, which was full of difficulties that far from breaking her down have strengthened her spirit and will, and have helped her to face challenges such as food security.
Pumps fueled by 180-watt solar panels draw water from rustic wells to irrigate vegetable crops in the highland greenhouses of Peruvian farming communities. In the picture, farmer Fermina Quispe is helping to move the solar panels. CREDIT: Courtesy of Fermina Quispe
As a child she witnessed the kidnapping of her father, then lieutenant governor (the local political authority) of the community of Esmeralda, where she was born, also located in Arapa. Her father and her older brother were dragged away by members of the Maoist guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), which unleashed terror in the country between 1980 and 2000.
“A month later we found my father, they had tortured him and gouged out his eyes. My mother, at the age of 40, was left alone with 12 children and raised us on her own. I finished primary and secondary school but I couldn’t continue studying because we couldn’t afford it, we had nowhere to get the money,” she recalls calmly. Her brother was never heard from again.
She did not have the opportunity to go to university where she wanted to be trained as an early childhood education teacher, but she developed her entrepreneurial skills.
After she married Ciro Concepción Quispe – “he is not my relative, he is from another community,” she clarifies- they dedicated themselves to family farming and managed to acquire several cattle and small livestock such as chickens and guinea pigs, which ensured their daily food.
Her husband is a construction worker in Arapa and earns a sporadic income, and in his free time he helps out on the farm and in community works.
Their eldest daughter, Danitza, 18, is studying education at the public Universidad Nacional del Altiplano in Puno, the departmental capital, where she rents a room. And the youngest, 13-year-old Franco, will finish the first year of secondary school in December. His school is in the town of Arapa, a 20-minute walk from their farm.
Fermina managed to build “my own little house” on a piece of land she acquired on her own and outside of her husband’s land, in order to have more autonomy and a place of her own “if we have conflicts,” she says.
She also began to look for information about support for farming families, bringing together her neighbors along the way. This is how the association she now presides over came into being.
However, the drought, which has not let up since 2021, is causing changes and wreaking havoc in their lives, ruining years of efforts of families such as Fermina’s.
“We have a water crisis and the families are very worried. We are not going to have any production and the cattle are getting thin, we have no choice but to sell. A bull that cost 2,000 soles (519 dollars) we are selling off for 500 (129 dollars). The middlemen are the ones who profit from our pain,” she says.
During her participation in the Encuentro Feminismos Diversos por el Buen Vivir held in Chosica, near Lima, Fermina Quispe, a farmer from the Andes highlands of the department of Puno, in southern Peru, dresses in a colorful lliclla, a handmade Quechua blanket. She is working on solutions in her community to mitigate the impact of a severe drought on subsistence agriculture and livestock production. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS
Solar water pumps
In the face of adversity, “proposals and action” seems to be Quispe’s mantra. She wants to strengthen her vegetable production for self-consumption and is thinking about growing aromatic herbs and flowers for sale. To do so, she needs to ensure irrigation in her six-by-thirteen-meter highland greenhouse where she uses agroecological methods.
During her participation in Cedepas Centro’s training activities, she learned about solar water pumps, which make it possible to pump water collected in rustic wells called “cochas” to gardens and fields. She has knocked on many doors to raise funds to set up solar water pumps in her community.
“Fermina’s gardens and those of 14 other farmers in her community now have solar pumps for irrigation and living fences made of Spanish broom (Cytisus racemosus),” José Egoavil, one of the experts in charge of the institution’s projects, told IPS.
“They are small pumps that run on 120- to 180-watt solar panels,” he says in a telephone interview from Arapa.
He explains that the solar panel is connected to the pump, which sucks the water stored in the wells that the families have dug, or in the “ojos de agua” – small natural pools of springwater – present on some farms. Thus, they can irrigate the vegetable crops in their greenhouses, and the living fences.
“It is a sustainable technology, it does not pollute because it uses renewable energy and maintenance is not very expensive. In addition, the families give something in return, which makes them value it more. Of the total cost of materials, which is about 900 soles (230 dollars), they contribute 20 percent, in addition to their labor,” he says.
Egoavil, a 45-year-old anthropologist, has lived in Arapa for three years. He is from Junín, a department in the center of the country where Cedepas Centro, an organization dedicated to promoting food security and sustainable development in the Andes highlands of central and southern Peru, is based,
“The focus of our work is on food security and a fundamental issue is water for human consumption and production. There have already been two agricultural seasons in which we have harvested much less and we are about to start a new one, but without rain the forecasts are not encouraging,” he says.
Given the water shortage, they have promoted the community participation of families in emergency projects such as solar pumps, which help to ensure their food supply.
In addition, long-range water seeding and harvesting works are underway, such as the construction of infiltration ditches at the headwaters of river basins.
The participation of small farming families is the driving force behind the works and they are responsible for identifying the natural water sources for their conservation and the construction of the ditches that will prevent the water from flowing down the hills when it rains.
“The ditch is like a sponge that retains water, but if it doesn’t rain, we don’t know what will happen,” says Egoavil.
A veterinarian by profession, Jesusa Calapuja, born in the Peruvian highlands, participated in the Encuentro Feminismos Diversos por el Buen Vivir, held on the outskirts of Lima, where she spoke about the reality of peasant families in a context of poverty and water shortages due to drought. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS
Learning to harvest water
Jesusa Calapuja, a 27-year-old veterinarian born in Arapa, is one of the people in charge of technical assistance in agroecological production, planting and water harvesting at Cedepas Centro.
Using the Escuela de Campo (countryside school) methodology, she travels by motorcycle to the different communities where she interacts with farming families. She came with Fermina Quispe to the feminist meeting in Chosica, where IPS interviewed her.
Calapuja also notes changes in the dynamics of the population due to water scarcity. For example, their production no longer generates surpluses to be sold at the Sunday markets; it is barely enough for their own sustenance.
“They don’t have the income to buy what they need,” she says.
She also notices that at training meetings, women and men no longer bring their boiled potatoes or soup made with the oca tuber, or roasted corn for snacks, but only chuño (dehydrated potatoes) or dried beans. The scarcity of their tuber and grain production is evident in their diets.
But Fermina Quispe hastn’t lost her smile in the face of adversity and is confident that her new skills will help the women in her community.
“Our great-great-grandparents harvested water, made terraces and dams; we have only been harvesting, collecting and using. But it won’t be like that anymore and we are taking advantage of the streams so the water won’t be lost. We only hope that the wind does not carry away the rain clouds,” she says hopefully.
Opinion by Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Siti Sarah Abdul Razak (kuala lumpur, malaysia)
Inter Press Service
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Oct 25 (IPS) – Policy approaches relying solely on voluntary actions to address urgent needs are unlikely to succeed. Depending on optional compliance to address global warming will not fix things in time.
Regulation for transformation
Tariq Fancy, former Chief Investment Officer for Sustainable Investing at BlackRock, had created a storm with his criticisms of ESG (environmental and social governance) ‘greenwashing’, remaining wary of voluntary corporate-led reforms.
Jomo Kwame SundaramNevertheless, judicious and effective regulation based on ESG principles, combined with changing incentives and increased public awareness, can incentivize companies to do better.
Fancy believes changing rules for better regulation is essential for better outcomes. Limiting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is essential to ensure responsible governance aligned with the long-term public interest.
Investment managers have several responsibilities – including fiduciary duties, legal obligations, and financial incentives – requiring them to prioritize short-term profitability rather than sustainability.
Changing regulations to incorporate sustainability considerations should require portfolio managers to prioritize social and environmental concerns, and make choices supporting long-term sustainability goals.
Profits not aligned with public interest
Fiduciary duties oblige company managers to always act in the best interest of shareholder profits. This means ESG initiatives will only happen if they help, or at least do not hurt, profitability.
Social, cultural and media shifts in the West have undoubtedly influenced transnational business behaviour. The popularization of ESG discourses reflects these trends, but there is no strong evidence of their efficacy and positive impact.
Fleeting episodes of public attention cannot even ensure long-term protection of the public interest. With managers constrained by their fiduciary duties, relying on corporations to do the right thing is neither reliable nor sufficient.
Relying on corporate social or environmental responsibility may well become a distraction, delaying urgent and much-needed efforts. This failure underscores the need for government regulation and corporate compliance to achieve vital social and environmental goals.
De-risking finance means protecting the financial value of an investment portfolio. This includes protecting against asset damage, or reducing the risk of lower investment returns, but certainly not climate change mitigation.
Mitigating climate change requires proactive measures to reduce GHG emissions. This includes measures to generate and use clean, especially renewable energy.
Financial protection is important for financial asset owners, but it cannot replace the efforts needed to fight climate change. Worse, believing such measures address the climate crisis serves to delay government interventions and other changes needed to do so.
Climate inequity
Climate change exacerbates inequality, which in turn delays progress. The intergenerational distribution of the burden of climate risks disproportionately affects younger and future generations.
This deters proactive measures, as older generations are less inclined to spend more now for future generations who will suffer more from global warming. Instead, they may prefer measures to better adapt to its contemporary effects.
Aside from younger and future generations, the more vulnerable will also bear its worst effects. Thus, for example, small farmers in developing nations will have to cope with increased droughts, floods and crop failures.
Thus, further progress on climate change is delayed due to financial short-termist thinking, business interests, limited contemporary accountability for future consequences, as well as political and cost considerations.
Developing nations, with much smaller per capita carbon footprints, typically lack resources, leaving them more vulnerable. Meanwhile, developed countries, the major historical greenhouse gas emitters, have more resources to slow and adapt to climate change.
Can ESG principles help?
Will businesses maintain commitments to ESG ‘principles’ over the long term? They are legally obliged to maximize shareholder interests, especially profits, and also know public interest, attention, sentiment and priorities are always changing.
Business leaders may only commit to ESG principles in the long term if compelled to embrace them owing to the pecuniary costs of ignoring them. Obligations to other stakeholders – including investors, customers and employees – can also help sustain ESG commitments.
Establishing clear governance arrangements for ESG oversight, setting measurable and achievable goals, reporting regularly, and ensuring comprehensive organizational accountability should also help.
But ultimately, regulation should appropriately advance social and environmental responsibility, with such commitments sustained despite shifting public attention, fads and profit concerns.
Are voluntary efforts enough?
The COVID-19 experience has also taught us to prioritize proactive, systemic and mandatory measures, rather than rely solely on voluntary efforts. While voluntary efforts can advance sustainability efforts, the pandemic experience suggests they will not be sufficient to achieve needed changes soon enough.
A systemic approach can induce businesses and individuals to do the needed. Policy interventions, especially regulation, are essential to drive systemic changes on a large scale, and to align businesses and individuals with ESG principles.
Clear communications, transparency and collaboration – among governments, businesses and civil society – are crucial for achieving long-term sustainability and progressive social change.
To control the pandemic, governments adopted ‘all of government’ and ‘whole of society’ approaches, imposing strict mandatory lockdowns, but also providing vaccinations to all, and support to the vulnerable.
Similar top-down approaches may be needed to effectively address social and sustainability challenges. This could involve implementing regulations, standards and incentives promoting, even requiring, sustainable practices.
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