By External Source
May 3 2023 (IPS-Partners)

Niloofar Hamedi, Elaheh Mohammadi and Narges Mohammadi have been named as the laureates of the 2023 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize, following the recommendation of an International Jury of media professionals. The awards ceremony took place on the evening of May 2 in New York, in the presence of Audrey Azoulay, Director General of UNESCO.

Now more than ever, it is important to pay tribute to all women journalists who are prevented from doing their jobs and who face threats and attacks on their personal safety. Today we are honouring their commitment to truth and accountability.
Audrey Azoulay UNESCO’s Director-General

We are committed to honoring the brave work of Iranian female journalists whose reporting led to a historical women-led revolution. They paid a hefty price for their commitment to report on and convey the truth. And for that, we are committed to honoring them and ensuring their voices will continue to echo worldwide until they are safe and free.
Zainab Salbi Chair of the International Jury of media professionals

The three laureates

Niloofar Hamedi writes for the leading reformist daily newspaper Shargh. She broke the news of the death of Masha Amini following her detention in police custody on 16 September 2022. She has been detained in solitary confinement in Iran’s Evin Prison since September 2022.

Elaheh Mohammadi writes for the reformist newspaper, Ham-Mihan, covering social issues and gender equality. She reported on Masha Amini’s funeral, and has also been detained in Evin Prison since September 2022. She had previously been barred from reporting for a year in 2020 due to her work.

Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi are joint winners of both the 2023 International Press Freedom Award by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE), and Harvard’s 2023 Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism. They were named as two of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023.

Narges Mohammadi has worked for many years as a journalist for a range of newspapers and is also an author and Vice-Director of the Tehran-based civil society organization Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC). She is currently serving a 16-year prison sentence in Evin Prison. She has continued to report in print from prison, and has also interviewed other women prisoners. These interviews were included in her book “White Torture”. In 2022, she won the Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) Courage Prize.

Women journalists under threat

Globally, women journalists and media workers face increasing offline and online attacks and are subject to disproportionate and specific threats. The gender-based violence they are exposed to includes stigmatization, sexist hate speech, trolling, physical assault, rape and even murder. UNESCO advocates for the safety of women journalists and collaborates with partners to identify and implement good practices and share recommendations with all parties involved in countering attacks against women journalists, as recognized by numerous UN resolutions.

In 2021, UNESCO published The Chilling, a study on global trends in online violence against women journalists, which demonstrated the extent of attacks against women journalists and the impact on their well-being, their work and press freedom at large. UNESCO works with partners to develop practical tools for journalists, media managers and newsrooms to respond to online and offline abuse. UNESCO also partners with specialized organizations to train women media workers on the ground and through online training courses, and works with security forces to sensitize them on freedom of expression with a gender focus.

About the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize

Created in 1997, the annual UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize honours a person, organization or institution which has made an outstanding contribution to the defence and/or promotion of press freedom anywhere in the world, especially when this has been achieved in the face of danger. It is the only such prize awarded to journalists within the UN System.

It is named for Guillermo Cano Isaza, the Colombian journalist who was assassinated in front of the offices of his newspaper El Espectador in Bogotá, Colombia, on 17 December 1986, and funded by the Guillermo Cano Isaza Foundation (Colombia), the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation (Finland), the Namibia Media Trust, Democracy & Media Foundation Stichting Democratie & Media (The Netherlands), and the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

About UNESCO’s action to protect journalists

UNESCO is the United Nations agency with a mandate to ensure freedom of expression and the safety of journalists around the world. It coordinates the UN Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity, which marked its 10th anniversary with a global conference in Vienna, Austria this year.

The Organization condemns and monitors judicial follow up to every journalist killing. It also trains journalists and judicial actors, works with governments to develop supportive policies and laws, and raises global awareness through events such as World Press Freedom Day (3 May) and the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists (2 November) held annually.

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Opal Palmer Adisa in Jamaica. Credit: SWAN

By SWAN
PARIS, Mar 8 2023 (IPS)

For the past six years, Jamaican writer and scholar Opal Palmer Adisa has been one of the voices crying out against the prevalence of gender-based violence in the Caribbean and elsewhere. To highlight this human rights issue, she launched “Thursdays in Black” – holding public protests throughout the year and, on Thursdays, making use of social media to spread her message and raise awareness.

Palmer Adisa, a former director of The Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, is also known as one of the forces highlighting Caribbean artists “at home and in the diaspora” (alongside SWAN, which was launched in 2011). She’s the founder of Interviewing the Caribbean, a journal where artists from all genres discuss their craft and the arts in general.

But it is her work on gender that is now coming to the fore and which is a focus in her latest publications – she has written some 20 books, including novels and collections of stories and poetry. Her most recent work, The Storyteller’s Return, looks at misogyny and examines how women find healing amidst violence.

For International Women’s Day, SWAN spoke with Palmer Adisa about her writing and her continuing fight to end GBV both in her homeland and globally. The edited interview follows.

SWAN: The United Nations defines gender-based violence (GBV) as “harmful acts directed at an individual based on their gender”. The organization cites estimates that “one in three women will experience sexual or physical violence in their lifetime”. Why isn’t the world calling this for what it is and doing more?

Opal Palmer Adisa: As much as some people claim that feminists are always blaming patriarchy, the reason why gender-based violence is not declared for what it is – life-threatening to women and damaging to the entire society – is because of patriarchy and the institutions that are patriarchal; hence gender-based violence is really not taken very seriously.

There are band-aid things that are being done in Jamaica and elsewhere to address the issue, but the issue is deeper and encoded in our social/religious institutions and, therefore, has to be attacked or resolved at those levels.

We have to look at the various interpretations of religions that make men in charge of women. So, in order to change gender-based violence, we’re talking about a complete reframing of the entire society starting with the institutions. We have to project and reinforce that women are equal to men and should be treated equally in all areas.

A question that I have been grappling with, even in my new novel, is: why do men rape? Why is it something that they feel they can and do do? It is a form of terror and control of women. There is definitely some progress, but the various governments have to declare GBV as war, which it is, and treat it as such.

SWAN: Campaigns to stop violence against women – the main victims of GBV – are generally highlighted every International Women’s Day (March 8) and every Nov. 25 – International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. What are these campaigns achieving on the international level?

OPA: International Women’s Day and the 16 days of elimination of violence against women have brought international attention to this issue, and this has forced more governments and people worldwide to stop and pay attention, and understand the long-term effect of gender-based violence, not just on the woman and man who are involved (because 80% of the perpetrators are men), but it impacts the children, it impacts the elders, it impacts the health industry, the economy – because women have to seek help through medical care, lose work time, etc.

More importantly, because of these specific days, a growing number of women globally understand that they don’t have to be victims and that there are resources now for those who are in abusive situations to get some kind of respite. The changes that are needed are still a long time away, but these days bring attention and awareness and education.

However, we need to understand that we live in a world that prescribes violence as a solution, and GBV is an obvious consequence. There has to be a major paradigm shift – what we’re talking about is non-violent conflict resolution, which for me is one of the important things in my struggle against gender-based violence: teaching men and women how to talk with each other and how to disagree with each other without resorting to physical harm.

We must teach men to deeply respect women, not just to say it, but to respect women and to understand that women are not here to be of service to them, to wash their clothes or cook their meals, to take care of them sexually – that woman are their partners and deserve to be treated with mutual respect.

International Women’s Day and November 25th through December 10th are very important because they bring tremendous awareness to the ills and plight of women and offer some solutions to ameliorate these conditions.

SWAN: According to the Caribbean Policy Research Institute, Jamaica is among the nations that have the highest rate of femicide (intentional homicide of females) and of “intimate partner violence”. You have been highlighting these issues through both your scholarly and creative work. How did your initiative in this area begin?

OPA: As you’ve indicated, Jamaica has a very high femicide and gender-based-violence rate, and, as a child growing up, I saw this. I grew up on a sugar estate where poverty was a reality for those cane cutters and their families who toiled daily under the sun, and violence fed by anger was also part of that reality. There were numerous whispered stories of gender-based violence.

This lived experience influenced my work, so my very first collection Bake-Face and Other Guava Stories explores this issue as well as sexual abuse. In my creative work, I always felt it was important to illuminate these issues to bring about awareness. My advocacy of “Thursdays in Black” is really just a continuation.

As a writer, my work is intended to address those issues that impact both women and men and try to offer solutions. Growing up, I felt that not many people were doing anything about these issues, dismissing them as “man-and-woman” business.

Honestly, I think that many people didn’t understand the social and long-lasting impact it had on children, on the entire family unit, and so I feel it’s my duty to do that, to write about these things, and expose the theme in the hope of bringing about change. My writing is really about healing – how do we heal from these historical traumas of enslavement but also the daily traumas that we inflict on each other.

SWAN: At the 2021 Bocas Lit Fest (an annual literary festival in Trinidad), you did a powerful online reading of How Do I Keep Them Safe. Can you tell us what motivated this poem?

OPA: In the last 6 years, I have been working specifically to look at issues impacting women and children. Living in Jamaica, you can’t help but hear about the tremendous atrocities done to girls, raping, and mutilation. It’s just awful, quite devastating, and in some instances debilitating.

So, I wrote that poem for mothers. Seeing them in the newspaper or the news, underlining their lament and grief is how do we keep our girls safe. I am a mother, and even though my girls are young adults, it was my constant concern – how to keep them safe. The poem is the voices of women, the community, the voice of fathers who are searching for ways to keep their children safe, specifically their girl children from sexual harassment, which is rampant, and from rape and mutilation.

SWAN: Your most recent collection of poetry, The Storyteller’s Return, explores misogyny and women’s survival and healing in hostile spaces. What do you want readers to take from it?

OPA: The Storyteller’s Return is a love story to Jamaica, a book of gratitude about being able to return. It’s for all the returnees and for all those who want to return but don’t feel they can. While it asserts that Jamaica is unsafe and misogyny is pervasive, it also reveals that there are safe havens and beautiful wonderful people still present in Jamaica.

I want readers to really take away from this book that in the midst of the hostility there is redemption, and all of us have a role to play. The collection is really a homage to those who are away and who have returned and who are wanting to return and who cannot return – to understand that even in the midst of the seeming chaos and hostility, there is opportunity and joy and peace.

SWAN: Not all artists can be activists, but what are some of the ways in which everyone can join the fight to end GBV?

OPA: In order for gender-based violence and violence in general to change in Jamaica, and anywhere else, everyone has to do their role. You don’t have to be an activist and go on marches and carry out other conscious acts of protest like I do, and you don’t have to make this your weekly assignment, but there is a lot you can do on a personal individual level.

Start by having meaningful conversations about some of the ills you see in your society and what each of us as individuals can do to help eradicate and address those ills. Almost everyone has seen, heard and/or witnessed GBV. We have to adopt the African motto: “Each one teach one.” Start on the individual level, talking with each other, acting peacefully with your friends and colleagues and whenever you see injustice or wrong, be brave and speak up against it; do not ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist. So, that’s how do our part – be a witness, speak up, help a victim when and wherever you can.

By External Source
Mar 7 2023 (IPS-Partners)

From the earliest days of computing to the present age of virtual reality and artificial intelligence…

…women have made untold contributions to the digital world in which we increasingly live.

Their accomplishments have been made against all odds, in a historically unwelcoming field.

Today, a persistent gender gap in digital access keeps women from unlocking technology’s full potential.

Underrepresentation in STEM education and careers remains a major barrier to their participation in tech design and governance.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020, women are still underrepresented in the technology sector.

They make up only 17% of the core technology workforce.

And the pervasive threat of online gender-based violence forces them out of the digital spaces they occupy.

A survey of women journalists from 125 countries found that 73% had suffered online violence in the course of their work.

Exclusion extends in more subtle forms as well:

Women make up only 22% of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) workforce.

And a global analysis of 133 AI systems across industries found that 44.2 per cent demonstrate gender bias.

However, there is some progress being made.

Women’s participation in the technology sector has increased by 10% since 2014.

According to the National Center for Women and Information Technology…

…the number of women in executive positions in the technology sector has increased from 11% in 2012 to 20% in 2019.

There is still a long way to go in terms of achieving gender equality in the technology sector.

International Women’s Day is a global celebration of the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women.

It is a call to action to continue to strive for progress.

This year, let’s celebrate our International Women’s Day theme: “DigitALL: Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality”.

IPS UN Bureau

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Women's access to digital technologies and the development of their abilities to use and take advantage of such technology for empowerment and exercise of rights is a way to reduce the deepening of the digital gender gap in Latin America. The photo shows a training course carried out with this aim by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) with women in the region. CREDIT: APC

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Mar 7 2023 (IPS)

The digital gender gap is multifactorial in Latin America and as long as countries fail to address discrimination against women, inequality will be reflected in the digital space, excluding them from access to opportunities and enjoyment of their rights.

This is what Karla Velazco, political advocacy coordinator for the women’s rights program of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), an international network of civil society organizations that promotes the strategic use of information and communications technologies in Latin America, Asia and Africa, told IPS:

Poverty in the region affects 32 percent of the population, but with a clear gender and ethnic bias, with higher rates among women and indigenous people and blacks, according to a study by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

This disadvantage, the study underlines, impacts them by reducing their access to, use, management and control of new technologies, to the detriment of their development.

Velazco is also part of the Inter-American Telecommunications Commission’s (CITEL) Permanent Consultative Committee, where she promotes women’s right to access the internet and new technologies in general, she explained by videoconference from her office in Mexico City.

On the occasion of the commemoration of International Women’s Day, whose theme this year is “For an inclusive digital world: Innovation and technology for gender equality”, the expert drew attention to the lack of centralized and updated data on this topic that would enable governments to move forward with well-defined policies.

The ECLAC study, entitled “Digitalization of Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Urgent action for a transformative recovery, with equality” and published in 2022, reports that four out of 10 women in the region do not have access to the internet, based on data provided by 11 countries.

But Velazco said this figure does not provide qualitative information nor does it address the gap between urban and rural environments.

“There is no measurement of how women are using technology and how it affects their lives. For example, we see a lot of online gender-based violence (OGBV) but there are almost no reports on this,” she said.

Karla Velazco, from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), an international network of civil society organizations, says it is important to have up-to-date data on the different aspects of the digital gender gap in Latin America, so that countries can design appropriate public policies and take action. CREDIT: Courtesy Karla Velazco

In any case, the figure served as a reference point to assume a commitment to reduce the digital gender gap, during a regional consultation held in February to reach a position on the issue to be presented at the 67th meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) taking place Mar. 6-17 at United Nations headquarters in New York.

The 11 countries that provided data for the study were Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay.

Velazco argued that women do not completely adopt the new technologies because as long as structural gender inequalities persist in labor, educational, economic and social areas, intertwined with discrimination based on ethnicity, economic status, sexual orientation or age, these will be replicated in the digital space.

“As it is made up of different factors, the digital gender gap is very difficult to measure, but it is a responsibility that States have to assume so that women are not excluded from technological advances and innovations and, on the contrary, benefit from it for their empowerment and exercise of rights,” she said.

Elizabeth Mendoza, a Peruvian lawyer from the non-governmental organization Hiperderecho, said that in Peru it is very difficult to report online gender-based violence. In an interview at the NGO’s office in Lima, she showed IPS the Tecnoresistencias digital space created to promote safe browsing for girls and women and prevent violations of their rights. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

The difficulties of reporting online gender-based violence

Elizabeth Mendoza is a lawyer and legal coordinator of the non-governmental Hiperderecho, a Peruvian institution that has worked for 10 years on rights and freedoms in technology.

“There are disadvantages in the use and enjoyment of the internet. When browsing we come across situations or people who try to violate our rights by taking advantage of technology and this is what we know as digital gender violence,” she told IPS in an interview at the NGO’s headquarters in Lima.

In 2018 Legislative Decree 1410 was passed in Peru, which recognizes four types of criminal online gender-based violence: harassment, sexual harassment, sexual blackmail and dissemination of audiovisual content and images through technological means.

Hiperderecho analyzed the efficiency of the law and found that people do not know how to report such crimes and that the authorities have fallen far short in enforcing the legislation.

“Many people experience OGBV and don’t know it’s a reportable crime; in cases in which the complaint has been made, it is not received by the police and the prosecutor’s office does not have the authority to adequately investigate and prosecute the case,” said the lawyer.

This situation is due to lack of training for the authorities in understanding OGBV and how to handle cases from a gender perspective, and with respect to using technology to investigate and put together a case.

“What generally happens is that they tell you: if he’s bothering you, block him; if you have a problem, close your account. In this type of crime, the idea is to act diligently and quickly because the aggressors delete the content, the message, the account and we can be left without evidence,” Mendoza said.

In the cases assisted by Hiperderecho, the common denominator is the re-victimization of the complainant. “In the middle of a hearing we met a defense lawyer who said: why are you making so much trouble if my defendant has a future ahead of him, this is just a case of harassment and he is sorry. It is difficult to report online gender-based violence in Peru,” she commented.

To help protect the rights of girls and women in the use of the digital space, Hiperderecho has created the Tecnoresistencias self-care center that provides guidance and information on how to identify online gender-based violence, how to fight it and how to proceed and report it.

The center provides self-care guides, explanations of the different kinds of OGBV, and methods available for reporting it. It also answers queries.

“At first they only used the cell phone to talk; now it’s a means to face the poverty that worsened in the pandemic,” said Rosy Santiz, a Mayan woman from the town of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, talking about women embroiderers and weavers who, through the use of technology, have been able to weather the economic and social crisis they have been facing. CREDIT: Courtesy of Rosy Santiz

Using mobile applications to weather the crisis

On the other side of the coin, the use of the internet and access to new technologies made it possible to weather the serious economic and social crisis that COVID-19 accentuated among a group of Mayan indigenous women in the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

“The pandemic made it very difficult for us, we were not making progress in access to communication because there is little internet here in San Cristóbal de las Casas and we needed to learn,” said Rosy Santiz, a Mayan woman who is a trainer and promotes rights.

She is a member of the K’inal Antsetik (“land of women” in the Tzeltal indigenous language) Training and Skills Center for Women. Created in 2014, the center supports collectives and a network of cooperatives of women embroiderers and weavers.

“We knew how to use the cell phone, but to keep our jobs we had to learn other programs like Zoom. It was difficult, but it was the only way to be able to communicate and work from home. We learned how to continue holding our meetings and how to coordinate to continue disseminating information and training, because in the pandemic we also continued to share our experiences,” Santiz said.

In the communities where the women who make up the collectives and the cooperative live, there is little internet signal, so they decided to train them in the use of the WhatsApp application. The members of the board of directors who live in San Cristóbal de las Casas receive the orders from clients and channel them to the women embroiderers and weavers, sending the specifications and photographs over WhatsApp.

“At first they only used the cell phone to talk; now it’s a means to face the poverty that worsened in the pandemic, it is one of the aspects that we take advantage of with respect to technology,” she said.

Excerpt:

Cooperative members in southern Lebanon make a rare, traditional bread called Mallet El Smid to be sold at the MENNA shop in Beirut. Women are central to meeting the SDGs, say parliamentarians. Credit: UN Women/Joe Saade

By IPS Correspondent
JOHANNESBURG, Feb 23 2023 (IPS)

The post-COVID-19 period has been a crucial one for members of parliament who have their work cut out to ensure that issues that arose during the pandemic are addressed, especially concerning the ICPD25 commitments and programmes of action for universal access to sexual and reproductive rights, gender-based violence and building peaceful, just and inclusive societies. Across the world, progress toward achieving the SDGs by 2030 was impacted during the pandemic.

As Dr Samar Haddad, a former member of the Lebanese Parliament and head of the Population Committee at the Bar Association in Lebanon commented at a recent meeting of the Forum of the Arab Parliamentarians  for Population and Development (FAPPD): “The main theme for this year is combating gender-based violence, which is a scourge that the entire world suffers from, and its rate has risen alarmingly in light of the economic crisis, bloody stability, wars, and displacement.”

IPS was privileged to interview two members of parliament from the region about how they are tackling GBV, youth empowerment, and women’s participation in politics, society, and the economy.

Here are edited excerpts from the interviews:

Pierre Bou Assi, MP from Lebanon

Pierre Bou Assi, MP from Lebanon

IPS: What legislation, budgets, and monitoring frameworks are in place or planned for combating GBV in Lebanon?

Pierre Bou Assi (PA): Lebanon has launched a project to support protection and prevention systems to prevent gender-based violence within the framework of continuous efforts aimed at responding to social and economic challenges in Lebanon and aims to strengthen prevention and monitoring mechanisms for gender-based violence, and support the efforts made by the Public Security Directorate through the Department Family and juvenile protection.

IPS: One of your speakers at a recent conference spoke about rapid population growth, youth, and high urbanization rates. Youth are often impacted by unemployment or low rates of decent employment. What are parliamentarians doing to assist youth in ensuring that the country can benefit from its demographic dividend?

PA: Youth are the pillar of the nation, its present and future, and the means and goal of development. They are the title of a strong society and its future, stressing that the conscious youth (educated and mindful) armed with science and knowledge are more than capable of facing the challenges of the present and the most prepared to enter the midst of the future.

I would like to say that the Youth Committee in the Lebanese Parliament is working on developing a targeted and real strategy that includes advanced programs that are agreed upon by experts and active institutions in this field to consolidate the principles of citizenship, the rule of law and patriotism, and empower the youth politically and economically to achieve their potential and develop and expand their horizons.

In addition, we are expanding youth participation in public life by providing them with opportunities for practical training in legislative and oversight institutions, and refining the participants’ personal skills by informing them of the decision-making process in the Council.

IPS: Looking back at the COVID-19 situation, most countries experienced two clear issues, an increase in GBV and its impact on children’s education. There was also an issue with high levels of violence experienced by children. Are parliamentarians concerned about the COVID impacts on children, and what programs have been implemented to support them?

PA: There is no doubt that Lebanon, like other countries in the world, was affected by the coronavirus pandemic in all aspects of life, including children and its impact on the quality of education, as well as the high level of violence that children were exposed to during that period, as I would like to take a look at the more positive side. We note a number of measures Lebanon took during the pandemic – which included the release of children who were in detention, the strengthening or expansion of social protection systems through cash assistance, and an overall decrease in levels of violence in conflict situations.

Lebanon has a plan that includes the following points:

• The continuity and safety of learning for all school children, including bridging the digital divide and creating low-cost technology.
• Implementing a basic package for equitable access to primary health care for children and mothers.
• Expanding the scope and appropriateness of infant and young child feeding programs and general educational messages.
• Expanding social protection systems to reach the most affected children and families through cash transfer programmes.
• Enhancing government budgetary allocations and public funding for social sectors, with a special focus on health care and education.

Hmoud Al-Yahyai, MP from Oman.

Hmoud Al-Yahyai, MP from Oman

Al-Yahyai spoke to IPS about the development of a human-rights-based framework. The interview followed a meeting with the theme “Human Rights and their relationship to the goals of sustainable development. The meeting was held by the Omani Parliamentary Committee for Population and Development in cooperation Omani National Commission for Human Rights, the Forum of Arab Parliamentarians for Population and Development (FAPPD), and the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA) on “Human Rights and their relationship to the goals of sustainable development.”

IPS: How is Oman working towards a human rights-based legislative framework, and what role are parliamentarians taking to ensure implementation? What role does Oman Vision 2040 play in this?

Hmoud Al-Yahyai (HY): The government of the Sultanate of Oman has integrated the sustainable development goals into national development strategies and plans and made them a major component of the long-term national development strategy components and axes known as Oman Vision 2040. The strategy is enhanced by broad societal participation when designing and implementing it and evaluating the plans and policies set. And we, as parliamentarians, make sure, as stated in the voluntary national report, (to provide oversight of) the government’s commitment to achieving the goals of sustainable development, with its three dimensions, economic, social, and environmental, within the specified time frame.

I commend the efforts of the Sultanate of Oman in implementing the goals of sustainable development through several axes, including the pillars of sustainable development, implementation mechanisms, progress achieved, and future directions for the localization of the sustainable development agenda in the short and medium term, and the consistency of Oman Vision 2040.

The Sultanate of Oman reviewed its first voluntary national report on sustainable development at the United Nations headquarters as part of its participation in the work of the UN Economic and Social Council.

Sustainability is crucial to Sultanate, emphasizing that development is not an end in itself, but aimed at building up its population.

Future directions for the localization of the SDGs in the short and medium term are represented on five axes, which include raising community awareness, localizing sustainable development, development partnerships, monitoring progress and making evidence-based policies, and institutional support.

The axes for sustainable development are human empowerment, a competitive knowledge economy, environmental resilience through commitment and prevention, and peace. These form the pillars for sustainable development through efficient financing, local development, and monitoring and evaluation.

Oman has adopted a coordinated package of social, economic, and financial policies to achieve inclusive development based on a competitive and innovative economy. This is being worked upon toward Oman Vision 2040 and its implementation plans, through a set of programs and initiatives that seek to localize the development plan toward achieving the SDGs 2030 and beyond.

IPS: What role do women play in your legislative framework, and do they play a role in ensuring, for example, SRHR rights?

HY: The Sultanate has taken many positive measures to sponsor women. The Sultanate’s policies towards accelerating equality between men and women stem from the directives of the Sultan and his initiatives to appoint women to high positions, to feminize the titles of positions when women fill them, and to grant them political, economic, and social rights.

Women benefit from support in the

• Social field: through comprehensive social insurance and social security system.
• Political field: through the appointment of female ministers, undersecretaries, and ambassadors, and in the field of public prosecution.
• Economic field: through labor and corporate law.
• Cultural field: through the system of education and grants.

There are many programs geared or dedicated to women. The government has begun to circulate and implement a program to support maternal and childcare services at the national level to reduce disease and death rates by providing health care for women during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum and encouraging childbirth under medical supervision.

IPS: What are the achievements of Oman in reaching SDG Target 3.7 (Sexual and reproductive health by 2030, ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare services, including family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies)?

HY: In this regard, a campaign was launched on sexual and reproductive health in the Sultanate due to its positive impact on public health and society. This campaign confirms that reproductive health services are an integral part of primary health care and health security in the country and that it has long-term repercussions on health and social and economic health. Family planning is one of the most important of these services because, if it is not organized, it constitutes a social bomb that can hit everyone, whether a citizen or an official. Therefore, we must take proactive preventive steps.

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The continuing economic crisis and high women's unemployment have resulted in many underaged girls turning to sex work in Zimbabwe. In the area near Penhalonga, the girls target artisanal miners in the region. Credit: Farai Shawn Matiashe/IPS

By Farai Shawn Matiashe
MUTARE, ZIMBABWE, Feb 23 2023 (IPS)

After other adolescent girls her age have gone to bed at around 10 pm, Kudzai commutes to a shopping centre near her home in Penhalonga, a mining area 25 kilometres outside the third largest Zimbabwean city of Mutare, to look for men to solicit sex.

Clad in a black and white skirt with its hemline well above the knees, the 15-year-old Kudzai, whose first name is being used to conceal her identity, is whispering a prayer to God for her night to pay off in this gold-rich area located in Manicaland Province near the porous border with neighbouring Mozambique.

Zimbabwe’s worsening economic crisis has forced Kudzai into the sex trade, and most of her clients are illegal and artisanal gold miners – they, too pushed into mining by the economic malaise coupled with a high unemployment rate of over 90 percent – to earn a living.

She usually returns home early in the morning the following day after spending the whole night working.

“This is how I survive,” says Kudzai, who stays with her elder sister in Tsvingwe, a peri-urban residential area in Penhalonga.

“I dropped out of school last year during COVID-19. My sister, who has been paying for my school fees all these years, could not afford it anymore.”

There are over 1,000 mining pits in the Redwing Mine concession in Penhalonga, owned by a South African mining firm Metallon Corporation.

The mining rights in this concession were allegedly illegally taken by a gold baron Pedzisai ‘Scott’ Sakupwanya, through his company Betterbrands Mining.

Sakupwanya, a ruling party Zanu PF councillor for Mabvuku Ward 21 in the capital Harare, is also the owner of a gold-buying company, Better Brands Jewellery.

His dealings are exposed in a 35-page report by the Centre for Natural Resource Governance, a local civil society organisation that defends the rights of communities affected by extractive industries in Zimbabwe.

Amid an economic struggle, many girls in Penhalonga and surrounding areas have turned to the sex trade to eke a living.

The artisanal and illegal miners often take advantage of these minors to sexually abuse and exploit them.

Some underage girls trade sex for as little as 1 United States dollar.

Sex work is illegal in Zimbabwe.

In 2015, sex workers got relief after a landmark ruling by the Constitutional Court of Zimbabwe that a woman could not be arrested for soliciting sex by merely being in a bar or nightclub.

The legal age of consent is currently 16, but this year the Constitutional Court ruled that it should be raised to 18 years.

But underage girls like Kudzai, with no options for other work, have ventured into the trade and mining areas are hotspots.

Zimbabweans have been through tumultuous times.

High inflation induced by a worsening economic crisis due to the shock of COVID-19 and, more recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused the cost of living to rise rapidly.

But before this, Zimbabwe was in an economic crisis due to massive corruption and economic mismanagement blamed on the Mnangagwa-led government.

This dire economic reality leaves low-income families like Kudzai’s among those worst affected. Worse because the natural resources, such as gold in Penhalonga, benefit only the elite, and the companies don’t seem to be doing much to give back to the community.

Kudzai sometimes sheds a tear, worrying about her bleak and uncertain future.

“I cannot save much money. This is just hand-to-mouth business,” she says.

With 59,6 percent of women in the country unemployed, many are turning to sex work to earn a living, according to a recent survey by the State-controlled Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZimStat).

According to the CNRG report, illicit financial flows in the artisanal mining sector in Zimbabwe are responsible for leakages of an estimated 3 tonnes of gold, valued at approximately $157 million every month.

Most of the gold is smuggled through the porous borders in Mutare to Mozambique and South Africa.

Weston Makoni, a chairman at Penhalonga Residents and Ratepayers Trust, says the situation of girls turning to sex work in his community is worrisome.

“Mainly the push factors are poverty, lack of food, peer pressure and need of school fees money,” he says.

“They are lured by artisanal miners who have cash at hand regularly to buy them food, valuables such as smartphones, drugs and take them out for entertainment.”

Tapuwa O’bren Nhachi, a social scientist, says it’s unfortunate because disease, abuse and trauma now determine these adolescent girls’ life.

“It also means psychological effects that are associated with the trade.  The same girls are also dropping out of school and engaging in drugs which has a negative impact on their future,” he says.

According to the Centre for Sexual Health, HIV and Aids Research (CeSHHAR), more than 57 percent of female sex workers in the country are HIV positive.

Another 15-year-old girl Tanaka says some of her clients are violent, and they often refuse to pay her.

“We meet different people at work. Some refuse to use protection while others do not even want to pay for the services rendered,” says Tanaka, whose only first name is used to protect her.

Makoni says the companies mining in Penhalonga should give back to the surrounding communities to help the poor.

“I basically believe that the companies would greatly assist the girl child in the community by providing school fees to those that are from poor families and mostly orphans,” he says.

“They could help by engaging the community in livelihood projects, making households self-reliant.”

Betterbrands Mining company and Redwing Mine officials did not respond to questions sent to them by this publication.

Nhachi says companies have unlimited responsibilities to ensure that communities they operate in are not deprived of social and public goods, such as affordable education, health facilities and other important infrastructure.

“Companies should create vocational training facilities to prepare the youths for future employment opportunities not only for them but anywhere around the country,” he says.

“Unfortunately, companies that are operating in Penhalonga are mafia styled. They are looting and thriving in the chaos existing in the country, so we should not expect much from them,”

Kudzai says if given an opportunity to return to school, she is ready and willing.

“I do not intend to spend the rest of my life like this. I hope to train as a nurse,” she says.

Note: IPS approached Pedzisai Sakupwanya and Redwing Mine corporate manager Knowledge Hofisi for comment, but they did not get back to us. We asked them for following questions.

1. Leaders of residents associations in Penhalonga have said adolescent girls surrounding your mine are being driven by poverty to venture into the sex trade. We are just checking with you to see if you are running any programmes to support people, including young girls in Penhalonga and its surrounding areas.
2. What is it that you are doing to give back to the community? Residents have been complaining of poor infrastructure in the area.

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Feb 16 2023 (IPS)

In late January, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, finished an official visit to Venezuela. He said he’d found a fragmented society in great need of bridging its divides and encouraged the government to take the lead in listening to civil society concerns and responding to victims of rights violations.

But Venezuelan civil society had hoped for more. Two days before his arrival, the National Assembly, Venezuela’s congress, had approved the first reading of a law aimed at further restricting and criminalising civil society work. International civil society urged the High Commissioner to call for the bill to be shelved. Many found the UN’s response disappointing.

Another turn of the screw

The bill imposes further restrictions on civil society organisations (CSOs). If it becomes law, CSOs will have to hand over lists of members, staff, assets and donors. They’ll be obliged to provide detailed data about their activities, funding sources and use of financial resources – the kind of information that has already been used to persecute and criminalise CSOs and activists. Similar legislation has been used in Nicaragua to shut down hundreds of CSOs and arrest opposition leaders, journalists and human rights defenders.

The law will ban CSOs from conducting ‘political activities’, an expression that lacks clear definition. It could easily be interpreted as prohibiting human rights work and scrutiny of the government. There’s every chance the law will be used against human rights organisations that cooperate with international human rights mechanisms. This would endanger civil society’s efforts to document the human rights situation, which produces vital inputs for the UN’s human rights system and the International Criminal Court, which has an ongoing case against Venezuela.

The law-making process has been shrouded in secrecy: the draft bill wasn’t made publicly available and wasn’t discussed at the National Assembly before being approved. The initiative was immediately denounced as a tool to control, restrict and potentially shut down CSOs and criminally prosecute their leaders and staff. If implemented, it could mean the end of civil society as we know it in Venezuela.

The UN and Venezuela

The previous High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, visited Venezuela in September 2019. She was criticised for taking a cautious approach. Moreover, most of the commitments in the agreement the government signed with her were never fulfilled.

Following that visit, the UN Human Rights Council established the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (FFMV), tasked with investigating alleged human rights violations. In September 2022, the FFMV issued a report detailing the involvement of Venezuela’s intelligence agencies in repressing dissent, including by committing human rights violations such as torture and sexual violence.

But intimidation only grew as Türk’s visit approached, with some protest leaders put under surveillance, followed and detained.

Venezuelan CSOs called for a more energetic approach, but Türk followed his predecessor’s footsteps. His visit was characterised by secrecy and brevity, particularly in terms of the time dedicated to engaging with civil society.

Bachelet’s agreement with the government had included the presence of a two-person UN team to monitor the human rights situation and provide assistance and advice. This has now been extended for two years, but the details haven’t been made public.

Civil society activists have continued to work closely with the UN field office and wouldn’t want to risk its presence in the country, so to some extent they understand Türk’s caution in dealing with the Venezuelan government. But they also view his visit as a missed opportunity.

Türk’s statement to the media at the end of his visit was very much focused on the political and economic crises and healing divisions in society, with human rights ‘challenges’ occupying third place on his list of major concerns.

Alerta Venezuela, a Colombia-based human rights group, recognised the references Türk made to ‘new issues’ – such as the need for Venezuela to sign the Escazú Agreement on environmental rights and decriminalise abortion – alongside ongoing human rights violations such as extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests and torture. But it criticised crucial omissions and the UN’s apparent willingness to take government data at face value.

On the anti-NGO bill, the High Commissioner said he’d asked the government to take into account his comments but didn’t provide any information about their content, so it isn’t clear whether he advocated for amendments to a law that can only remain deeply flawed or for it to be shelved – which is what civil society wanted him to do.

The Venezuelan government has all along paid only lip service to cooperation with the UN and hasn’t kept its promises. Repression is only going to intensify in the run-up to the presidential election scheduled for 2024. Any strategy that involves trusting the government and hoping it will change its position seems doomed to failure.

High-level human rights advocacy needed

More energetic criticism came from the independent and less politically constrained FFMV, which expressed ‘deep concerns’ about the potential implications of the draft NGO law for civic and democratic space.

That is the stance civil society would like the High Commissioner for Human Rights to have taken. They want the office holder to be a human rights champion standing independent of states and unafraid of causing a stir.

Türk is only five months into his four-year term. Civil society will keep doing its best to engage, in the hope that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights can become the human rights advocate the world – and Venezuela – need.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

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Credit: UNICEF/2022/Adebayo

By Yasmine Sherif and Stephen Omollo
NEW YORK, Jan 24 2023 (IPS)

“Is it a sin to be a girl? We don’t want to be at home and illiterate. We want to go to school, study and be intelligent.”

In just a few words, this plea for education from a young Afghan girl has captured the world’s attention. Her heartbreaking question shows how the Taliban’s recent ban on girls attending secondary school and university – effectively ending education opportunities for all Afghan girls and women – is not only violating their fundamental human right to education but shattering countless hopes and dreams in an instant.

Elsewhere in the world, millions of other girls living through humanitarian crises are also being deprived of the right to go to school. In their case, it isn’t necessarily a proclamation that bars them from learning, but hunger, conflict or the consequences of extreme weather induced by the climate crisis, sometimes a combination of all of these. And underpinning this, gender inequality means that the sheer fact they are girls means their education and rights often aren’t prioritized.

For example, at present, hunger is causing huge damage to girls’ education opportunities in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Haiti and other hotspots around the word.

Yasmine Sherif and Stephen Omollo. Credit: Education Cannot Wait (ECW)

The reasons for this are many and interconnected. When food is scarce, it is often girls who shoulder the responsibility of travelling long distances to find sustenance, or caring for siblings while their parents do so, leaving little time for their studies. When small quantities of food are shared amongst a family, evidence shows girls often eat least and last, making it difficult for them to focus and truly benefit when they do go to school.

Elsewhere, from Ukraine to South Sudan, conflict is disrupting girls’ education as families are forced to flee for their safety – indeed, half of all refugee children are out of school.

Whatever the reason, when girls are forced to drop out of school, it isn’t just their education and life opportunities that suffer. Adolescent girls in particular then become even more vulnerable to violence, exploitation, early pregnancy and harmful practices, from child marriage to female genital mutilation. Indeed, the chances of a girl marrying as a child reduce by six percent with each year she remains in secondary education.

Inclusive, quality education is a lifeline which has a profound effect on girls’ rights. But more needs to be done to make this a reality.

Girls in crisis settings are nearly 2.5 times more likely to be out of school than those living in countries not in crisis. One reason for this is that in emergencies and protracted crises, education responses are severely underfunded. The total annual funding for education in emergencies as a percentage of global sector-specific humanitarian funding in 2021 was just 2.9%.

Yasmine Sherif pictured in Lebanon speaking to a young child at an ECW-supported facility. Credit: Education Cannot Wait (ECW)

Together with partners, Plan International and Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the UN’s global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, are calling for this proportion to be increased to at least 10% of humanitarian financing. This must include increased multi-year investments in the institutional capacities of local and national actors.

Today, on International Day of Education, we stand in solidarity with girls in Afghanistan and in all other crisis affected countries to say “education cannot wait.” Education is not only a fundamental human right, but a lifesaving and life-sustaining investment for girls affected by crisis. We must stand with girls as they defend this right.

Next month, when world leaders will gather in Geneva at the Education Cannot Wait High-Level Financing Conference, we urge donor governments to immediately increase humanitarian aid to education. We must translate our promises into action through bold, courageous and substantive financing.

This funding is essential if we are to build resilience in the most climate-exposed nations, where the consequences of extreme weather will all but certainly pose a threat to girls’ education in the years to come. Education budgets – which declined by two-thirds of low- and lower-middle-income countries after the onset of COVID-19 – must be protected and increased, especially in crisis-affected countries.

Investments should be geared towards building stronger education systems and tackling gender inequality and exclusion, with girls’ needs prioritized at every stage of programming. Governments should also ensure that refugee and internally displaced children aren’t overlooked, and make concrete commitments towards inclusive quality education for displaced children and youth at the Global Refugee Forum in December of this year.

Right now, 222 million crisis-affected children and adolescents are in need of urgent education support and more than half of those are girls. It is critical that Education Cannot Wait is fully funded with a minimum of US$1.5 billion in additional resources over the next four years, so that partners such as Plan International and others can deliver the critical programmes needed.

Too often, girls’ voices are silenced during emergencies, leaving their experiences invisible and their needs ignored and overlooked. It’s up to us to change this, for a more just, equal and peaceful world.

About the Authors
Yasmine Sherif is the Director of Education Cannot Wait, the UN’s global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises.

Stephen Omollo is Chief Executive Officer of Plan International, a child rights and humanitarian organisation active in more than 80 countries globally.

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Credit: UNICEF/UNI280376/Tremeau

By External Source
NEW YORK, Jan 24 2023 (IPS)

As we mark the International Day of Education, world leaders must make good on their promise of providing quality education for all by 2030.

Education is our investment in peace where there is war, our investment in equality where there is injustice, our investment in prosperity where there is poverty.

Make no mistake about it, there is a global education crisis that threatens to unravel decades of development gains, spur new conflicts, and upend economic and social progress across the globe.

As UN Secretary-General António Guterres highlighted at last year’s Transforming Education Summit: “If we are to transform our world by 2030 as envisaged by the Sustainable Development Goals, then the international community must give this (education) crisis the attention it deserves.”

When Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, was founded in 2016, we estimated that 75 million crisis-impacted children required education support. Today, that number has tripled to 222 million.

Of the 222 million children whose right to an education has been ripped from their hands by the multiplying impacts of conflict, climate change and other protracted crises, an estimated 78 million are out of school all together – more than the total populations of France, Italy or the United Kingdom.

Even when they are in school, many are not achieving minimum proficiencies in reading or math. Think about this terrifying statistic: 671 million children and adolescents worldwide cannot read. That’s more than 8% of the world’s total population. That’s an entire generation at risk of being lost

As we have seen from the war in Ukraine, the challenges of the Venezuelan migration to Colombia and South America, the unforgiveable denial of education for girls in Afghanistan, and a devastating climate change-driven drought in the Horn of Africa that has created a severe hunger crisis for 22 million people, we are living in an interconnected world. The problems of Africa, the Middle East, South America, and beyond are the problems of the world that we share together.

Every minute of every day, children are fleeing violence and persecution in places like Myanmar, the Sahel, South America and the Middle East. Every minute of every day, boys are being recruited as child soldiers in Somalia, the Central African Republic and beyond. Every minute of every day, the climate crisis brings us closer to the end of times, and children go hungry because they are denied their right to go to school, where they might just have their only meal of the day. And amid conflict, migration and climate change, governments like Colombia are struggling to secure the most basic living and education conditions for children in hard-to-reach borders.

It’s an assault on our humanity, a moral affront to the binding promises outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a giant step backwards in our persistent efforts – against all odds – to find peace in our times.

There is hope. By embracing a new way of working and delivering with humanitarian speed and development depth, ECW and its strategic partners have reached 7 million children in just five years, with plans to reach 20 million more of the next four years.

Imagine what an education can mean for a child of war? In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 13-year-old Nyota lost her father and brothers in a brutal attack on her village. Her family’s home was burnt to the ground.

In a country where 3.2 million children are out of school, Nyota’s future was bleak. Would she be a child bride, the victim of sexual violence, another tragic statistic in a forgotten crisis?

No. She did not give up. With the support of an innovative programme funded by ECW, Nyota is back in school. “When I have completed my studies, I dream of becoming the President of my country to end the war here. That will allow children to study in peace and not endure the same horrible things that I have.”

Nyota is not alone: we have received inspiring letters from girls and boys in over 20 crisis-affected countries across the world that underscore the amazing value of education in transforming lives and creating a better future for generations to come.

On February 16, world leaders are gathering for the Education Cannot Wait High-Level Financing Conference in Geneva. Hosted by ECW and Switzerland – and co-convened by Colombia, Germany, Niger, Norway and South Sudan – the conference provides world leaders, businesses, foundations and high-net-worth individuals with the opportunity to deliver on our promise of education for all. The aim is to raise US$1.5 billion for the next four years.

As the co-conveners of this seminal event, we are calling on the people of the world to invest in the promise of an education. It’s the best investment we could make in delivering on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Nyota and millions like her are not giving up on their dream, and we shouldn’t give up on them. We have promises to keep.

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Excerpt:

Our investment in education – especially for children caught in crisis and conflict – is our investment in a better future.

Women receive food rations at a food distribution site in Herat, Afghanistan. Credit: UNICEF/Sayed Bidel

By Chloe Bryer, Azza Karam, Ruth Messinger and Negina Yari
NEW YORK, Jan 12 2023 (IPS)

Can you imagine what it would be like if women were simply not allowed to step outside of their homes, let alone to work for a living? When women choose to do so, and they can afford it, then it is a matter of choice. When women mostly cannot, as is the case in Afghanistan now, not only is half the population imprisoned, but children go hungry, and communities sink deeper into poverty.

World Bank data (as incomplete as it is), indicates that the average number of female-headed households (i.e. households where women are the primary – if not the only – breadwinners), is around 25%.

What that means is, that on average, a quarter of all households around the world depend on women earning an income. Children, families, communities, and nations –depend on women’s work, to the tune of a quarter of their labour force.

Economists are still pointing to the obvious challenges of counting female labour, which often lies disproportionately on the frontiers of the formal economy, such that women continue to serve as reserve armies of labour and frontline workers during industrialization.

Economists who work to document these specificities, also point out that as soon as these frontiers expand or change, women are expelled or relegated to the shadows of the informal economy and piece-rate labour, identifying this as an all too frequent failure to recognize the importance of the kind of work many women engage in, which both keeps an economy running, and enables its expansion and growth.

The Covid-19 Pandemic should have resulted in a clear realisation that all hands are necessary on deck, with so many women actually needed as first responders–the backbone of the public health crisis – everywhere in the world.

As economies take a nosedive and the realities of recession hit many of us, all economies need to be kept running, if not to expand and grow.

And beyond these very real challenges to counting women’s work – and making that work count – there is another very critical reality: culture. Lest we think only of the vagaries of women who take over “men’s jobs” (whatever that means in today’s world), we need to stop being blind to the fact that women are needed to serve other women.

In fact, in many parts of the world, including the supposedly liberal and ‘egalitarian’ Western world, many women still prefer to receive life-saving direct services from other women – in public health, in sanitation, in all levels of education, in nutritional spaces, and many, many others.

Now let us pause a moment and consider humanitarian disaster zones, where women and girls often need to be cared for – and this can only be done by and through other women.

Then let us envision a reality one step further – let’s call it a socially conservative country, which is facing humanitarian disaster, and is heavily dependent on international organisations (governmental and non- governmental) for the necessary humanitarian support.

How is it conceivable that in such a context, women can be excluded from serving? And yet this is precisely what the Taliban have decreed on December 24, when it barred women from working in national and international NGOs. And this is after they banned women from higher education.

Many international NGOs halted their work in Afghanistan, explaining that they cannot work without their women staff – as a matter of principle, but also as a question of practical necessity. Yet, the United Nations – the premier multilateral entity – continues to see how they could compromise with the Taliban rule, for the sake of ‘the greater good – real humanitarian needs’.

Thank goodness they are letting the UN continue to work with their women employees, runs one way of thinking. We will not fail to deliver humanitarian needs, runs another UN way of thinking.

Of course, humanitarian needs are essential to human survival – and thus, should never be held hostage. But why is the United Nations being accountable for humanitarian needs only?

Meanwhile, the Taliban claim that these edicts about womens’ work and education are a matter of religious propriety, a claim which, as of this moment, is not strongly challenged by another multilateral entity – the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), encompassing 56 governments and members of the United Nations.

While individual governments have spoken out, this multilateral entity has remained relatively silent on the Islamic justice of such a decree. Is it because this multilateral religious entity sees no need to speak to humanitarian needs?

Or is it because it sees no value to hard economic realities where women’s agency plays a central role? Or perhaps it is because there is no unanimity on the Islamic justification behind such decrees?

In light of this hostage-taking of humanitarian relief efforts, a group of women of faith leaders, have come together to ask some simple questions of the two multilateral entities involved. They have sent a letter with over 150 international NGO sign ons.

Multilateralism is supposed to be the guarantor of all human rights and dignity, for all people, at all times. But as governmental regimes weaken, so do traditional multilateral entities heavily reliant on those governments. Time for community based transnational networks based on intergenerational, multicultural, gender sensitive leaders.

Rev Dr Chloe Bryer is Executive Director, Interfaith Center of New York; Prof Azza Karam is Secretary General, Religions for Peace; Ruth Messinger is Social Justice Consultant, Jewish Theological Seminary; and Negina Yari is Country Director, Afghans4Tomorrow

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Women students and workers travel free from harassment in the BRT buses, which reserves seats for them in the conservative region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Jan 4 2023 (IPS)

A bus rapid transport (BRT) system in Peshawar is benefiting female students and working women by providing a safe journey – something women passengers could not take for granted on regular public transport.

“Prior to the launch of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, girls faced enormous hardships in reaching colleges and universities, but now, we don’t have any issue in getting to our respective institutions in a timely manner,” Javeria Khan, 21, a student at the University of Peshawar, told IPS.

She said that two of her elder sisters had left education after completion of secondary school because of a lack of proper transportation services.

“Now, there is a sea-change as far transportation is concerned; thanks to BRT through, we reach home on time without any hindrance,” Javeria, a student at the Department of Chemistry, said.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one of Pakistan’s four provinces, is considered conservative where most women cover their faces while venturing out in public and avoid traveling with men in buses; the new service has proved a blessing for the female population living in the capital city of Peshawar.

There is a 27 km long corridor with as many stations to facilitate about 400,000 people every day, including 20 percent women.

BRT launched in April 2020, fleet contains a fleet of 150 air-conditioned buses imported from China, which charge people USD 0.24 from the first to the last station, and the fare is only USD 0.09 for a single stop.

“We have allocated 25 seats to women in each bus, so they don’t face any harassment. The buses go along the main road, which provides a service to the general public as well as the students,” Umair Khan, spokesman for BRT, told IPS.

Before the BRT, there were complaints of harassment and high fares charged by private buses, which deterred the women from traveling, he said. “Now, women have separate compartments with security measures in place to ensure the safe journey of all the commuters.”

In February 2022, the BRT received Gold Standard Award for transforming transport through its clean technology buses and promoting non-motorized traffic. A month before, it received the certificate of International Sustainable Award from the International Transport Organization, while UN Women has also honored the BRT for providing a safe traveling facility to women.

Transport Ticketing Global, UK presented the award to BRT for easing the lives of a large segment of society using innovative solutions, Khan said.

A local resident, Palwasha Bibi, 30, told IPS that she thinks that the BRT has been constructed to assist women workers.

“It was a Herculean task to get a seat in a private bus before the BRT. Even if one was lucky to get a seat, the fares were high, and the drivers were reluctant to drive fast as they waited for more people to embark on the bus to earn more money,” Bibi, who works in a garment factory in Peshawar’s industrial Estate, said.

More often than not, my colleagues and I encountered pay cuts for arriving late at the factory, she said. “Now, we reach 15 minutes before duty time because the BRT has a strict timing schedule. It stops at every station for 20 seconds only,” Bibi said.

BRT is also helping the common people.

Muhammad Zaheer, 31, a salesman at a grocery shop, said that he had been using a motorbike to reach the outlet, which cost him more money and time.

“Many times, I also faced minor accidents due to huge rush on the road, but now the BRT has a signal-free route with no chance of accidents, and the cost is very low,” he said.

Our manager is very happy that I get to the shop early than my duty time, and the same is true for over a dozen of my co-workers, Zaheer, father of three, said.

Naureena Shah a female student at the Islamia College Peshawar, said the BRT had been a blessing for her.

“My parents have asked me to stop education because every day we encountered problems, but the BRT has helped me to continue my studies because I arrive at the college and get back home well on time,” she said. My parents are no longer opposing my studies because they also use BRT for shopping and so on, she said.

Now, I will get medical education to serve patients, she said.

Nasreen Hamid, a schoolteacher, is all praise for BRT services.

“It has benefitted me in two ways. I use the service for going to duty and getting back home and also for going to market,” she said.

Spogmay Khan (17), a second-year student at the Jinnah College for Women, said that all her class fellows were praising former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who started the service in the city.

She said most of the students who were dropped off by fathers or brothers at the college were now traveling alone because the buses were safe.

“The main road remains flooded with vehicles, making it difficult to attend classes with punctuality, but the BRT route is smooth, and no traffic jams, due to which we enjoy traveling in the buses,” she said.

Khan said that it has really improved women’s education and the credit goes to former Prime Minister Imran Khan. “Many of our classmates wouldn’t have been able to take admission because of the messy traffic and worn-out buses, but the BRT has solved this issue, once and for all,” she said

BRT’s spokesman Umair Khan said they had started feeder routes to ensure passengers can use the facility near their homes. The feeder buses use the roads, and the passengers take these buses after disembarking from the buses on (BRT) corridors.

“About 20 percent of the BRT’s 4000 employees are females,” he said.
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Some Afghan women put their lives at risk by migrating to Europe. Along the way, and even at the destinations, they face sexual violence at the hands of traffickers, but they often take the risk so that they can live free from the constraints of the Taliban. This photo shows a woman from the Hazara minority in Bamiyan. She used to be a singer and appeared on local TV but is now forced to stay at home. Credit: Sara Perria/IPS

By Sara Perria
KABUL & ATHENS, Dec 22 2022 (IPS)

Maliha looks confident in a café in Athens as she tells the story of her journey from Afghanistan to Europe. But as she starts recounting how a smuggler assaulted her in Turkey two years ago, she pauses, looking the other way and fiddling with her loose hair.

It makes her anxious when she remembers it. She was traveling alone and soon realized she was the only woman on board a bus to the border with Greece.

“[The smuggler] told me to get off. He wanted me to himself.” With unusual strength, the young woman managed to escape as the man was trying to rape her. Still shaken, she tried to report the crime to the local police, but she felt they were more concerned about her status as an illegal migrant than the attempted rape. “Luckily, I had a contact on Facebook [who is] a cousin who I knew lived in Turkey but whom I never met.” He happened to live near that police station, and he convinced the officials to let her go.

Afghan refugees picnic in a park in Athens. Their journeys to Europe are often dangerous. Credit: Sara Perria/IPS

Now Maliha lives in Athens as a “free woman” – a fact that she remarks upon while wearing leggings and no head covering.

The violence experienced by Mahila is not an isolated case. An investigation into the journey of Afghan women from their home country to Europe carried out in Afghanistan, Turkey and Greece has revealed a pattern of systematic violence throughout, their vulnerability heightened by lack of documents and money. Women, some traveling alone or only with their children, pay to get to Europe only to become victims of trafficking and sex slaves.

According to 31-year-old Aila, an Afghan refugee and former Médecins sans Frontières worker in refugee camps in Athens, “some 90% of women suffer a form of violence during the journey.”

“When your life is in the hands of smugglers,” continues Aila, “it’s not up to you to decide whom to stay with, what to do, where to go: it’s the smuggler who decides. Even if you are with your family or the members of your family, he can still threaten you with a weapon, and if he wants to separate you from them, he’ll do it”.

Afghans are now the second largest group of asylum seekers in the EU after Ukrainians, but the flow of asylum seekers started well before the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August 2021. According to the International Organization for Migration, nearly 77,000 women and girls were registered at arrival by sea and by land in Europe between 2018 and 2020, making up 20 percent of total arrivals. Women make up an increasing percentage of asylum requests globally, all facing gender-based risks.

The reasons behind Afghans’ search for a safe place run deep in a country torn by decades of war. Social and financial restrictions within a deeply patriarchal society and the hope for a better life abroad had already pushed many to leave the country even before the arrival of the Taliban.

However, the challenges of the journey can be harrowing. “I remember traveling with a 10-year-old and her grandmother,” Aila recalls. “During the journey, her grandmother died, and she was handed over to the trafficker,” says Aila, describing one of the most traumatic episodes she witnessed.

“Was she raped? Of course. For them, she was a woman”.

Women escaping from the increasingly restrictive Taliban regime in Afghanistan find their journeys to freedom are fraught with dangers. This week the Taliban banned women from universities. They are increasingly forced to remain at home. Credit: Sara Perria/IPS

The risks are so stacked against women that word of mouth has led to the development of ‘survival’ techniques, such as dressing up as a man. Aila says she put on a similar short jacket, jeans, and sneakers to that of other boys. “I kept my hair hidden under my cap. And when the trafficker gave me his hand to get on the boat, he said, “Hey, boy.” I didn’t answer. “Never talk to traffickers,” is the second ‘tip’ dispensed by Aila.

Acceptance rates of Afghan asylum seekers are now high, especially in countries such as Spain and Italy, with 100% and 95% in 2021, respectively, and 80% in Greece, the first EU frontier for the many who come after spending months or years in Turkey or Iran.

Yet getting adequate assistance after suffering abuse, rape and forced prostitution is a different story. The violence suffered often doesn’t get denounced by the police due to cultural or linguistic barriers and the stigma surrounding rape or forced prostitution. Lack of adequate protection in Europe is also a reason, so NGOs set up by fellow Afghans try to step in.

Months of interviews with Afghan asylum seekers in Afghanistan, Turkey, and Europe expose the extent of the danger for women who embark on a journey organized by smugglers. Direct witnesses’ accounts and NGO transcripts, seen exclusively by this reporter, reveal a pattern of how women – and in particular Afghans belonging to ethnic minorities – fall into a ‘trap’ of violence.

Freshta spent years between Iran and Turkey with a sick brother before eventually succeeding in reaching a refugee camp in Greece and then a place in Athens hosted by a friend. However, her attempts to find a job and become independent soon turned into a prolonged series of tortured experiences. The possibility of asking for help was radically reduced by her illegal status and lack of documents.

“One day, I was in a café with my friend, and she introduced me to this man. We only knew that he was a trafficker of Iraqi nationality.” He, himself a refugee, knew very well how vulnerable women like Freshta are. “He started following me and kept saying that I should go with him.” Her constant rejections didn’t work. On the contrary, he threatened to kill her brother, who was still in the refugee camp – a sign of the long reach of influence traffickers can call upon.

One day, despite attempts to protect herself, hiding for days at a friend’s house, the man managed to kidnap her and take her to her apartment. He then hit her on the head, threatening her with a knife pointed at her stomach and forcing her to get into his car. At that moment, Freshta became a slave, first suffering violent rape, with beatings that made her pass out because she also suffered from asthma.

“When I woke up, he wasn’t there. I was full of pain and didn’t know what to do; I was in shock. I went to the bathroom, got washed, dressed, and cried.”

Upon his return, the trafficker told her that she now belonged to him. If she went out and told anyone what had happened, then he would kill her.

Freshta managed to hide at her friend’s again, but again the man managed to take her by force, beating her and locking her up at home for weeks, repeatedly raping her. Freshta got pregnant. “He told me I couldn’t do anything because he had become a Greek citizen, and I was nothing; I didn’t have any document.”

It took many weeks and the help of an association to allow her to report the incident. She had an abortion. The woman has since been moved by the Greek government to a secure facility in an undisclosed location.

To add to Freshta’s tragic testimony is the fact that, as the operator of an NGO in Athens explains, “There are many cases of sexual slavery like this, which are not reported by the victims because they are afraid of being stigmatized and of their lack of documents.” The perpetrators of the violence can be fellow nationals, generally belonging to a different ethnic group and, to a lesser extent, other nationalities.

The lack of support is accentuated by a form of class distinction within the refugee community and by the way resources are thus distributed, according to some of the Afghan women interviewed in Athens. “The refugees who arrived in Europe through the evacuation program [in Kabul] consider themselves ‘different’ from those who arrived here on foot, with the traffickers. And they are also treated differently by the authorities,” says Aila.

While for men, the lack of documents, money, and a family network leads more easily to labor exploitation, women can often fall victim to sexual exploitation. Some women are “passed from trafficker to trafficker,” says Aila, while the local association also reports cases of forced prostitution just outside the camps. But even in the aftermath of a violent attack, NGOs are worried about the short time women are allowed to spend in safe structures, as well as the limited space available there. Resources do not meet the seriousness and extent of the problem.

“When they asked me if I wanted to report the man [who kept me as a slave], I said yes, but only if I had a safe place to stay first,” says Freshta. “I was so desperate that I left behind everything I had.”

This project on trafficking has been developed with the financial support of Journalismfund.eu

https://www.journalismfund.eu/

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Testing new approaches for preventing gender-based violence to galvanize more and new partners and resources. Credit: UN Women

By Jacqui Stevenson, Jessica Zimerman and Diego Antoni
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 30 2022 (IPS)

How are the multiple shocks and crises the world is facing changing how we respond to gender-based violence? Almost three years after the COVID-19 pandemic triggered high levels of violence against women and girls, the recent Sexual Violence Research Initiative Forum 2022 (SVRI) shed some light on the best ways forward.

Bringing together over 1,000 researchers, practitioners, policymakers and activists in Cancún, Mexico, the forum highlighted new research on what works to stop and address one of the most widespread violations of human rights.

While some participants candidly – and bravely – shared that their initiatives did not have the intended impact, many discussed efforts that transformed lives, in big and small ways.

After 5 days of the forum one thing was clear; a lack of evidence is not what is standing in the way of achieving a better future. It is a lack of opportunities and the will to apply that evidence.

Among the many shared findings, UNDP presented its own evidence.

Since 2018, the global project on Ending Gender-based Violence and Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a partnership between UNDP and the Republic of Korea, and in collaboration with United Nations University International Institute for Global Health, has tested new approaches for preventing and addressing gender-based violence, to galvanize more and new partners, resources, and support to move from rhetoric to action.

Three key strategies have emerged.

1. We need to integrate

Gender-based violence (GBV) intersects with all areas of sustainable development. That means that every development initiative provides a chance to address the causes of violence and to transform harmful social norms that not only put women disproportionately at risk for violence, but also limit progress.

Bringing together diverse partners to jointly incorporate efforts to end GBV into “non-GBV” programmes has been central to the Ending GBV and Achieving the SDGs project. Pilots in Indonesia, Peru and the Republic of Moldova integrated a GBV lens into local development planning.

The results were local action plans that focused on needs and solutions identified by the communities themselves, including evidence-based GBV prevention programming such as the Common Elements Treatment Approach, which has been proven to reduce violence along with risk factors such as alcohol abuse. This approach is growing, opening up new and more spaces for this work.

2. We need to elevate

While evidence is crucial to creating change, the work doesn’t stop there. We also need to elevate this evidence to policy makers and to support them in putting the findings into action. In our global project, we went about this in different ways.

In Peru women’s rights advocates and the local government worked together to draft a local action plan to address drivers of violence in the community of Villa El Salvador (VES). By working collaboratively and building trust between key players, the project was able to take a more holistic approach and to create stronger alliances to boost its sustainability and impacts.

In particular, the local action plan was informed by cost analysis research that showed that this approach would pay for itself if it prevented violence for only 0.6 percent of the 80,000-plus women in VES who are at risk for violence every year.

Since the pilot’s launch, more than 15 other local governments have expressed interest in the model, and it has already been replicated in three.

3. We need to finance

Less than 1 percent of bilateral official development assistance (ODA) and philanthropic funding is given to prevent and address GBV, despite the fact that roughly a third of women have experienced physical or sexual violence.

The “Imperative to Invest” study, funded by the EU-UN Spotlight Initiative and presented at the SVRI Forum, shows just what can be achieved with a US$500 million investment. The study highlights that Spotlight’s efforts will have prevented 21 million women and girls from experiencing violence by 2025.

The Ending GBV and Achieving the SDGs project also finds positive results when financing local plans. Through pilot initiatives in Peru, Moldova and Indonesia, it was possible to mobilize funds when different municipal governments take ownership of participatory planning processes at an early stage.

The local level is a key, yet an often overlooked, entry point to identifying community needs and, through participatory, multi-sectoral partnerships, to translate them into funded solutions.

In Moldova the regional government of Gagauzia assigned funds to create the region’s first safe space, with the support of the community.

The SVRI Forum was living proof that a better future is possible. It offered profound moments for thoughtful exchange, learning with partners and peers, and deepened our own reflections on the outcomes and next steps for this global project.

As we approach the final countdown to meeting the SDGs, including SDG5.2 on eliminating violence against women and girls, it has never been more urgent to take all this evidence and turn it into action against gender-based violence. Let’s act today.

Jacqui Stevenson is Research Consultant UNU International Institute for Global Health, Jessica Zimerman is Project Specialist, Gender-based Violence, UNDP, and Diego Antoni is Policy Specialist Gender, Governance and Recovery, UNDP.

Source: UNDP

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On the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, 25 November, the color orange is used to represent a brighter future, free from violence against women and girls.Credit: UN Women

By Sima Bahous
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 25 2022 (IPS)

Five years ago, the global #MeToo movement brought new urgency and visibility to the extent of violence against women and girls. Millions of survivors came forward to share their experience. They forced the world to recognise a reality that shames every one of us. Their courage and voice led to a powerful collective activism and a sea-change in awareness.

This wake-up call, alongside other invaluable initiatives around the world, continues to resonate. Grassroots activists, women’s human rights defenders and survivor advocates remind us every day, everywhere.

They are revealing the extent of that violence, they collect and shape statistics, document attacks and bring the violence that happens from the shadows into the light. Their work remains as crucial as it ever was. They offer us a path to bringing this violation of women’s rights to an end.

The work of women’s rights movements and activists is the bedrock of accountability and making sure that promises made many times become reality. They are mobilizing and they are powerful. We celebrate them today.

The evidence is clear. We have to invest urgently in strong, autonomous women’s rights organizations to achieve effective solutions.

This lesson was taught to us most recently during the COVID-19 pandemic. Countries with powerful feminist movements, stronger democracies and more women in parliament were the most effective in responding to the surge in gender-based violence, the shadow pandemic of COVID.

In this area as in others, we see time and again that when women lead everyone wins. We all benefit from a more inclusive and effective response to the challenges we face. We all profit from more resilient economies and societies.

Alongside these efforts, men must step up and push forward. They must play their part in change. They can begin where they live. It is an uncomfortable truth that for some women and girls rather than being a place of safety, as it should be, home can be deadly.

The latest global femicide estimates presents an alarming picture, one made worse by COVID-19 lockdowns. Our new report, released with UNODC, shows that on average worldwide, more than five women or girls are killed every hour by someone in their own family.

These deaths are not inevitable. This violence against women does not need to happen. Solutions are tried, tested and proven, and include early intervention, with trained, supportive policing and justice services, and access to survivor-centred support and protection.

I have three calls to action. I believe these are our priorities and our essentials. They are the basis on which we can push forward and make a reality of stated commitments to end violence against women and girls.

First, I call upon governments and partners across the world to increase long-term funding and support to women’s rights organizations, to make commitments to the Generation Equality Action Coalition on Gender-based Violence and donations to civil society organizations through the UN Trust Fund and support to the Spotlight Initiative. Resources matter and the scale of financial support for this cause does not match either the scale of the issue or the statements of concern made by those in leadership roles.

Second, I ask that we all, in our own ways, resist the rollback of women’s rights, amplify the voices of feminist women’s movements and mobilize more actors. We can all be advocates and our voices combined can drive the change we seek. In doing so, we must also ensure the promotion of women’s and girls’ full and equal leadership and participation at all levels of political, policy-making and decision-making spaces. Accelerated progress toward ending violence against women and girls is just one of the dividends.

Third, I ask for the strengthening of protection mechanisms for women human rights defenders and women’s rights activists. No one anywhere, ever, should face violence or harassment for standing up for what is right and calling for what is necessary.

We cannot let our determination to keep “pushing forward” for gender equality waver. Our goal of a world where violence against women and girls is not just condemned but stopped is possible. By pushing forward together we can attain it.

Sima Bahous is UN Under-Secretary-General and UN Women Executive Director.

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ECW Director Yasmine Sherif Statement on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and #16Days of Activism

By Yasmine Sherif
NEW YORK, Nov 25 2022 (IPS-Partners)

As we now have entered the 21st century, we must end violence against girls and women. Attacking and abusing girls and women as a means of warfare, the war-machinery or domestic violence as a result of crisis, is absolutely abhorrent and unacceptable. Exposing half of the world’s population to the risks of violence because of their gender is not only a violation of international and domestic laws, but a disgraceful and brute breach of our very own humanity.

With our strategic partners across the globe, Education Cannot Wait commemorates the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and joins 16 Days of Activism Campaign with a solemn promise to leverage the power of education to protect girls and women everywhere from being disempowered and subjected to horrific attacks and fears thereof.

Worldwide, 222 million crisis-affected children and adolescents are in need of urgent education support. Barriers to girls’ education such as armed conflicts, forced displacement, the climate crisis, COVID-19 and other factors have left 129 million girls worldwide out of school.

In countries affected by fragility, conflict and violence, girls are 2.5 times more likely to be out of school than boys, and they are 90% more likely to be out of secondary school than those in non-conflict-impacted environments. Of deep concern is recent data indicating that approximately 60 million girls are sexually assaulted on their way to or at school every year.

Such abhorrent violence against girls is a travesty of all humankind.

The denial of education to girls in places like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Yemen and beyond is in and of itself is an act of violence. It is a moral affront to our collective efforts to build a more equal world and realize the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Education is our single best tool in our efforts to protect girls and women from violence. Safe and protective learning environments insulate girls from sexual assaults, childhood marriage, early pregnancy, forced labour and other senseless violations of their human rights.

To achieve this, we must get every girl – everywhere – into safe learning environments. We must provide physical protection, including safe passage to and from school. We must advocate for cultural shifts that embrace girls as equals and support access to education from early childhood straight through to the university. And we must advocate for legal protection and an end of impunity.

At ECW, we include protection for girls as a central component in all our investments supporting joint programming in the education sector. World leaders, and public and private sector donors everywhere will have an opportunity to contribute to end violence against girls and adolescent girls, showing their support for girls’ education – and the power it has to end violence against girls – by committing funding support at the Education Cannot Wait High-Level Financing Conference on 16-17 February 2023 in Geneva.

You can join us too, as we #OrangeTheWorld and help realize the #222MillionDreams of the world’s 222 million crisis-affected girls and boys with your individual donation. Together, we can and must end violence and protect the physical and mental rights of every girl, every student and every teacher. Yes, we can!

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"Not one woman less, respect our lives” writes a Peruvian woman on the effigy of a woman in a park in front of the courthouse, before a demonstration in Lima over the lack of enforcement of laws against femicides and other forms of violence against women. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Nov 24 2022 (IPS)

Violence against women has failed to decline in the Latin American region after the sharp rise recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, while preventing the causes of such violence remains a major challenge.

This is what representatives of the United Nations, feminist organizations and women’s movements told IPS on the occasion of the commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on Nov. 25."We attack the problem but not its causes. I have been talking for 30 years about the importance of preventing violence against women by fostering major cultural changes so that girls and boys are raised in the knowledge that it is unacceptable in any form." -- Moni Pizani

This date, established in 1999 by the United Nations, was adopted in 1981 at the first Latin American and Caribbean feminist meeting held in Colombia to promote the struggle against violence against women in a region where it continues to be exacerbated by high levels of ‘machismo’ or sexism.

The day was chosen to pay tribute to Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal, three sisters from the Dominican Republic who were political activists and were killed on Nov. 25, 1960 by the repressive forces of the regime of dictator Rafael Trujillo.

The date launches 16 days of activism against gender violence, culminating on Dec. 10, Human Rights Day, because male violence against women and girls is the most widespread violation of human rights worldwide.

“It is not possible to confirm a decrease in gender violence in the region at this post-pandemic moment,” said Venezuelan lawyer Moni Pizani, one of the region’s leading experts on women’s rights. “I could say, from the information I have gathered and empirically, that the level has remained steady after the significant increase registered in the last two years.”

Pizani, who retired from the United Nations, currently supports the UN Women office in Guatemala after a fruitful career advocating for women’s rights. She was twice representative in Ecuador for UN Women and its predecessor Unifem, then worked for East and Southeast Asia and later opened the UN Women Office for Latin America and the Caribbean in Panama City as regional director.

“Before the pandemic we used to talk about three out of 10 women having suffered violence, today we say four out of 10. The other alarming fact is that the impact is throughout the entire life cycle of women, including the elderly,” she told IPS in a conversation in Tegucigalpa, Honduras during a Central American colloquium on the situation of women.

UN Women last year measured the “shadow pandemic” in 13 countries in all regions, a term used to describe violence against women during lockdowns due to COVID.

Seven out of 10 women were found to have experienced violence at some time during the pandemic, one in four felt unsafe at home due to increased family conflict, and seven out of 10 perceived partner abuse to be more frequent.

The study also revealed that four out of 10 women feel less safe in public spaces.

Pizani said the study showed that this violation of women’s human rights occurs in different age groups: 48 percent of those between 18 and 49 years old are affected, 42 percent of those between 50 and 59, and 34 percent of women aged 60 and over.

Venezuelan lawyer Moni Pizani, one of Latin America’s leading experts on gender issues, with a long career at UN Women and its predecessor Unifem, takes part in a Central American colloquium in Tegucigalpa on sustainable recovery with gender equality in the wake of the COVID pandemic. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

According to the same study, unemployed women are the most vulnerable: 52 percent of them experienced violence during the pandemic.

And with regard to mothers: one out of every two women with children also experienced a violation of their rights.

The expert highlighted the effort made by many countries to adopt measures during the pandemic with the expansion of services, telephone hotlines, use of new means of reporting through mobile applications, among others. But she regretted that the efforts fell short.

This year, the region is home to 662 million inhabitants, or eight percent of the world’s population, slightly more than half of whom are girls and women.

The level of violence against women is so severe that the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) cites it as one of the structural factors of gender inequality, together with gaps in employment, the concentration of care work and inequitable representation in public spaces.

Governments neither prevent nor address violence

Peru is an example of similar situations of gender violence in the region.

It was one of the countries with the strictest lockdowns, paralyzing government action against gender violence, which was gradually resumed in the second half of 2020 and which made it possible, for example, to receive complaints in the country’s provincial public prosecutors’ offices.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office Crime Observatory reported 1,081,851 complaints in 2021 – an average of 117 per hour. The frequency of complaints returned to pre-pandemic levels, which in 2020 stood at around 700,000, because women under lockdown found it harder to report cases due to the confinement and the fact that they were cooped up with the perpetrators.

Cynthia Silva, a Peruvian lawyer and director of the non-governmental feminist group Study for the Defense of Women’s Rights-Demus, told IPS that the government has failed to reactivate the different services and that the specialized national justice system needs to be fully implemented to protect victims and punish perpetrators.

Lawyer Cynthia Silva, director of the Peruvian feminist institution Demus, poses for a picture at the headquarters of the feminist organization in Lima. She stresses the need for government action against gender violence to include not only strategies for attending to the victims, but also for prevention in order to eradicate it. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

She stressed the importance of allocating resources both for addressing cases of violence and for prevention. “These are two strategies that should go hand in hand and we see that the State is not doing enough in relation to the latter,” she said.

Silva urged the government to take action in measures aimed at the populace to contribute to rethinking socio-cultural patterns and ‘machista’ habits that discriminate against women.

Based on an experience they are carrying out with girls and adolescents in the district of Carabayllo, in the extreme north of Lima, she said it’s a question of supporting “deconstruction processes” so that egalitarian relations between women and men are fostered from childhood.

On Nov. 26 they will march with various feminist movements and collectives against machista violence so that “the right to a life free of violence against women is guaranteed and so that not a single step backwards is taken with respect to the progress made, particularly in sexual and reproductive rights, which are threatened by conservative groups in Congress.”

Adolescent women and men in Lima, the Peruvian capital, wave a huge banner during the march for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on Nov. 25, 2019, before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic that exacerbated such violence in Latin America. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

An equally serious scenario

Argentina is another example of gender violence – including femicides – in Latin America, the region with the highest levels of aggression against women in the world, the result of extremely sexist societies.

This is in contrast to the fact that it is one of the regions with the best protection against such violence in national and even regional legislation, because since 1994 it has had the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women.

The problem is that these laws are seriously flawed in their implementation, especially in the interior of the countries, agree UN Women, regional organizations and national women’s rights groups.

Rosaura Andiñach, an Argentine university professor and head of community processes at the Ecumenical Regional Center for Counseling and Service (CREAS), said it is worrying that in her country there are still high rates of femicide, despite the progress made in terms of legislation.

Between January and October 2022, there were 212 femicides and 181 attempted gender-based homicides in the country of 46 million people, according to the civil society observatory “Ahora que sí nos ven” (Now that they do see us).

She said the government still owes a debt to women in this post-pandemic context, as it fails to guarantee women’s rights by not adequately addressing their complaints.

“We do not want the same thing to happen as with a recent case: Noelia Sosa, 30 years old, lived in Tucumán and reported her partner in a police station for gender violence. They ignored her and she committed suicide that afternoon because she did not know what else to do. We are very concerned because the outlook is still as serious as ever in terms of violence against women,” Andiñach said.

It was precisely in Argentina that the #NiunaMenos (Not one woman less) campaign emerged in 2015, which spread throughout the region as a movement against femicides and the ineffectiveness of the authorities in the enforcement of laws to prevent and punish gender-related murders, because femicides are surrounded by a very high level of impunity in Latin America.

Moni Pizani, from UN Women, stressed that the prevention of gender violence should no longer fall short in the region.

“We attack the problem but not its causes. I have been talking for 30 years about the importance of preventing violence against women by fostering major cultural changes so that girls and boys are raised in the knowledge that it is unacceptable in any form,” she underlined.

This strategy, she remarked, “involves investing in youth and children to ensure that the new generations are free from violence, harassment and discrimination, with respect for a life of dignity for all.”

Excerpt:

The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on 25 November, followed by the global 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence, is a moment to reflect on, renew, amplify, and strategize to achieve commitments to eliminate violence against women by 2030. Ending violence against women is possible, but only if we act together, now, says the United Ntions.

By Jacqui Stevenson
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Nov 23 2022 (IPS)

Violence against women is a global crisis, prevalent in every community and society around the world. Globally, estimates published by WHO indicate that about 1 in 3 (30%) of women worldwide have been subjected to either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime. Yet, there is limited coordination and insufficient funding to truly address the scale of the issue.

This has catastrophic consequences for the individual women affected, who have their rights violated, bodily integrity and psychological wellbeing undermined and health harmed. It also has ramifications across society, including the costs of providing services to respond to violence and the financial impact of violence itself.

While these costs are borne across sectors, including health, policing, social services and education, among others, often efforts to reduce or prevent violence against women suffer from limited budgets and siloed funding streams. The invisible costs borne by women, and their children, families and communities, are also missing from many responses. While nearly three out of four countries have policy infrastructure in place to support multisectoral action to address violence against women and girls, only 44 percent of countries report having a national budget line item to provide health services to address violence against women.

Recent analysis indicates that foreign donors play a critical role in financing GBV interventions but funding is limited and uncertain, and fails to comply with human rights principles. Bridging the gap between policy and implementation is critical if efforts to reduce violence against women are to meet the urgency and scale required.

Ending violence against women is an urgent legal, moral and ethical imperative. Effective interventions to reduce, prevent and respond to gender-based violence in all its forms must be a priority for all governments.

In addition to ending the violation of women’s human rights and the perpetuation of gender inequality that violence against women represents, interventions to end gender-based violence contribute to achieving the sustainable development goals and more broadly to furthering the development of societies. Effective coordinated investments are a key part of achieving this necessary aim, but it is important to underscore that the case for ending violence does not turn on return for investment.

Recognising the challenges introduced by siloed budgets, UNDP and UNU-IIGH collaborated on a project, with the support of the Republic of Korea, to produce new tools and evidence on “participatory planning and paying models”. These models engage diverse community stakeholders in defining their own solutions and establishing sustainable financing for local GBV action plans.

The approach prioritises the need to engage with diverse policymakers and stakeholders at the local level to generate effective solutions to address violence against women that are both contextually relevant and locally led. The pilots were implemented in Indonesia, Peru and the Republic of Moldova.

Findings from these pilot projects have been published to mark the World Day for Elimination of Violence against Women. Importantly, the models centre the participation and leadership of women and women’s civil society, embedding women’s rights activists in local structures that develop the plans and budgets to address gender-based violence.

The core idea underpinning the participatory planning and paying approach is simple: the benefits of reducing violence are shared by everyone, so the costs can also be shared. Different sectors stand to gain from the financial benefits of reducing violence against women, but are unlikely to adequately fund a comprehensive programme of prevention and response if each acts separately.

Instead, bringing these sectors together along with local communities and other stakeholders, the project facilitated the development of local action plans (LAPs) to address GBV, using participatory methods. Each LAP addressed locally defined priorities to prevent and respond to violence with targeted benefits across a range of health, economic and social sectors and issues.

The LAPs are costed, and, just as the plan itself is participatory, so too is paying for its implementation, with ‘payers’ identified across sectors, and budgets pooled to maximise impact. Rather than siloed budgets funding a mixture of interventions and services with no coherent structure, funding streams are pooled to support a coordinated plan. Through collaboration, shared expertise and decision-making, and local community accountability, the total is greater than the sum of its parts.

Implementing this innovative model is inherently challenging. Particularly in resource-constrained settings such as the settings for these pilots, there are competing demands for limited budgets, and multiple priorities that struggle for attention and funding. Breaking down siloes to achieve shared financing is a political, contested process, and centring the voices, priorities and rights of women, especially those most marginalised, is a challenge.

A key learning from the pilot projects is the need to ensure that senior decision-makers who have budget responsibilities in key sectors and government departments, are engaged early in the process of developing LAPs to gain their support.

Despite the challenges, the benefits of shared budgeting and resource mobilisation are clear. In Peru, UNDP undertook a ground-breaking study to estimate the costs associated with failing to prevent gender based violence. The “Cost of No Prevention” study estimated the annual costs of GBV in the Villa El Salvador community (where the project pilot was implemented) at nearly $72.9 million USD (in 2018 figures), including direct costs such as health care and indirect costs such as absence from work and loss of income, borne by affected women, their children and families, networks and wider communities.

Cost estimates for the participatory planning process to prevent and respond to GBV were estimated at $256,000 USD over 2.8 years (including the costs of project initiation and development of tools and products, so will reduce over subsequent years). This is a clear demonstration of the value for money of participatory approaches to planning and paying models to address gender-based violence.

Failure to adequately prevent and respond to violence places the costs squarely on women’s shoulders. The “Cost of No Prevention” study estimated that 45% of the costs of GBV are absorbed by the affected women themselves, including the costs of increased physical and mental health problems, out of pocket expenses and lower income.

A further 11% is subsidised by households and 44% by the community, including missed school days for children affected by violence in the home, and provision of emotional support, shelter and personal loans by others in the community. Inadequate funding, siloed budgets and limited resources only increase the costs for women, communities, and societies.

Participatory planning and paying models offer a blueprint to fund and provide the services and interventions women need, want and are entitled to. Ultimately, someone must pay the price of violence against women.

Dr Jacqui Stevenson is a research consultant, leading work to generate new evidence on the intersections of gender and health, including GBV and COVID-19, at the UN University International Institute for Global Health.

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Constance Okollet Achom, chair and founder of Osukuru United Women Network (OWN), an organization fighting against domestic violence using climate change solutions in Uganda, during an exclusive interview with IPS at COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Nov 23 2022 (IPS)

Constance Okollet Achom, a Ugandan woman from Tororo, a rural village located in Eastern Uganda, has helped several dozens of her peers affected by domestic violence to address the issue by equipping victims with skillsets to manufacture eco-friendly biofuels from agro-forestry waste.

“There have been a growing number of women in my village who experienced intimate partner violence. But they have always accepted to continue bearing the brunt of suffering because of their inability to deal with their finances,” Okollet, who is the chair and founder of Osukuru United Women Network, told IPS. 

With the increasing levels of domestic violence in rural Uganda, Okollet is now championing using climate change solutions to curb its occurrence in this East African nation.

The latest estimates by the World Bank indicate that 51% of African women report that being beaten by their husbands is justified if they burn or refuse to prepare food. Yet acceptance is not uniform across countries. The report shows that the phenomenon appears deeply ingrained in some societies, with a 77% acceptance rate in Uganda.

Okollet’s organization currently empowers and educates women on how climate change affects their village resources. Most importantly, it provides resources for entrepreneurship and counseling to women affected by domestic violence and advocates for their emancipation by empowering them to be self-reliant by becoming green entrepreneurs.

With 2,000 members engaged in various climate solutions, including carbon farming, clean energies, and tree planting, the tradition of abuse has slowly started to fade in rural Uganda as many women who used to depend financially on their husbands have taken bold steps in investing in green projects.

“It has traditionally been regarded as shameful for the male members of a family if a female member works outside of the home and earns a living,” Okollet told IPS on the sidelines of the just concluded global climate summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

To amplify support for women to build climate resilience, the African Development Bank organized the session held during COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh under the theme, “Gender-sensitive and climate just finance mechanisms.”

The panelists said facilities tailored to supporting women, who are helping to build climate resilience, must be visible, simple, and easily accessible.

During the session, the former Irish president and an influential figure in global climate diplomacy, Mary Robinson, pointed out there is not currently an appropriately dedicated climate fund or a permanent climate fund to support women entrepreneurs in combating climate change.

Robinson gave the example of some women-led projects in Uganda which could do ten times more if they had access to targeted climate resources. “They had no prospects of getting the money that could be available for their sector – they didn’t even know who was getting the money or where it was going,” she told delegates.

So far, the bank has earmarked funding for ten capacity-building projects focusing on gender and climate through the Africa Climate Change Fund.

According to Kevin Kariuki, the bank’s Vice President Vice for Power, Energy, Climate, and Green Growth, the new funding mechanism has committed $100 million in loans to public and private sector projects to address gender and climate issues across the continent.

Apart from the new funding scheme launched on the sidelines of COP27, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the African Development Bank Group (AfDB), and the French Development Agency (AFD) in partnership with the Egyptian government also launched the Gender Equality in Climate Action Accelerator.

It is expected that the accelerator will support private sector companies improve the gender responsiveness of their corporate climate governance.

According to the officials, the initiative will help African governments promote gender-sensitive climate sector policies, thereby accelerating their green transition to meet Paris Agreement targets, the UNFCCC’s gender action plan, and key Sustainable Development Goals.

In the meanwhile, Okollet also said that in collaboration with local administrative authorities in her remote rural village in Uganda, she has already trained several hundred women on how to develop green projects so that they become financially independent and confident to face whatever difficulties they may face in life – including domestic violence.

According to her, most rural women in Uganda must wait for their husbands to decide on land management and access, leaving many women underemployed and without any control over productive resources and services.

“These income-generating projects from green initiatives are helping the majority of these women to develop self-sufficiency in their families and stand on their feet,” she said.
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Security Council members vote to adopt a resolution endorsing special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 21 2022 (IPS)

The United States, which recently laid down a set of guidelines to monitor sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) by US citizens in international organizations, including the United Nations and its agencies worldwide, has implicitly accused the UN of faltering on a high-profile case last month.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York sentenced Karim Elkorany, an American citizen and a former UN employee, to 15 years in prison for the drugging and sexual assault of one victim and making false statements to cover up another sexual assault.

As part of the federal investigation, Elkorany admitted that he had drugged and/or sexually assaulted 17 additional victims between 2002 and 2016.

Ambassador Chris Lu, U.S. Representative for UN Management and Reform at the US Mission to the United Nations, said that consistent with State Department policies, “we have referred this matter to the Office of Inspector General for review to ensure a culture of accountability”

“We also call on the United Nations to undertake a similar review that includes a comprehensive examination of the handling of any sexual exploitation and abuse or sexual harassment (SEAH) allegations against Mr. Elkorany during his employment with the United Nations”.

The investigation, he said, should examine whether UN officials were aware of Elkorany’s misconduct and failed to take appropriate action, including ensuring the availability and accessibility of assistance to survivors.

In line with the “Principles on Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse and Sexual Harassment (SEAH) for U.S. Government Engagement with International Organizations”, the United States said it is committed to preventing and responding to sexual exploitation and abuse and sexual harassment in the UN system.

“We strongly support the United Nations’ zero tolerance policy and the Secretary-General’s efforts to strengthen its implementation”.

“Protection from SEAH is the responsibility of leadership and managers at every level who have a duty to take action in response to allegations of SEAH and ensure implementation of governance policies and delivery of services in a manner that respects the rights and dignity of all personnel and communities served by our institutions.”

The critical stand against the UN comes amid “16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence”, beginning November 25, and billed as an opportunity to call for prevention and elimination of violence against women and girls.

Meanwhile, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has established a Chief Executive Board Task Force to review policies to prevent sexual harassment and develop improved and consistent approaches across the UN, including a review of how the UN defines sexual harassment.

Tsitsi Matekaire, the Global Lead on Equality Now’s End Sexual Exploitation Programme based in the UK, told IPS the publication of these principles by the US government is a welcome development.

They echo similar positive initiatives by countries such as Australia and the UK, which have introduced measures following highly publicized scandals in recent years within the international aid sector.

“It is good to see more organizations introducing and extending safeguarding policies, but words must be underpinned by effective action and we need more evidence about the impact of these commitments. It is no good having protection strategies and procedures in place if they are not being well implemented and abuse continues unchecked”, said Matekaire.

“We don’t know the true scale of the problem, but we do know from frequent revelations that sexual harassment, sexual exploitation and abuse remain a widespread problem inside the United Nations system and within other international development organizations”.

In September 2022, she pointed out, a media investigation disclosed sexual abuse by humanitarian workers at an UN-run camp in South Sudan. It was reported that abuse occurred “on a daily basis” over a number of years and aid officials were aware as early as 2015.

Although the UN did take some action, it faced criticism for failing to introduce effective strategies to end the problem, and an external review cited a lack of victim support, she noted.

“The UN and all international development agencies must enforce a zero-tolerance approach to sexual abuse and harassment directed at, and perpetrated by, staff. This must apply to everyone, regardless of what level their position is”.

“All staff should receive training, with policies and procedures well communicated. Reports of abuse should be taken seriously, investigations carried out swiftly and effectively, and perpetrators held fully to account”.

She also said that aid workers and other whistle-blowers need to be well protected so they are able to disclose allegations of abuses without fear of negative repercussions, including retaliation or sidelining.

And safeguarding and reporting mechanisms need to ensure sexual predators are not able to evade punishment or move to different jobs where they are able to commit further offences.”

And here is the link to the article about the South Sudan story referenced above.

Meanwhile, a Reuters report of November 1 said the World Health Organization (WHO) has suspended a senior manager at its Geneva headquarters after a British doctor publicly alleged she was sexually assaulted at a health conference last month, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Rosie James, a 26-year-old junior doctor working for England’s National Health Service tweeted last month that the assault occurred at the World Health Summit in Berlin. The event, which took place from Oct. 16-18, was jointly organized by the WHO. James said at the time that she planned to report the incident.

“The alleged perpetrator is on leave and the investigation is on-going,” a WHO spokesperson said in an emailed response to Reuters about James’s statements, without naming him.

The set of “Government Engagement Principles on Protection from Sexual Exploitation Abuse and Sexual Harassment within International Organizations, laid down by the US includes six key components:

Zero Tolerance

The United States will continue to promote the full implementation of policies of zero tolerance for sexual exploitation and abuse and sexual harassment, including zero tolerance for inaction in response to allegations, across the United Nations and other International Organizations.

This includes support for policies that prioritize prevention and mitigation efforts, monitor the effectiveness of such efforts, ensure safe access to confidential SEAH reporting mechanisms and appropriate survivor support, and embed survivor-centered principles across all actions in response to reported allegations – including investigations.

The United States recognizes that an absence of reporting does not mean incidents are not being perpetrated, nor does it indicate that zero tolerance policies are being fully implemented.

A Survivor-centered Approach

The United States expects all allegations or incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse and sexual harassment to be reviewed and addressed, while respecting principles of due process.

In its engagement with the United Nations and other International Organizations, the United States will continue to advocate for the use of survivor-centered principles and standards – an approach that recognizes and empowers survivors as individuals with agency and unique needs, safeguarding their dignity and wellbeing.

Prevention and Risk Mitigation

The United States will work with the United Nations and other International Organizations to institutionalize prevention and mitigation measures that go beyond basic awareness-raising, training, capacity-building or dissemination of codes of conduct, and include a commitment to promote adequate funding, dedicated technical staff, and meaningful risk analysis and mitigation.

The United States will hold the United Nations and other International Organizations to the highest standard, including from the onset of a crisis, conflict or emergency, to mitigate against such risk, especially with highly vulnerable populations.

Accountability and Transparency

The United States expects the leadership of the United Nations and other International Organizations to take meaningful action to support accountability and transparency through, among others, the following: the conduct of timely and survivor-centered investigations; response efforts driven by the needs, experiences, and resiliencies of those most at risk of SEAH; clear reporting and response systems, including to inform Member States of allegations or incidents; and accountability measures, including termination of employment or involvement of law enforcement, as needed.

Organizational Culture Change

The United States will work to advocate for the development by the United Nations and other International Organizations of evidence-based metrics and standards of practice in the implementation of zero tolerance policies, promote holistic approaches, empower women and girls, and reinforce leadership and organizational accountability.

Policies, statements, and training are essential, but alone are insufficient to produce lasting positive change. Systems-level change requires a shift in organizational culture, behavior, and the underlying processes and mechanisms to deliver assistance and promote internal accountability.

Empowerment of Local Communities

The United States will prioritize, in partnership with the leadership of the United Nations and other International Organizations, the critical importance of locally-led efforts, particularly those led by women and girls, who, when meaningfully supported and engaged, can inform the measures that may mitigate risks and promote safer foreign assistance programming.

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By External Source
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 15 2022 (IPS)

Whether to have children or not is one of the most life-altering decisions a person can make.

But as UNFPA’s 2022 State of World Population report shows, people around the world – especially women and members of marginalized groups – are frequently denied any choice in the matter, with partners, relatives, health care providers and even governments making or strongly influencing these decisions.

“Men have greater decision-making power [regarding contraception]. Women may have to act secretly/discreetly to get contraception services,” a man in India told report authors.

“Men hold the ultimate decision-making power. It is common practice for providers to ask for the husband’s consent,” a woman in Sudan said.

Though women’s reproductive decisions have been subject to interference for centuries, it’s only in the last decade that researchers have begun to recognize and explore this concept. They call it reproductive violence.

What does reproductive violence look like?

Reproductive violence includes any form of abuse, coercion, discrimination, exploitation or violence that compromises a person’s reproductive autonomy.

This form of gender-based violence can be committed by individuals such as partners, relatives and health care providers, or by entire communities, as social norms influence societies’ ideas of who should or should not be a parent. Meanwhile governments often exert this form of violence through laws and institutions, by preventing access to contraceptives or even conducting forced sterilization campaigns, for instance.

At the interpersonal level, reproductive violence might look like a partner hiding, destroying or even forcefully removing their partner’s birth control, or involve “stealthing” – the practice of removing a condom during sex without consent.

For others, reproductive violence follows the news of a pregnancy, with some women compelled against their will into motherhood and others, to terminate.

It was the latter action that 58-year-old Jasbeer Kaur from Rajasthan, India, told UNFPA in 2020 that her husband’s family tried to force on her after learning Jasbeer was pregnant with triplets – all girls.

“No daughter had been born in my husband’s family in the last three generations. They told me, we won’t allow three daughters to be born in the house at the same time. They gave me an ultimatum: Get an abortion or leave,” Ms. Kaur said.

In demanding this of her, Ms. Kaur’s in-laws were perpetuating harmful social and gender norms that assign higher value to boys’ lives than those of girls. Members of Ms. Kaur’s community reinforced this discriminatory perspective, calling Ms. Kaur “poor thing” for not having any sons.

“Here, people still think … as a mother, you haven’t done your bit until you’ve given birth to a son,” one of Ms. Kaur’s neighbours told UNFPA.

But Ms. Kaur stood up to these norms and practices. She chose to leave her husband and his family and to keep her pregnancy. Today, her triplets Mandeep, Sandeep and Pardeep are all in their mid-twenties, building careers across the arts, business and health care.

“Today, people know us as Jasbeer Kaur’s daughters. We want to make something of our lives,” Sandeep said.

Seeing the problem to solve it

Although reproductive violence often involves partners and family members, as in Ms. Kaur’s case, they are not the only perpetrators. Governments and institutions also commit acts of reproductive violence through coercive laws and policies, some of which aim to control national-level fertility.

With the global population now eclipsing 8 billion people, countries’ population policies have entered the spotlight. And evidence has begun to emerge, especially, of countries seeking to boost fertility through problematic means, including by limiting access to abortion and cutting sex education from school.

UNFPA has warned that these efforts to engineer population size typically have little impact on fertility in the short term, and in the long term, risk causing major problems.

“Focusing on numbers alone treats people as commodities, stripping them of their rights and humanity,” UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Natalia Kanem said on 14 November in an op-ed for TIME. “We have too often seen leaders setting targets for population size or fertility rates, and the grievous human rights abuses that result.”

“Let’s be clear: When we talk about the ‘problem’ with fertility rates or an ‘ideal’ population size, we are really talking about controlling people’s bodies. We are talking about asserting power over their capacity for reproduction, whether by influence or by force, from policies where families are paid to have more children, to egregious violations like forced sterilization, often suffered by ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, and people with disabilities.”

Today, many women are unable to exert control over their reproductive lives. UNFPA reports that across 64 countries, more than 8 per cent of women lack the power to decide on contraception, and nearly a quarter of women lack the power to say no to sex.

Specifically regarding reproductive violence, UNFPA is currently working on a technical paper and developing a measurement tool to help health care practitioners, researchers, institutions and governments identify where, when and how these violations occur. It’s a critical step towards helping societies address this issue and safeguard people’s rights and choices.

“A resilient world of 8 billion, a world that upholds individual rights and choices, offers infinite possibilities – possibilities for people, societies and our shared planet to thrive and prosper,” said Dr. Kanem.

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The UN Secretariat building in New York City. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías

By Peter A Gallo
NEW YORK, Nov 15 2022 (IPS)

The U.S. Government has recently published ‘Engagement Principles’ on Protection from Sexual Exploitation Abuse & Sexual Harassment within International Organizations’, and while any involvement from Member States is to be encouraged, these principles do not address the fundamental need for either deterrence or for accountability.

The concept of a “survivor-centred approach” – sadly – is an irrelevant sound bite to appease a political lobby. Post-incident care and support for the victim is not only admirable but very necessary but serves no deterrent purpose, and any bearing it might have on the prosecution of an offender will be indirect at best.

Nothing done for victims after an incident will prevent future victims being similarly assaulted.
One of the accepted tenets of criminology is that criminal activity is not discouraged by procedures, committees, working groups or focal points, nor is there any deterrent effect in increasing the penalty for anyone convicted of the offence; criminal activity is minimised by maximising the likelihood of the perpetrator being held accountable for their actions. The UN choses to ignore that, and will not acknowledge three basic truths the Member States must recognise:

FIRST: that any sexual assault is a serious criminal offence that should be prosecuted as such.

In the real world, where both a criminal case and a civil one arise from the same event; the civil case will be sisted to give priority to the more important criminal prosecution. The UN, however, does the opposite and insists that their administrative investigation take priority over the criminal investigation of the same incident.

As a result, even where a rape is reported in the UN, the chances of the perpetrator being successfully prosecuted in a criminal court is minimised to the point where the risk is insignificant.

SECOND: that while UN personnel require and deserve the protection of the 1946 Convention on Privileges & Immunities, that Convention does not grant immunity for sexual offences.

Abuse of the concept of immunity has greatly influenced the evolution of the UN culture into one of narcissistic entitlement, where sexual predators believe they can act with impunity.

Functional Immunity was afforded to UN staff members under the Convention which states, very clearly, in Section 18:

Officials of the United Nations shall : (a) be immune from legal process in respect of words spoken or written and all acts performed by them in their official capacity; (Emphasis added.)

Given that any sexual activity – whether consensual, contractual, or coerced – is not part of the “official duties” of any UN staff member; it is self-evident that no immunity can apply in the case of any sexual offence. If such an offence appears to have been committed; the host nation must therefore have jurisdiction over the matter.

The Convention was adopted to protect UN staff against harassment by a hostile government, and in those conditions, there will always be a risk that criminal charges might be fabricated. There is no doubt, therefore that the UN must take an interest in any accusations against staff members, but as soon as their preliminary enquiries establish reasonable grounds to believe that a sexual offence has been committed; the matter should be handed over to local law enforcement immediately – for them to proceed with a criminal investigation.

The Convention was never intended to protect offenders from the consequences of their own criminality. That is made clear in Section 20 which reads:

Privileges and immunities are granted to officials in the interests of the United Nations and not for the personal benefit of the individuals themselves. The Secretary-General shall have the right and the duty to waive the immunity of any official in any case where, in his opinion, the immunity would impede the course of justice and can be waived without prejudice to the interests of the United Nations.

If the Secretary-General can give an example of how the prosecution of a sexual predator could possibly “prejudice to the interests of the UN” – the world deserves an explanation.

The UN interprets the Convention to protect UN staff members from sexual offences even when no staff member is accused of any such thing, as was demonstrated in 2015 by the Organization’s response when French authorities sought to investigate allegations against French peacekeepers in the Central African Republic.

The Convention states in Section 21:

The United Nations shall cooperate at all times with the appropriate authorities of Members to facilitate the proper administration of justice, secure the observance of police regulations and prevent the occurrence of any abuse in connection with the privileges, immunities and facilities mentioned in this article.

That is a provision the Secretariat appears to ignore, because “immunity” was cited as the reason why UN staff members could not assist French investigators by introducing them to victims. The UN has never explained how that could be justified.

Immunity was created for the best of reasons, it has now become part of the problem.

THIRD: that ‘self-regulation’ by the UN has clearly been a failure; the Organization cannot properly investigate itself.

What most people fail to appreciate about the corruption in the UN is that it is almost always “procedurally correct” – which may mean the resulting administrative decision cannot be challenged before the UN Dispute Tribunal, it does not make the decision ethical or legitimate – but OIOS investigations will not pursue any such line of enquiry for fear of what it might reveal.

Complaints about malpractices, misconduct, bias or abuses of authority by investigators are common, but are routinely ignored – because there is no independent oversight of OIOS (Office of Internal Oversight Services) and the management of the office is tied up in the same network of mutually supportive patronage that is ingrained in the UN culture.

The OIOS “leadership” is widely believed to do the bidding of the USG/DMSPC in particular, legitimising the most patent retaliation – because the USG/DMSPC protects them from any accountability for their own shortcomings. The former Director of Investigations admitting that their primary objective was simply “to get the Americans off our backs” – for which, naturally, he was promoted.

As for sexual misconduct investigations; the term “survivor-centered approach” makes little sense. It is described as an innovative approach but in any sexual assault, the victim has always been the most important witness – so how exactly were these cases actually investigated in the past?

Post-incident care for the victim has no bearing on the burden of proof. Cases must be proved by established facts, and that requires diligent and competent investigators – not “investigators” promoted for their personal loyalty, or whose misconduct has routinely been overlooked for the same reason.

Gross incompetence by managers, rampant misconduct and corruption anywhere in the UN must be considered serious in its own right, but incompetence, misconduct and corruption in the investigative function is more serious because that facilitates the corruption everywhere else.

Einstein is said to have defined insanity as doing same thing over and over, and expecting a different result, but that has been the UN’s approach to investigating sexual misconduct for the last 20 years.

The solution clearly lies with someone capable of thinking differently – but within the UN culture; anyone who dares to think differently is a dangerous heretic who cannot be promoted.

Peter Gallo is a lawyer and former OIOS investigator, whose disagreements with the Organization began when OIOS sought to demand that as an investigator, he must “never ask questions just to satisfy his curiosity” – a bizarre instruction that the UN did not consider even unusual, despite the fact that no one was ever able to point out a single example of his ever having done so….He has written extensively on the UN’s failure to properly investigate misconduct, been quoted in the media, featured on television documentaries and twice testified before congressional committees on the subject.

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An art exhibition in Juba, supported by the UN mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), seeks to educate people about gender and sexual based violence. Credit: UNMISS/Nektarios Markogiannis

By Anwarul K. Chowdhury
NEW YORK, Nov 8 2022 (IPS)

Calling it “so disappointing and disheartening” in social media on 17 October, Dr. Rosie James, a British medical expert, announced that “I was sexually assaulted by a World Health Organization (WHO) staff tonight at the World Health Summit.”

WHO, as we all know, is a part of the UN system of entities. She went to emphasize that “This was not the first time in the global health sphere that this has occurred (for MANY of us).”

Dr. James further elaborated to our disdainful shame that “I want to make something clear. This is not just a WHO or UN issue. I and many others have experienced sexual abuse in medicine and field NGOs, for example. Workplaces need to be safe and supportive environments for all. And it will take each one of us to make that a reality.”

It is an embarrassment to the international community that she warned that “We must do better #Zero Tolerance; # MeToo; #Gender Equality.”

In 2021, an independent commission reported on cases concerning WHO personnel responding to the tenth Ebola virus epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That was not enough of a warning bell for the WHO staff and its leadership. Now this.

To make the matter worse, CNN reported another shocking news about a UN employee getting a 15-year prison sentence by a US court for multiple sexual assaults, perpetrating “monstrous acts against multiple women over nearly two decades.”

During some years of that period. the staff worked for UNICEF, known for its longstanding, unblemished record of care and dedication for the world’s children.

These and many other such cases, particularly UN peacekeepers and other staff of UN peace operations encouraged the US government to announce on 26 October that it has established its engagement principles for use by all federal agencies engaging with the United Nations and other International Organizations on the prevention and response to incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse and sexual harassment.

These principles reflect the US government’s “commitment to increase U.S. engagement in a clear and consistent manner” and to “promote accountability and transparency “in response to such issues.

This is the first time a Member State has publicly declared a set of “engagement principles” to work with the UN in an area of utmost importance which puts the UN’s credibility at stake.

More so, as it is announced by the largest contributor to the UN budget and a veto-wielding Member of the UN.

Substantively, there are many positive aspects of these principles in putting the UN on guard. But at the same time, if various Member States start announcing such “engagement principles” in various areas and issues and insist on pursuing those in the context of UN’s work, a chaotic situation is bound to emerge.

The UN has yet to make its position known on the US announcement which in effect is an expression of the latter’s frustration about the way the UN has been handling the sexual exploitation abuse cases in a rather lackadaisical manner over the years.

Its much-touted zero-tolerance and no-impunity policies have not improved the situation to the satisfaction of many well-wishers of the UN.

Zero-tolerance policy is applied by the UN system entities as if they are using a zebra-crossing on a street which does not have any traffic lights.

The non-governmental entity the Code Blue Campaign is the most articulate and persistent actor with regard to the sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) issues and incidents in the UN system as a whole.

The Campaign, steered by Stephen Lewis and Paula Donovan as the co-founders, surely deserves the global community’s whole-hearted appreciation and highest commendation for its laudable work.

It has correctly emphasized that “… unjust UN policies and practices have, over decades, resulted in a culture of impunity for sexual “misconduct” ranging from breaches of UN rules to grave crimes. This represents a contravention of the UN Charter.”

The labyrinthine rules, regulations, procedures, channels of communication of the UN make the mockery of the due-process and timely justice. These have been taken advantage of by the perpetrators time and again.

As most of the SEA incidents happen at the field levels, nationalities and personal equations play a big role in delaying or denying justice.

The victim-centred approach of the UN in handling SEA cases has been manipulated by the perpetrators and their organizational colleagues to detract attention from their seriousness.

Not only the victims should get the utmost attention, so should be the abusers because upholding of the justice is also UN’s responsibility.

Also, UN watchers become curious whenever media publish such SEA related reports, the UN authorities invariably mentions the concerned staff is on leave or administrative leave. When these cases are in the public domain, the abusers are merrily enjoying the leave with full pay.

It is also known that during the leave the abusers have tried to settle the matter with the victims or their families with lucrative temptations. The leave has also been used to wipe off the evidence of the crime. These have happened in several cases with the full knowledge of the supervisors.

What a travesty of the victim-centred approach!

The head of the UN peace operations where the SEA cases take place should be asked by the Secretary-General to explain the occurrence as a part of his or her direct responsibility. Unless such drastic measures are taken the SEA would continue in the UN system.

Another unexpectable dimension of the victim-centred approach is that the abuser-peacekeepers are sent back home for dispensation of justice as per the agreement between the troops contributing countries (TCC) and the UN. Sending them home is one of the biggest reasons for the continuation of SEA in the peace operations.

The victim is not present in that kind varied national military justice situation and no evidence are available except UN-cleared reports to show or suppress the extent of abuse.

Again, a travesty of justice supported by the upholder of the global rule of law!

The UN Secretary-General would be well-advised to propose to the Security Council a change in the clause of the agreement that UN signs with the TCCs which incorporates for repatriation of abuser-peacekeepers to their home countries. If a TCC refuse to do so, the agreement would not be signed. Period.

A functional, quick-justice global tribunal should be set up with the mandate to try the peacekeepers as decided by the UN. If the International Criminal Court (ICC) can try heads state or government for crimes against humanity, why the UN peacekeepers cannot be tried for SEA?

That would be a true victim-centred approach!

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury is a former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the United Nations; former Ambassador of Bangladesh to the UN and President of the Security Council

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Ship "Life Support" in the port of Genoa. Credit: Emergency

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Oct 20 2022 (IPS)

That’s why a new ship with a big white “E” will navigate the Mediterranean Sea. The vessel has a red hull, is more than fifty meters long and has low decks. Soon, it will leave the port of Genoa and go out into the open sea. If those living on the north shore of that ‘water cemetery’ bearing the name of Mediterranean had chosen life, the “Life Support” would not have been greeted by the applause of a people packed square, on a late summer night, in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia. It would not be ready to sail now; . if they had chosen life, that ship would have another job.

“Mom, I’m thirsty.” That’s how Loujin died, asking for water. She was four years old and had been at sea for ten days on a boat that launched an SOS to which no one responded until was too late on a still-very-hot September. She and her family were fleeing the war in Syria with the impossible hope of a refugee camp in Lebanon. She died along with six other refugees: “They died of thirst, hunger and severe burns,” said Chiara Cardoletti, Representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy, on Twitter. “According to the reports of the survivors who are being verified by the police […] the corpses were thrown into the sea when they began to be stockpiled,” according to the newspaper Avvenire. The sea took at least eighty, dead off the coasts of Lebanon and Syria, just a few days later. Eleven other decaying bodies were recovered in the first half of October off the coast of Tunisia. Before that, water had snatched away so many lives that we are not even able to count them and cry for them.

If there had been a ship, such as the one with a large white “E” on its red sides, perhaps Loujin would be alive. The “E” is that of Emergency, an Italian NGO founded in 1994 to bring aid to civilian victims of war and poverty.

Emergency has made its choice: It will sail the Mediterranean, fishing for human beings regardless of the “barriers” erected in that water. Barriers created by laws, rules, and sometimes arbitrarily, do not prevent women and men in search of a future; instead, all too often, they turn into dead bodies – those that wars and starvation weren’t able to make.

Ten thousand people were in Reggio Emilia at the annual meeting of Emergency, an organization that has turned the defense of human rights and its radical “No war” policy into concrete actions in the most difficult places on the planet. Those numbers, doubled compared to the previous year, portray a country, Italy, which longs for peace and hospitality.

“Seeing and knowing that there are thousands of people dying off our shores is absolutely not acceptable. With [the ship project] we believe to represent many people in Italy who do not want to see this happen,” Pietro Parrino, Emergency’s director of the Field Operations Department, explained to us.

From 2014 to the day of this writing, i.e., mid-October this year, 25,034 people have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean Sea. “They were more than 1,100 just [this year] in the absence of a coordinated search and rescue operation at [the] European level,” a statement from the NGO said. “We must be at sea to save people’s lives,” Parrino stressed. Whatever the reason why those women and men have decided to take the most dangerous of journeys: “They simply need help and we are, and we try to be, in the places where help is needed,” he added.

Being there, however, is a hard choice. There are very few NGO search and rescue ships, constrained by laws and bureaucracy that prevent them from getting to where they are needed, leaving migrants in the hands of the Libyan coast guards or forcing the vessels to wait days before docking at safe ports. Their work is not easy and they have even been accused of being “sea taxis” or “accomplices” of traffickers in a country where the call for a “naval blockade” has been a slogan for those who won the last political election.

It takes courage to choose life, anyway.

The last stretch

Barriers, “walls” within the sea, ancient Romans called Mare Nostrum, built by other choices, political choices, such as the bilateral Memorandum of Understanding that Italy signed with Libya in 2017 or the Malta Declaration issued shortly after. Agreements “that form the basis of a close cooperation that entrusts the patrolling of the central Mediterranean to Libyan coastguards,” followed by the establishment of the Libyan SAR, a large maritime area where the responsibility for coordinating search and rescue activities was assigned to Libya, Amnesty International explained. The human rights organization is among those calling for the suspension of the Memorandum: “In the last five years, over 85 thousand people have been intercepted at sea and sent back to Libya: men, women and children who have faced arbitrary detention, torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, rape and sexual violence, forced labor and illegal killings.”

Any attempt to pull out those barriers, even if made up of boats, is doomed to fail; instead, it will produce pain. Migrations do not stop, new routes open up, and the old ones close and then reopen as the laws or European policies change. Crossing the sea is just the last stretch of a long journey in which human trafficking is a business built on desperation and managed by the same organizations that smuggle drugs and oil. Trips are a commodity sold on a market where the currency can be money or one’s body.

The Mediterranean route will continue to be worth a lot of money. Dirty money, cash, mobilized in a very sophisticated way, ends up in the pockets of those we do not know, or rather, of those about whom we know what they do, financing other illicit businesses. It is not just a question of the “passage” [across the sea], but it is a much more complicated mechanism.

NGOs’ search and rescue operations were said to have increased the number of people who decided to travel to Europe. However, data from the Italian Ministry of the Interior show that this is false, as reported by the Huffington Post last year. In 2021, there were many more arrivals than the previous year even though there was not a greater number of vessels in the Mediterranean, as some of them were blocked by “bureaucracy.” There were few ships but a greater number of arrivals because those who flee wars and hunger always find new ways to organize the journey.

“People who [decide] to leave countries like Afghanistan or the Horn of Africa and have thousands and thousands of kilometers in front of them to be covered on foot with little or no money, are people who have courage and determination unimaginable for us,” Parrino said. Desperation moves them, a desperation that puts them in the hands of those who promise a place in a rust bucket. “The story these people tell is that few get a simple ride. Many are enslaved for years, in the fields or as prostitutes, because the traffickers earn tens of thousands of euros by selling them and reselling them before setting them free again. The trafficking is not to let people cross the Mediterranean; the trafficking is the management of these thousands of desperate people who are exploited as labor slaves and sex slaves for months, for years, before receiving the green light to take the boat,” he added. “People do it because they have even less than the [little] hope that lies ahead. They are people who accept a risk they already know”, Parrino stressed.

Gabriele Baratto, a criminologist at the University of Trento, studied that market for a research project. He investigated the “digitization” of human trafficking.

Smugglers use social media, especially Facebook, to find migrants who want to leave. Then Baratto and his team contacted them. They thought it would be difficult, that they would have to turn to the dark web, that they would have to use secret jargon. But no, everything happens in the light of day. It was enough to type simple keywords, questions such as: “how to get to Europe.”

“[There are] hundreds of posts, pages, and groups dedicated to promoting travel for migrants and these posts contained and contain basic information on the [route], point of departure, point of arrival and some indication on the price, date, [and] month of departure. And the thing that left us most bewildered was that there was the phone number of the traffickers,” Baratto explained at Emergency’s meeting in Reggio Emilia.

They are “tour operators” of pain, who ask to be reached by phone, WhatsApp, or Skype, which are more difficult to intercept. “We came up with scripts, stories saying: ‘I am in Italy but I have my sister, I have my brother, I have my parents [who have to leave].’ They answer, and if they don’t answer, they write to you. Within a maximum of half an hour you can talk to them on the phone and they give you all the information.” The more you pay, the safer, more “comfortable,” and more direct the journey is, and traffickers know how laws and policies of states in Europe change.

“‘If you did this, why don’t the police do the same?’ [people ask us],” Baratto added. It is just too difficult to arrest traffickers one by one. The solution is only “a new approach to immigration,” he believes.

Behind that market in the sunlight, there is hell – the hell that Emergency knows.

“Is it possible to open a humanitarian corridor and decide with what means (to intervene)? … We know very well from where they come…”, Parrino told us. The only answer to those questions has been Europe’s agreement with Libya, providing patrol boats, money, preventing migrants and refugees from leaving the north african country.

“The flows from the countries of departure have not changed, the flows in the countries of arrival have greatly decreased. Where do all these people go? How do traffickers use them?”, he said.

To halt the chain of deaths, it would be necessary to eradicate the factors that force people to leave or to decide that it can’t be fate to open the doors of Europe: “Access […] cannot be by chance for [those] who are saved at sea or manage to land on our shores by boat. We think that it should be much better structured, without launching ‘invasion’ alarms,” he said.

Legal and safe access for those who must leave their countries: That’s the call of the NGO Emergency. Until then, it will be at sea because the sea swallows everything. “After a few minutes the sea is flat and you don’t realize that there has been a tragedy, there are no pieces left, nothing remains …” Parrino said from the Reggio Emilia stage.

No one answered the SOS of the boat that took away the souls of those eighty people who died in mid-September, as happened to Loujin. No one listened to their cries, betraying the ancient law of the sea that imposes that obligation. Instead, Emergency wants to be there with its “Life Support” to respond to those ships that cry out. It will be one of the few of that small fleet of NGOs that resists the obstacles dictated by a guilty and inhuman bureaucracy that pulls invisible barbed wires straight into the water.

A “bureaucracy,” the Italian one, to which the European Court of Justice replied in August, giving reason to the NGO’s Sea Watch vessels blocked for months in the ports of Palermo and Porto Empedocle in 2020. Ships subjected to inspections, prevented from operating for reasons such as “missing certifications” or “too many people on board.” Laws, political choices, and administrative stops that over time have forced NGOs to rethink even “how” help is brought.

Emergency has already been operating since 2016 with other partners offering health and social assistance, a type of aid that was not so common in the past because search and rescue operations were quick and disembarkation never too long. But now, docking in Italy can be timeless.

“The longest mission I can remember was fifty days. Fifty days at sea, of which at least thirty [were] with the refugees on board because [they were] stuck in the harbor, with people jumping off the ship [and] psychologists who had to get on,” Parrino remembered.

There are no well-defined rules, he explained, but a lot of arbitrariness, differences according to the ports or the “political climate. There were moments that three or four days passed from identification at sea to disembarkation and moments when thirty or forty days passed,” he added.

That’s why Life Support’s mission will be about fifteen days, as it could be necessary to stay on board longer. “If I had to leave and return from Sicily, it takes about a day to go patrolling in front of the Libyan coast, and you go there when there are good weather windows because in bad weather there are clearly no departures. Within two or three days you should be able to identify the target, so within four or five days the mission should be over.”

That’s just theory. More often, boat persons must share the little space of the ship for days, and over time that forced coexistence can become hard. “Those vessels are clearly not cruise ships. We are renovating the one we bought to the fullest with the experience we have gained over the years, but there are certainly no one hundred and seventy cabins … so things get heavy.”

Two or three days after the rescue, adrenaline turns into other fears, and “everything returns to memory: hunger, despair, what you have left … what you have suffered, the [fear] for what has been and for what will happen.” This is why keeping people on board for a long time has profound repercussions for everyone. We need to work “on empathy” and we need to increase the staff, doctors, [and] nurses, “we need to have psychologists ready to board in case the ship has to stop, you have a crew under pressure,” Parrino explained.

Search and rescue at sea by NGOs is often a divisive topic but saving lives cannot be divisive, ever. This is Energency’s starting point, also this time. That’s why the “Life Support” will go out into the open sea. On its red hull, it will take, off the shores of Genoa, the words of Gino Strada, its founder, who in 2017 won the SunHak Peace Prize and who passed away last year: “If the rights are not for every single person, you’d better call them privileges.”

Life can’t be a privilege.

IPS UN Bureau

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On the suspension bridge that crosses the Vilcanota River, in the village of Secsencalla, in the Andes highlands region of Cuzco, Peru, a group of men who have been taking steps towards a new form of masculinity without machismo pose for a photo. From left to right: Saul Huamán, Rolando Tito, Hilario Quispe and Brian Junior Quispe. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
CUZCO, Peru , Oct 6 2022 (IPS)

“My father was very ‘machista’, he used to beat my mother… It was a very sad life,” said Dionisio Ticuña, a resident of the rural community of Canincunca, on the outskirts of the town of Huaro, in the southern Peruvian highlands region of Cuzco more than 3,000 meters above sea level.

Today, at 66 years of age, he is happy that he managed to not copy the model of masculinity that his father showed him, in which being a man was demonstrated by exercising power and violence over women and children."I have been married to my wife Delia for 35 years, we have raised our children and I can say that you feel great peace when you learn to respect your partner and to show your innermost emotions.” -- Dionisio Ticuña

“Now I am an enemy of the ‘wife beaters’, I don’t hang out with the ones who were raised that way and I don’t pay attention to the taunts or ugly things they might say to me,” he said in an interview with IPS in his new adobe house, which he built in 2020 and where he lives with his wife and their youngest daughter, 20. Their three other children, two boys and a girl, have already become independent.

In this South American country of 33 million people, tolerance of violence, particularly gender-based violence, is high, and there is a strong division of roles within couples.

A nationwide survey on social relationships, conducted in 2019 by the governmental National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI), showed that 52 percent of women believed they should first fulfill their role as mothers and wives before pursuing their dreams, 33 percent believed that if they were unfaithful they should be punished by their husband, and 27 percent said they deserved to be punished if they disrespected their husband.

The survey also found that a high proportion of Peruvians agreed with the physical punishment of children. Of those interviewed, 46 percent thought it was a parental right and 34 percent believed it helped discipline children so they would not become lazy.

Katherine Pozo, a Cuzco lawyer with the rural development program of the Flora Tristán Peruvian Women’s Center, told IPS that masculinity in Peru, particularly in rural areas, is still very machista or sexist.

“The ideas acquired in childhood and transmitted from generation to generation are that men have power over women, that women owe them obedience, and that women’s role is to take care of their men and take care of the home and the family. This thinking is an obstacle to the integral experience of their masculinities and to the recognition of women’s rights,” she said in an interview at her home in Cuzco, the regional capital.

Dionisio Ticuña, a resident of the rural community of Canincunca, in the Andean region of Cuzco in southern Peru, stands in front of his new adobe house, built in 2020. At the age of 66, he has achieved the tranquility of a life without machismo, which he experienced as a child in his family. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Based on that analysis the Center decided to involve men in the work they do in rural communities in Cuzco to help women exercise their rights and have greater autonomy in making decisions about their lives, promoting the approach to a new kind of masculinity among men.

In 2018 the Center launched this process, convinced that it was necessary to raise awareness among men about gender equality so that women’s efforts to break down discrimination could flourish. The project will continue until next year and is supported by two Spanish institutions: the Basque Agency for Development Cooperation and Muguen Gainetik.

IPS visited different Quechua indigenous villages in Cuzco´s Andes highlands to talk to farmers who are working to shed gender prejudices and beliefs that, they acknowledge, have brought them unhappiness. Now, they are gradually taking significant steps with the support of the Center, which is working to generate a new view of masculinity in these communities.

“I have been married to my wife Delia for 35 years, we have raised our children and I can say that you feel great peace when you learn to respect your partner and to show your innermost emotions,” said Ticuña, a participant in the initiative.

“Being head of household is hard, but it doesn’t give me the right to mistreat. I decided not to be like my father and to be a different kind of person in order to lead a happy life with her and our children,” he said, sitting at the entrance to his home in Canincunca.

Hilario Quispe, a farmer from the Secsencalla farming community in the town of Andahuaylillas, in the Peruvian highlands region of Cuzco, poses for a photo with his wife Hilaria Mena. For him it was a revelation to understand that the tasks she performs at home are work, and his commitment now is to share them. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Recognizing that women do work

Hilario Quispe, a 49-year-old farmer from the Secsencalla community in the town of Andahuaylillas, told IPS that in his area there is a great deal of machismo.

In his home, at 3100 meters above sea level, he said that he has been able to understand that women also work when they are at home.

“Actually, they do more than men, we have only one job, but they wash, cook, weave, take care of the children, look after the animals, go out to the fields…And I used to say: my wife doesn’t work,” he reflected.

Because of the distribution of tasks based on stereotyped gender roles, women spend more time than men on unremunerated care tasks in the household.

INEI reported in 2021 that in the different regions of the country, Peruvian women have a greater overall workload than men because the family responsibilities fall on their shoulders.

In rural areas, women work an average of 76 hours per week, 47 of which are in unpaid activities involving work in the home, both caring for their families and their crops.

In the case of men, their overall workload is 64 hours per week, most of which, 44 hours, are devoted to paid work.

Saúl Huamán is a family farmer in the rural community of Secsencalla. He recognizes that machismo is still a daily reality in Peru’s Andes highlands regions, but he strives to demonstrate day by day that he can be different and can achieve a life based on respect with his partner and their six-month-old son, Luas. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Breaking down stereotypes

Pozo, with the Flora Tristán Center, cited data from the official report that found that in the countryside, married women spend 17 hours a week in kitchen activities and men only four; in housekeeping seven and their partners three; and in childcare 11 and their husbands seven.

Quispe, who with his wife, Hilaria Mena, has four children between the ages of six and 17, said it was a revelation to understand that the different activities his wife performs at home are work.

“If she wasn’t there, everything would fall apart. But I am not going to wait for that to happen, I am committed to stop being machista. Those ideas that have been put in our minds as children do not help us have a good life,” he remarked.

The department of Cuzco is a Peruvian tourist area, where the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu is the main attraction. It has more than 1.3 million inhabitants, of which 40 percent live in rural areas where agriculture is one of the main activities. Much of it is subsistence farming, which requires the participation of the different members of the family.

This is precisely the case of the Secsencalla farming community, where, although the new generations have made it to higher education, they are still tied to the land.

Rolando Tito sits next to his mother Faustina Ocsa. He believes that men can experience their masculinity differently, without machismo or violence, with equal relationships with women. The university student is also actively involved in agricultural work in his rural village of Secsencalla, in the Andean region of Cuzco, in southern Peru. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Rolando Tito, 25, is in his third year of systems engineering at the National University of Cuzco, and helps his mother, Faustina Ocsa, 64, with the agricultural work.

“I want to better myself and continue helping my mother, she is a widow and although she was unable to study, she always encouraged me to do so. Times are no longer like hers when women didn’t have opportunities, but there are still men who think they should stay in the kitchen,” he told IPS, with his Quechua-speaking mother at his side.

Sitting by the entrance to the community’s bodega, which is often used as a center for meetings and gatherings, with the help of a translator, his mother recalled that she experienced a lot of violence, that fathers were not supportive of their daughters and that they mistreated their wives. And she said she hoped that her son would be a good man who would not follow in the footsteps of the men who came before him.

“I have learned about equality between men and women,” her son said. “For example, I am helping in the house, I am cooking and washing, that does not make me less of a man, and when I have a partner I will not have the idea that she has to serve me. Together we will work in the house and on the farm.”

Brian Junior Quispe, a 19-year-old from the community, who is about to begin studying veterinary medicine, said he now knows that “men should not take advantage of women, but rather support each other to get ahead together.”

The same sentiment was expressed by Saúl Huamán, 35, who has become a father for the first time with his baby Luas, six months old.

“Now I have to worry about three mouths to feed. I used to be a machine operator but now I only work in the fields and I have to work hard to make it profitable. With my wife Sonia we share the chores, while she cooks I watch the baby, and I am also learning to prepare meals,” he says as his smiling wife listens.

Pozo the attorney recognized that it is not easy to change cultural patterns so strongly rooted in the communities, but said that it is not impossible.

“It is like sowing the seed of equality, you have to water and nurture it, and then harvest the fruits, which is a better life for women and men,” she said.

Adolescent girls collecting water, Luweero, Uganda. Credit: Esther Nsapu/Education Development Center (EDC)
 
On December 19, 2011, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 66/170 declaring October 11 as the International Day of the Girl Child.

By Amy West and Sharon Iwachu
WASHINGTON DC, Oct 5 2022 (IPS)

This year commemorates the 10th anniversary of the International Day of the Girl Child. While the last decade has seen greater attention on the positive development needs of girls, we must move beyond documenting the barriers that girls face to investing in and prioritizing girl-centered solutions to the critical development challenges of our world.

In light of the triple planetary crisis of climate change, air pollution and biodiversity highlighted in UN Common Agenda consultations in August, the vital role adolescent girls can play in climate-responsive solutions should not be underestimated.

Adolescent girls are among the most vulnerable to climate stress, natural disasters, and environmental degradation. With women, they are an estimated 80% of those displaced by climate-related disaster and represent 60% of the global population facing chronic hunger due to food insecurity.

Recent UNFPA studies have established the links between climate change, reduced and lost access to resources, and the pressures that result on households to survive. Families affected by climate change often have limited resources to begin with and even less after an acute weather-related disaster.

For those dependent on the environment for nutrition, health and household resources, this pressure results in early marriage or trafficking of girls for the sake of generating a source of income and/or reducing a household burden.

When climate change exacerbates existing inequities or the exclusion of girls – including their protection and access to functional, soft, life and technical skills development – household, community, and national level health and education outcomes are negatively affected; sometimes even for generations.

But what if we could change this harmful dynamic? What if we could effectively link the resilience, optimism, and resourcefulness of adolescent girls to new ways of investing in climate-related mitigation strategies?

Credit: UNICEF

What if we could turn existing environmental threats into “tipping-point” opportunities for better approaches to and investments in adolescent girls’ social and economic development?

With the most to lose from the harmful effects of climate change, girls and women also have the most to gain from climate-friendly development strategies that allow them to be active participants in and key contributors to community-led responses.

Adolescent girls can be the strongest catalysts for behavior and systems change if we understand their existing assets, the spaces they occupy, and the influence – invisible or otherwise – they have within households and communities.

Findings from an econometric study spanning four decades from the 1960s to early 2000s showed that adolescent girls’ rates of enrollment and retention in school significantly reduced weather-related death, injury and displacement at community level.

This is because with every year of education or skills training, adolescent girls’ self-confidence, leadership, communication, life and livelihoods skills increased.

As these more educated and skilled girls enter adulthood, they have greater decision-making power and create demonstrably healthier, safer, and more productive households.

There is a clear opportunity to connect the dots for those who occupy and are best placed to protect the land and its resources, as well as reinforce the health and safety of their households. In rural areas, especially, adolescent girls will become the next generation’s agricultural labor force.

If women worldwide are 40% of the agricultural labor force and responsible for more than half the world’s food production, and if education and skills training are prioritized for them, households will move beyond subsistence level farming to engage more as micro-businesses supporting farm-to-table supply and value chains.

This strengthens women-led engagement in diversifying agricultural approaches, through aquaculture and apiculture, and the connection of these innovations to economic development, as well as better health and nutrition outcomes.

To this end, climate-adaptive food systems can have a virtuous relationship, sustaining local suppliers and reinforcing local food security, and effectively weather-proofing communities by ensuring that everyone – in particular women and girls – has access to the knowledge and skills to save lives and sustain livelihoods.

We can take steps to harness the strength and resilience of adolescent girls everywhere even as we act urgently to mitigate the deleterious effects of climate-risk.

First, we must invest more in secondary education where the highest rates of dropout for girls occurs between lower and upper secondary level. This investment should include building context-relevant climate-smart skills for the resilience of households and communities.

Second, we must support the start-up of environmentally-friendly and climate-adaptive small businesses as part of workforce development and smart-financing strategies inclusive of adolescent girls and young women, especially in rural areas where green jobs can strengthen rural to urban supply chains and overall food security.

And finally, we must build community development plans that include ways young people, in particular adolescent girls, can support conservation and climate-risk reduction efforts as part of civic engagement – which will continue to reduce death, injury and displacement.

Without these forward-thinking investments in adolescent girls as key stakeholders in community development, harmful social and cultural attitudes that pit a woman’s role as a mother or wife against learning and livelihoods (and dismiss her right to own land) will continue, continuing a trend of lost opportunity on the grandest of scales.

Amy West of Education Development Center and Sharon Iwachu, Global G.L.O.W., Girl Advocacy Committee Alumni with Art of a Child in Uganda. EDC and Global G.L.O.W. are active members in the Coalition for Adolescent Girls (CAG), a member-led and driven organization dedicated to supporting, investing in, and improving the lives of adolescent girls.

IPS UN Bureau

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Women gather at the Punto Violeta, a center where different government agencies and social organisations seek to address the gender-based violence suffered by women in the Padre Mugica neighborhood, or Villa 31, a shantytown in Argentina's capital city. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 4 2022 (IPS)

The Padre Carlos Mugica neighborhood looks like another city within the Argentine capital, which most people usually see from up above as they drive past on the freeway but have never visited. It is a shantytown in the heart of Buenos Aires, of enormous vitality and where women are organizing to confront the various forms of violence that affect them.

“I have a history of gender violence. And what I found here is that many other women have experienced similar situations in their lives,” says Graciela, seated at the table of the weekly Women’s Meeting, in a small locale in the most modern sector of the neighborhood, called Punto Violeta, which has become a reference point for victims of violence."We centralize the care at the Punto Violeta because, although the violence here is no different from that in other parts of the city, many women find it difficult to leave the neighborhood because they don't know how." -- Carolina Ferro

Traditionally known in Buenos Aires as Villa 31 and home to more than 40,000 inhabitants, the neighborhood’s name honors a Catholic priest and activist who worked with poor families, who was killed during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

The slum is located on more than 70 hectares of publicly owned railway land just a few minutes from the center of the capital and separated by the train tracks from Recoleta, one of the city’s most upscale neighborhoods. Families started to occupy the area 90 years ago and the shantytown grew as a result of the successive crises that hit the Argentine economy and with the influx of poor immigrants from Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru.

Different governments have tried to eradicate the slum throughout its history, but in recent years the official view of the neighborhood has changed. Today Villa 31 is halfway through a slow and laborious process of urbanization and integration into Buenos Aires that the city government launched in 2015.

Thus, it has become a strange place, which mixes hope for a better future with the social woes of poverty and overcrowding.

There are wide streets with public transport and modern concrete housing blocks where once there was only a total absence of the state. But there are also still many narrow, dark passageways, where precarious brick and sheet metal houses up to four stories high seem on the verge of crumbling on top of each other.

View of one of the passageways in the Padre Mugica neighborhood, a slum located in the heart of Buenos Aires. The process of regularizing the informal settlement and integrating it with the city began in 2015, but it is only halfway done and narrow passageways lined with precarious housing coexist with modern roads and buildings. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The struggle for a better life

Graciela, who became a single mother at 18 and now has six children she has had to raise on her own, says she lived in the western province of Santa Fe and decided to move to Buenos Aires in search of a better life, after an accident at work in which she lost a hand. “In order to get a disability pension, I had to be here,” she explains. That’s how she ended up in Villa 31.

She says that this year her ex-partner tried to kill her, cutting her neck several times with a knife, so today she has a panic button given to her by the police.

She shares the things that happen to her at the Women’s Meeting every Wednesday, a space where collective solutions are sought for complicated lives, marked by economic difficulties, overcrowded housing, interrupted studies, lack of opportunities, families with conflicts and a permanent struggle to get ahead.

“It is a weekly meeting where we invite all the women of the neighborhood and we work on emotional strength as a preventive strategy against violence. Sometimes women start to feel that what they experience at home is normal,” says Carolina Ferro, a psychologist of the Women’s Encounter Program of the Undersecretariat of Public Safety and Order of the Buenos Aires Ministry of Justice and Security.

Ferro explains that the goal is to bolster the self-esteem of the women victims of violence. “Once they are empowered, they can go out to work to become economically independent or go back to school. We help them to be themselves,” she says during the last meeting in September, in which IPS was allowed to participate.

“This is part of a comprehensive care project. We centralize the care at the Punto Violeta because, although the violence here is no different from that in other parts of the city, many women find it difficult to leave the neighborhood because they don’t know how,” she adds.

Graciela, a mother of six children whom she has had to raise on her own, is one of the participants in the Punto Violeta in Padre Mugica, where women come together to find solutions to the violence they have experienced and to empower themselves to improve their lives, those of their families and the community. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

When the psychologist asks the women what has been the greatest achievement in their lives, excited responses emerge. One says, “Raising my children on my own”; another says, “Going back to school as an adult, and graduating”; and another says, “Having stopped working as a house cleaner to open my own little salon where I do therapeutic massage.”

“This is the first time in my life that I have spoken to a psychologist,” says one of the participants in the meeting, who is anguished because her son, whom she dreamed would become a university graduate and professional, dropped out of school. The group coordinator and her fellow participants insist on the need not to place expectations on another person, whose life cannot be controlled, in order to avoid frustration.

Unceasing violence

In 2021, in this South American country of 45 million people, 251 women were killed by gender violence, an average of one murder every 35 hours, according to the National Registry of Femicides, kept by the Supreme Court of Justice since 2015. In 88 percent of the cases, the victim knew her aggressor, and in 39 percent she lived with him. In 62 percent of the cases she was killed by her partner or ex-partner.

The Supreme Court has been conducting the survey since 2015 and the figures have not varied much, with approximately 20 percent of femicides in the city of Buenos Aires committed in shantytowns and slums. In any case, during 2020, the most critical year of the COVID-19 pandemic, calls to emergency numbers increased fivefold.

Aerial view of the Padre Mugica neighborhood, or Villa 31, as many still call it, with downtown Buenos Aires in the background. The 90-year-old informal settlement now straddles a freeway and has more than 40,000 inhabitants, just minutes from the heart of the Argentine capital. CREDIT: City of Buenos Aires

It was precisely during the pandemic that the Punto Violeta was born, as a government response to a longstanding concrete demand in the neighborhood for a women’s center.

“When the pandemic began and mobility restrictions were imposed, it was a very difficult time in the neighborhood, when some local women told us that we should not forget the women victims of violence, who had been locked in their homes with their aggressors,” Bárbara Bonelli, deputy ombudsperson in the Buenos Aires city government and a driving force behind the creation of the center, told IPS.

Punto Violeta is the name given in Argentina and other countries to spaces designed to promote the defense of the rights of women and sexual minorities, in which public agencies work together with social organizations.

The program in Mugica involves several public agencies, which take turns on different days of the week, with the mission of providing a comprehensive approach to the problem of violence.

At the center victims can file a criminal complaint of gender violence with representatives of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, obtain a protection measure or gain access to psychological care or a social worker.

“Punto Violeta was created to respond to a demand that existed in the neighborhood. I would say that the problem of violence against women is no different in poor neighborhoods, but it does need to be addressed at a local level,” says Bonelli.

“Since it is very difficult for them to leave the neighborhood, the state did not reach these women. We hope that the Punto Violeta will contribute to the effective insertion of women from the neighborhood in terms of employment, education, finance, economic and social issues,” she adds.

Ricksani Alice, 19, who was married at a young age but is now back in school hoping to complete her education thanks to the Spotlight Initiative talks with UNFPA Gender Programme Officer Beatrice Kumwenda at Tilimbike Safe Community Space in Chiludzi village, Dowa, Malawi on November 2, 2020. Credit: UNFPA ESARO

By Cecilia Russell
Johannesburg, Sep 29 2022 (IPS)

Child marriage continues to be a scourge in many African countries – despite legislation and efforts of many, including parliamentarians, to keep girls in school and create brighter futures for them. This was the view of participants in a recent webinar held under the auspices of the African Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development (FPA) and UNFPA East and Southern Africa Regional Office (ESARO).

The webinar, supported by the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA) and the Japan Trust Fund, heard how progressive legislation prohibiting marriage for adolescents under 18, and in one case, 21, was not enough to stop the practice.

Dr Kiyoko Ikegami, Executive Director, and Secretary General, APDA, noted in her opening address that the COVID-19 pandemic had affected child marriage prevention programmes and increased poverty and inequality, which was a driving force in child marriages.

Chinwe Ogbonna, UNFPA ESARO Regional Director a.i, said while there had been considerable achievements since the 1994 ICPD conference in Egypt – the work was not yet done.

She encouraged the parliamentarians to commit themselves to actions they agreed to at a regional meeting in Addis Ababa in June, which included “amplifying evidence-based advocacy.” In Africa, she said, teenage pregnancy and HIV prevalence are high. Gender-based violence was on the rise, and femicide and the harmful practices of child marriage, and female genital mutilation continued.

The webinar heard from members of parliament in various countries across the African continent.

Fredrick Outa, from Kenya, FPA Vice-President, told the delegates that while Kenya had made ambitious commitments, FGM was an area of concern. Kenya was committed to strengthening coordination in legislation and policy framework, communication and advocacy, integration and support, and cross-border cooperation to eliminate FGM.

Kenya aimed to eliminate GBV and child and forced marriages by “addressing social and cultural norms that propagate the practice while providing support to affected women and girls.”

An MP from Zambia, Princess Kasune, said it was of concern that the Zambia Demographic and Health Survey (ZDHS) of 2018 indicated that 29 percent of women aged 20-24 reported being married before 18. The country had various programmes to address this, including partnering with traditional rulers and civil society to fight early child marriage.

“Chiefs and headmen have made commitments in the fight against child marriage …. Traditional rulers are themselves champions in the fight against child marriage,” Kasune said.

She said the practice continues even though the Marriage Act prescribes 21 as the minimum age for marriage.

However, customary law differed, and there needed to be consistency in legislation.

The other crucial campaign against early marriages was to keep children in school. While the government had employed 30 000 teachers in rural areas, more was needed.

“Keeping children in school was critical to lowering the incidence of child marriage,” Kasune said.

Muwuma Milton, MP Uganda, agreed that culture played a part in eliminating harmful practices like child marriage. The country was applying a multifaceted approach to eliminating this – including school feeding schemes, providing sanitary packs for girls, and encouraging young mothers to return to school after delivery.

“A challenge is that the country has unmet needs for family planning services, which stands at 30%, and there is a culture that believes that once a girl reaches menstruation age, they are old enough to get married,” Milton said.

Matthew Ngwale, an MP from Malawi, noted that his country adhered to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) protocol that condemns the marriage of people under 18. The Malawian constitution, Marriage, Divorce, the Family Relations Act (2015), and the Childcare Justice and Protection Act all reinforce this policy.

But, Ngwale said, despite “progressive legislation, Malawi has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, where approximately 42% of girls get married before the age of 18, and 9% are below the age of 15. Approximately 7% of boys marry before the age of 18.”

He also noted that child marriage is higher in rural than urban areas. Rural girls are 1.6 times more likely to marry early than their urban counterparts.

Poverty is a clear driver, with women in the predominantly ‘poor’ south marrying at a slightly lower age than those in the ‘wealthier’ north and central regions.

“In Malawi, children from more impoverished families are twice as likely to marry early than those from wealthier families,” Ngwale said, and in a country where data shows that 51.5% of the people live below the poverty line, which is higher in rural areas at 60% compared to urban areas at 18%.

Traditional initiation practices, done as part of a rite of passage when a girl reaches puberty, encouraged early sexual activity, Ngwale said, and the prevalence of child marriage is higher among matrilineal than patrilineal groups.

“Due to food insecurity, child marriage often becomes a more likely coping mechanism as families seek to reduce the burden of feeding the family,” he said.

Climatic challenges, such as droughts and floods, have become more frequent and catastrophic.

Child marriage impacts secondary school completion rates. In Malawi, only 45% of girls stay in school beyond 8th grade.

“Most young girls who leave school due to child marriage have few opportunities to earn a living, making them more vulnerable to GBV. Child marriage lowers women’s expected earnings in adulthood by between 1.4% and 15.6%,” he said.

However, the Malawi government had created a conducive environment for civil society organizations to work with the government to end child marriage – including the official Girls Not Brides National Partnership.

Pamela Majodina, MP Republic of South Africa, told the webinar the country was committed to the objectives of ICPD25. It has passed laws, including the Domestic Violence Act, Children’s Act, Sexual Offences Act, and Child Justice Act, where it is a criminal offense to have sex with a child under 16 – regardless of consent.

Goodlucky Kwaramba, MP Zimbabwe, said her country was committed to reducing teenage pregnancies from 21.6% to 12% by 2030 and delivering comprehensive Family Planning services by 2030.

An MP from Eswatini, Sylvia Mthethwa, said her country, with 73 percent of the population below 35 and youth unemployment at 47 percent, was committed to ensuring that youth was front of mind. While senators were mobilizing financial resources, the National Youth Policy and National Youth Operational Plan had been developed.

Meanwhile, in Tanzania, some successes were already recorded Dr Thea Ntara, MP Tanzania, said rural areas were fully supported in the rollout of free ARVs, and adolescent and youth-friendly SRH services have been available in more than 63% of all health facilities since 2017.

Note: The webinar series is based on a recommendation of the African and Asian Parliamentarians’ meeting to Follow-Up on ICPD25 Commitments held in June 2022 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Schools, students and teachers continue to be targeted and attacked in countries around the world. Over the past two years, we have seen a substantial increase in the number of attacks on education. Innocent children, adolescents and teachers are being killed, raped and abducted. Schools and universities are bombed, burned down and used for military purposes. Girls and boys are too scared to walk to school and face intimidation and other attacks. These are severe breaches of international humanitarian law and ultimately – and absolutely – inhumane.

Yasmine Sherif

With the war in Ukraine, unrelenting forced displacement of millions, and armed conflict and violence in countries in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and beyond – exacerbated by the compounding pressures from the climate crisis and COVID-19 – these attacks on education and on human rights are derailing efforts to deliver on our promise of education for all and the other Sustainable Development Goals.

There were more than 5,000 reported attacks on education and incidents of military use of schools and universities, according the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack’s “Education Under Attack 2022” report.

As we unite to #ProtectEducationFromAttack and help realize the 222 Million Dreams of 222 million crisis-affected girls and boys who urgently need education support – ECW and our strategic partners are calling on government donors, the private sector, foundations and high-net-worth individuals to step up and make substantial contributions at Education Cannot Wait’s High-Level Financing Conference, taking place in Geneva in February 2023.

Hosted by Switzerland and Education Cannot Wait – and co-convened by Germany, Niger, Norway and South Sudan – the Financing Conference provides us a chance to deliver on our promise of education for all, to strengthen the protection of schools, students and teachers, and to create safe and more protected learning environments.

222 million crisis-affected girls and boys deserve nothing less than their inherent human right to learn in safety and with dignity.

Yasmine Sherif is Director of Education Cannot Wait.

Delegates from the Zambia All Party Parliamentary Group on Population and Development (ZAPPD) met in Lusaka to develop a strategic plan to tackle population and development issues. Credit: APDA

By Cecilia Russell
Johannesburg, Sep 8 2022 (IPS)

Parliamentarians play a decisive role in addressing population issues, as was demonstrated when the majority voted against a private member motion to end the teaching of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in Zambia in 2020.

However, a Zambia All Party Parliamentary Group on Population and Development (ZAPPD) workshop held in Lusaka also heard that many challenges need addressing. The Zambia All Party Parliamentary Group on Population and Development (ZAPPD) was founded in 1997 to provide capacity on population and development and to strengthen parliamentarians’ commitments. It is one of the first National Committees on population and development, established in the East and Southern African region.

The seminar, supported by the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), was attended by several expert researchers who unpacked the outlook for the developing nation.

Lester Phiri from the Planned Parenthood Association of Zambia (PPAZ) noted that much work was needed for the country to achieve its Vision 2030 goal of becoming a prosperous middle-income country.

Delegates at a ZAPPD workshop heard that significantly high poverty levels, particularly in Zambian rural areas where 76.6 percent of people are considered poor, should be addressed. The workshop delegates contributed to a strategic plan to address population issues. Credit: APDA

Phiri noted that while the economy had grown, with more mothers surviving childbirth and children being healthier and more educated – this did not “automatically lead to overall national development and improved quality of life.”

To achieve Vision 2030, the significantly high poverty levels, particularly in the rural areas where 76.6 percent of people are considered poor, should be addressed.

Unemployment was high, Phiri said, and there was limited access to empowerment programs.

Another issue was the high fertility rates and maternal mortality rate of 252 for every 100 000 births.

Research indicated that at least one-fifth of married women had an unmet need for family planning.

Zambia’s development would benefit from an explained the benefit of a healthy and educated population by addressing family planning.

“Couples with smaller families are better able to provide for their children, save money, and escape poverty,” Phiri said. “In fact, studies show that shifting the age structure of the population can lead to a 47 percent increase in per capita income.”

Of concern was that gender-based violence was high, with nearly half (47 percent) of ever-married women reporting having experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence.

Answering why, if the economy was growing, there was still widespread poverty, Phiri noted that Zamia had one of the fastest-growing populations in the world. By 2030 the population, estimated at 19 million, will have swelled to 24 million and 41 million by 2050.

This meant that at a “community and household level, there are a large number of dependents, which impacts the working population’s ability to save money and escape poverty”.

Phiri advised parliamentarians to work toward improved child survival and reducing fertility by promoting voluntary family planning.

Another issue needing fixing was the high school dropout rate. The benefits to society would be significant if the country increased secondary school completion rates among youth, especially girls. Other programmes should include investment in comprehensive sexuality education and create an enabling policy environment for pre- and post-secondary, and tertiary education economic activity to counter unemployment and promote entrepreneurship.

“If we invest in the health and education of the population, especially women and girls, we may see a different Zambia in the years to come,” Phiri told the workshop.

Ifoma Mulewa, a sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) researcher at the National Assembly of Zambia, said these objectives could be achieved through energetic and committed parliamentarians.

She said MPs should take the initiative to bring motions on population matters; they should participate in population debates in the House and parliamentary committees and through oversight visits.

They could also undertake public hearings to get wider community and stakeholders’ views on population matters.

She called on them to keep the pressure on the Executive to adhere to international protocols on population and growth.

Phiri agreed and said there was inadequate commitment towards population and development in the allocation, disbursement, and utilization of national budgets. It was also crucial to balance legislation – for example, on child marriage, where the statutory versus customary laws were not harmonized.

He said Zambia had a legislative framework to ensure Zambia remains on the path to achieving its Vision 2030 goal, including the Population Policy Implementation Plan (2019-2030), the 8th National Development Plan (2022-2026), the Family Planning Costed Implementation Plan (2021-2026) and a National Strategy on Ending Child Marriage.

It also had polity for youth, including Education Act 2011, the Comprehensive Sexuality Education Framework, and National Youth Policy (2015).

The Gender Equity and Equality Act (2015) ends discrimination against women.

However, MPs should engage more with the community on population and development issues.

The workshop, attended by about 35 participants and 22 parliamentarians, made crucial inputs to a strategic plan on population by ZAPPD. The new members of ZAPPD, under the leadership of Hon Princess Kasune, MP, are aiming to address the Committee’s contribution to implementing ICPD25 commitments.

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An Afghan girl in the Nawabad District of Kabul, Afghanistan. Credit: UNICEF/Mohammad Haya Burhan
 
A year of Taliban rule in Afghanistan has led to a deterioration in the lives of women and girls, affecting all aspects of their human rights, according to a report from three UN agencies. August 2022

By Saber Azam
GENEVA, Sep 7 2022 (IPS)

Afghanistan is where history has taken it! The Trump-Taliban “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan,” signed on 29 February 2020, is deemed by many as the submission of a superpower to a group that had perpetrated acts of extreme ferocity and terror.

The withdrawal of Western countries in August 2021 was the logical ramification of that “peace deal” and the dilapidation of the aspirations of Afghans who believed in democracy, respect for human rights, good governance, the rule of law, and many other attributes that had taken rightfully free societies to fame and gain.

The return of the Taliban to power reserves an unpredictable future for the Central and South Asia region and puts the entire world on alert. Western assertions during the past year that the religious clerics “had changed” or their regime “would improve with time” tallied the same dictions twenty years ago about the corrupt Karzai government.

Never fact-based, such postulations were not clear-sighted and cogent from various perspectives.

However, the Taliban articulate what the Western capitals desire to heed. In addition, falsity and negation of truth have become the daily practice of their leadership. A quick review of the situation since 15 August 2021 reveals drastic reversals in the country.

A – Human Rights and Humanitarian Situations

Human rights, particularly those of women and girls, are the prime prey of the Taliban. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the Independent Human Rights Commission were instantly banned. Instead, the Ministry of Virtues is established to implement archaic dogmas that they attribute to Islamic Sharia.

While children are permitted to attend school, the prospects of secondary and higher education and job opportunity remain unattainable to the female population. In addition to the imposition of total body cover, women are restricted from traveling, visiting a doctor, or reaching a health clinic without a recognized male chaperone, who must be the father, brother, or husband.

In retaliation to the nascent resistance that grows in strength in Central and Northern provinces, reports of young women and girls sexually assaulted and raped by the Taliban militants surface daily. In addition, collective punishment, torture, assassination, and expulsion/forced displacement of civilians, replaced by Taliban sympathizers brought from elsewhere, have increased.

Civil society activists are forbidden, and their demonstrations are viciously suppressed. Many human dignity advocates left the country. Others are arrested, tortured, and in some cases, assassinated.

Despite the Taliban’s impressive repression machinery, dauntless women still express their demands for access to freedom, higher education, and job, either in closed premises or in public, at the cost of their lives. One woman recently mentioned that “their struggle is against submission, dishonor, or suicide!”

Freedom of expression and independent media also befell targets of the new regime. Journalists and bloggers are not free anymore as they have to obey strict guidelines imposed by the Taliban. Reporters, scholars, and artists who freely expressed their opinion exercise no more such privilege. Some were arrested, and others were tortured and even killed. Culture has not been spared.

The Ministry of Virtues prohibited listening to music or performing shows. They focus on the size of men’s beards, people’s sartorial, parting men and women, and preventing unaccompanied ladies from using public transportation.

Ethnic, religious, and linguistic discriminations are manifest. Decision makers around the country are Sunni Pashtuns. The Hazara are deliberately targeted, justifying calls for genocide against them.

At the same time, the Taliban “impose” Pashtu in Dari-speaking provinces. Subsequently, conversations with Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen, and others appear quasi impossible, leading to systematic and senseless harassment.

The Taliban rebuffed recognition of the Shia Jaffary doctrine. Following the Jewish, the remaining Afghan Hindu and Sikh populations had no alternative but to depart the country. The few Christians face unbearable hardship.

The humanitarian situation is devastating. Most educated people lost their jobs and were replaced by religious clerics. Citizens depend on the alms of those residing outside Afghanistan.

In addition to repeated droughts, the recent destructive floods around the country have further deteriorated the conditions of ordinary people. The Taliban misappropriating international humanitarian aid has been reported in multiple instances, and sites.

B – Security Situation

The Taliban are a divided organization. Their leadership does not seem to have authority over the foot soldiers. Despite their spiritual leader’s amnesty to former security officers, hundreds of them have been brutally assassinated.

Resistance fronts in Panjshir, Baghlan, Takhar, Kapisa, Parwan, Badakhshan, Sari Pol, and many other provinces have gained strength. The Taliban suffer hefty losses in these mountainous areas.

Subsequently, they target civilians, including women and children, accusing them of helping the resistance and apply the “Discovery Doctrine.” Some already speak of war crimes.

In addition, over 100 incidents of explosive weapons have been recorded in the country. Recruitment by the Taliban of youngsters in the south to fight in the north will inevitably deepen the divide in Afghanistan. Reports of one million internally displaced and many more fleeing the country seem credible.

Fatal border clashes have occurred with neighboring Iran, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Despite the Taliban’s denial, the presence of notorious regional and international terrorist organizations in Afghanistan cannot be refuted, transforming this country into a haven for evildoers.

The killing of Ayman Al-Zawahiri in Kabul supports the above assertion. Some foreign militants fight alongside the Taliban; others pursue their specific objectives. Confrontation with numerous resistance fronts would likely intensify in the near future.

C – Political Situation

Similar to communists, the Taliban are inspired by deleterious ideologies. They derive their philosophy, policies, and actions from “self-defined” doctrines that are often contradictory even to the fundamentals of Islam. International norms for human dignity are ignored. The regime’s effort for international legitimacy has so far dramatically failed.

The willingness of the world community to provide humanitarian aid has been presented to the Afghan people as “de facto recognition” of their regime. The West bears a heavy responsibility for the current situation.

Their capitals deliberately trusted the Taliban rhetoric to justify their failure and hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. However, the current contentious debate in the UN Security Council on the travel of the Taliban leaders may be a sign of change in the right direction.

There seems to be no place for democratic institutions in the Islamic Emirate. The “Supreme Leader,” assisted by a selected group of “religious scholars,” defines and decides everything. Under such circumstances, it would be challenging for the International Community to recognize the Taliban regime.

D- Economic Situation

Prior to the arrival of the Taliban, there was no viable economy in Afghanistan. Lack of proper vision and planning, rampant corruption, mismanagement, nepotism of the rulers, politicians, and senior managers, and many other misdeeds had gangrened public and private sectors. Since August 2021, the situation has worsened.

The Taliban appointed religious clerics to run each sector of the government (security, political, social, economic, financial, humanitarian, public relations, etc.) Those who could assist have either been sidelined or left the country. Afghanistan is in a terrible economic situation.

Despite numerous hydroelectric dams, Central Asian countries provide electricity to Afghans. Kazakhstan and India have provided significant quantities of wheat. And the International Community continues providing humanitarian assistance to delay or avert a looming calamity.

Conclusions

A new corrupt “Taliban elite” is being formed. They desperately lobby the Western countries for the sustention of their regime. Afghans have lost trust in bilateral or multilateral foreign security, humanitarian, and development actions.

World superpowers seem to compete to assert their supremacy in Central and South Asia. It can lead to another prolonged phase of instability! Though it is difficult to predict the corollaries of the current situation, the following would constitute the basis of sound assertions:

1 – Afghanistan is central to peace, stability, and security in Central and South Asia.

2 – The Taliban cannot govern Afghanistan alone. Their zealous effort to convince the Afghan people and the International Community that they are the right choice to govern the country failed. However, they would not share power. Therefore, insecurity will increase, and soon they will lose territory to the resistance. Lawlessness will intensify, and Afghanistan could face a “fractured country-like” situation. Human rights and humanitarian situations would severely worsen.

3 – Superpowers may destabilize each other’s interests through diverse internal and foreign groups rooted in Afghanistan. Neighboring countries would try to safeguard their interests using ethnic and/or religious affinities. The country could face the serious challenge of disintegration and the region the possibility of lengthy conflicts.

4 – To ensure that Afghanistan poses no threat, its entire political, social, and economic structures must alter with the sincere assistance of the International Community. The Afghan society has dramatically changed; previous government formulas and leaders proved futile.

For nearly three centuries, the centralized government has not served the population equitably. The so-called “peace agreements” and “all-inclusive governments” never proved efficient as they did not address the root causes of the repeated conflicts.

There is an urgent need to invest in a new generation of leaders from within the country and support them to identify the main grounds of dispute, disparity, injustice, and unhappiness. New good-governance formulas must be agreed upon. A unique Afghan-led peace process in which national, regional, and international dimensions of the puzzle are addressed must be sponsored and backed unequivocally. Any foreign interference would cause disruption and further deteriorate the situation.

The link to Afghanistan: What Went Wrong https://www.ipsnews.net/2022/08/afghanistan-went-wrong/.

Saber Azam is a former official of the United Nations and author of Soraya: The Other Princess, Hell’s Mouth: A Journey to the Heart of West African jungles, and numerous political and scientific articles [https://www.saberazam.com].

IPS UN Bureau

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As we approach this year’s Transforming Education Summit, global leaders can and must prioritize expertise and mobilize political will to support efforts to ensure inclusive and quality education for all, especially girls. This is at the heart of Sustainable Development Goal 4 in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well as the commitments made in the Charlevoix Declaration and the G7 Declaration on Girls’ Education.

Helen Grant

Despite the progress made in recent decades, gender inequality between girls and boys, in all their diversity, is deepening. According to a recent United Nations report, the interlinked crises: of armed conflicts, climate change and COVID-19 are putting the 2030 Agenda in “grave danger, along with humanity’s very own survival.” These multiplying challenges are “creating spin-off impacts on food and nutrition, health, education, the environment, and peace and security, and affecting all the Sustainable Development Goals.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened the global learning crisis. Approximately 147 million children missed over half of in-person learning in 2020 and 2021 and it is estimated that 50% of refugee girls in secondary school may not return, when their classrooms reopen after COVID-19, whilst 222 million girls were not able to be reached by remote learning during the pandemic.

Shocking new estimates published by Education Cannot Wait (ECW) indicate that 222 million school-aged children caught in crises globally are in urgent need of access to a quality education. These include 78.2 million who are out of school – a majority (54%) of whom are girls – and 119.6 million who are in school but not achieving minimum competencies in mathematics or reading.

Yasmine Sherif

Girls impacted by the horrors of war and displacement in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Ukraine and Yemen face even greater risks, such as gender-based violence, early child-marriage and unwanted pregnancies.

The banning of secondary girls’ education in Afghanistan is especially intolerable. In the past year, girls were estimated to be more than twice as likely to be out of school, and nearly twice as likely to be going to bed hungry compared to boys.

This is the global picture as we approach, Transforming Education Summit, and why it is such a critical moment for girls education around the world.

ECW’s Case for Investment

ECW’s new Case for Investment is our case for humanity. It speaks up for girls’ rights to a 12-year education everywhere, not least in contexts of humanitarian crisis. It is our collective responsibility to deliver on the promise of 222 Million Dreams and the Sustainable Development Goals.

According to ECW’s recent Annual Results Report, conflict, forced displacement, climate-induced disasters and the compounding effect of the COVID-19 pandemic fueled increased education in emergencies needs with funding appeals reaching US$2.9 billion in 2021, compared with US$1.4 billion in 2020. While 2021 saw a record-high US$645 million in education appeal funding – the overall funding gap spiked by 17%, from 60% in 2020 to 77% in 2021.

Financing for education has not aligned with the deepening and growing needs. The gap has only widened.

It is only by closing this gap that we protect girls, support gender equality and empower the next generation of female leaders, teachers, lawyers, doctors and nurses.

Investing in 50% of a country’s population, its girls, is the best investment we can make. For every dollar invested in girls’ education, we see $2.80 in return. And a World Bank study estimates that the “limited educational opportunities for girls, and barriers to completing 12 years of education, cost countries between $15 and $30 trillion in lost lifetime productivity and earnings.”

The United Kingdom is a leading donor to Education Cannot Wait, and its support has allowed Education Cannot Wait and its strategic partners to have reached close to 7 million children and adolescents since 2016. In 2021 alone, the Fund reached 3.7 million children across 32 countries and an additional 11.8 million through COVID-19 interventions. Of all children reached by ECW’s investments to date, over 48% are girls, and 92% of programmes demonstrated an improvement in gender parity.

The Transforming Education Summit, and this year’s UN General Assembly will be a critical moment to address these challenges, and to assess the efficiency, effectiveness, scalability, sustainability and overall return-on-investment of ongoing and new initiatives and works streams as we look to increase girls access to quality education.

Delivering on Our Promise

Hosted by Switzerland and Education Cannot Wait – and co-convened by Germany, Niger, Norway and South Sudan – ECW’s 2023 High-Level Financing Conference offers an opportunity for leaders to turn these commitments into action.

We urge people everywhere to show their support for #222MillionDreams and #Everygirleverywhere with posts on social, individual donations, letters to your elected officials and calls to actions through the broad group of strategic partners.

Now is our chance to deliver on our promise of universal, equitable education. Now is our chance to transform girls’ education to transform the world. Now is our chance to deliver with humanity and for humanity.

About the Authors

Helen Grant is a Member of UK Parliament and the United Kingdom’s Special Envoy for Girls’ Education, leading the UK’s efforts internationally to ensure all girls get 12 years of quality education. Prior to politics, Helen was a children and family lawyer for 23 years.

Yasmine Sherif is the Director of Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises. A lawyer specialized in International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Law (LL.M), she has over 30 years of experience with the United Nations and international NGOs.

IPS UN Bureau

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Women receive food rations at a food distribution site in Herat, Afghanistan. Credit: UNICEF/Sayed Bidel

By Sima Bahous
NEW YORK, Aug 15 2022 (IPS)

In the year that has passed since the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan we have seen daily and continuous deterioration in the situation of Afghan women and girls. This has spanned every aspect of their human rights, from living standards to social and political status.

It has been a year of increasing disrespect for their right to live free and equal lives, denying them opportunity to livelihoods, access to health care and education, and escape from situations of violence.

The Taliban’s meticulously constructed policies of inequality set Afghanistan apart. It is the only country in the world where girls are banned from going to high school. There are no women in the Taliban’s cabinet, no Ministry of Women’s Affairs, thereby effectively removing women’s right to political participation.

Women are, for the most part, also restricted from working outside the home, and are required to cover their faces in public and to have a male chaperone when they travel. Furthermore, they continue to be subjected to multiple forms of Gender Based Violence.

This deliberate slew of measures of discrimination against Afghanistan’s women and girls is also a terrible act of self-sabotage for a country experiencing huge challenges including from climate-related and natural disasters to exposure to global economic headwinds that leave some 25 million Afghan people in poverty and many hungry.

The exclusion of women from all aspects of life robs the people of Afghanistan of half their talent and energies. It prevents women from leading efforts to build resilient communities and shrinks Afghanistan’s ability to recover from crisis.

There is a clear lesson from humanity’s all too extensive experience of crisis. Without the full participation of women and girls in all aspects of public life there is little chance of achieving lasting peace, stability and economic development.

That is why we urge the de facto authorities to open schools for all girls, to remove constraints on women’s employment and their participation in the politics of their nation, and to revoke all decisions and policies that strip women of their rights. We call for ending all forms of violence against women and girls.

We urge the de facto authorities to ensure that women journalists, human rights defenders, and civil society actors enjoy freedom of expression, have access to information and can work freely and independently, without fear of reprisal or attack.

The international community’s support for women’s rights and its investment in women themselves are more important than ever: in services for women, in jobs and women-led businesses, and in women leaders and women’s organizations.

This includes not only support to the provision of humanitarian assistance but also continued and unceasing efforts at the political level to bring about change.

UN Women has remained in country throughout this crisis and will continue to do so. We are steadfast in our support to Afghan women and girls alongside our partners and donors.

We are scaling up the provision of life-saving services for women, by women, to meet overwhelming needs. We are supporting women-led businesses and employment opportunities across all sectors to help lift the country out of poverty.

We are also investing in women-led civil society organizations to support the rebuilding of the women’s movement. As everywhere in the world, civil society is a key driver of progress and accountability on women’s rights and gender equality.

Every day, we advocate for restoring, protecting, and promoting the full spectrum of women’s and girls’ rights. We are also creating spaces for Afghan women themselves to advocate for their right to live free and equal lives.

One year on, with women’s visibility so diminished and rights so severely impacted, it is vital to direct targeted, substantial, and systematic funding to address and reverse this situation and to facilitate women’s meaningful participation in all stakeholder engagement on Afghanistan, including in delegations that meet with Taliban officials.

Decades of progress on gender equality and women’s rights have been wiped out in mere months. We must continue to act together, united in our insistence on guarantees of respect for the full spectrum of women’s rights, including to education, work, and participation in public and political life.

We must continue to make a collective and continuous call on the Taliban leadership to fully comply with the binding obligations under international treaties to which Afghanistan is a party.

And we must continue to elevate the voices of Afghan women and girls who are fighting every day for their right to live free and equal lives. Their fight is our fight. What happens to women and girls in Afghanistan is our global responsibility.

IPS UN Bureau

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Excerpt:

Credit: UNICEF/Noorani

UN human rights experts are warning of a direct link between the pandemic, socio-economic vulnerability and the risk of exploitation, including forced labour or being sold, trafficked and sexually exploited.

The UN commemorated the World Day Against Trafficking in Persons on July 30.

By Tsitsi Matekaire and Tara Carey
LONDON, Aug 1 2022 (IPS)

It is often those least responsible for causing climate change that suffer the most from the impacts. And such is the case with women and girls in Malawi – one of the world’s poorest and lowest carbon-emitting countries but ranked fifth in the Global Climate Index 2021 list of nations worst affected by climate-related extreme weather.

Climate change exacerbates sexual and gender-based violence in numerous ways, pushing people further into poverty, enflaming conflict over depleting natural resources, forcing migration, and compounding pre-existing gender discrimination. All these and many other forces conspire to put vulnerable women and girls in greater danger of sexual abuse and exploitation.

A recent study by Cambridge University analyzing scientific literature on extreme weather events found that gender-based violence — such as sexual assault, intimate partner violence, or trafficking, both during and after disasters — are recurring issues in studies worldwide.

In Malawi, the climate crisis is already triggering more erratic and extreme weather, resulting in chronic water, food, and financial insecurity for millions. Over the past twenty years, droughts and floods have increased in intensity, frequency, and scale, causing devasting environmental, social, and economic damage.

Around 9 out of 10 people in Malawi depend on rain-fed agriculture, and over half the population is food insecure. Rising temperatures, unreliable rains, and extreme weather events like cyclones influence food production and costs.

The economic downturn triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine, which has disrupted global supplies of cereals and fertilizers, have pushed prices up further.

According to World Bank data, 82% of Malawi’s population live in rural areas, and women account for 65% of smallholder farmers, making them particularly exposed to food insecurity. Women are often dependent on natural resources, and many earn a living in the informal sector, leaving them less able to withstand economic and environmental shocks.

Climate change is a threat multiplier

Climate change is not just an environmental problem – it acts as a “threat multiplier” interacting with social systems to exacerbate systemic inequalities. So, although everyone is affected by the ravages of the climate crisis, the vulnerability of individuals varies depending on their gender, geography, class, ethnicity, and age.

Global warming and environmental damage are gendered because the ability of women to adapt is hampered by their social status and limited income, education, and resources. Women are more likely to live in poverty than men and commonly have less schooling, decision-making power, and access to finance.

When yields from harvests are reduced, this leaves subsistence farmers with little or no surplus produce to sell to earn money for purchasing basics like medicine, clothes, sanitary products, schooling, and agricultural inputs for bolstering farming production.

Being unable to produce enough food to feed their families or pay for other essentials puts women under intense pressure to find alternative sources of income. This renders them more susceptible to sexual exploitation, which can take various forms such as transactional sex in exchange for goods, and being trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation.

Family financial hardship also disproportionately affects girls, who are frequently pressured to drop out of school to do domestic work and find paid employment. This, in turn, increases their susceptibility to exploitation, including false promises made by traffickers about jobs and education further afield.

In addition, girls experience higher rates of child and forced marriage, as parents may view marriage as a coping strategy to elevate monetary difficulties and shield daughters from sexual violence. It is estimated that around 1.5 million girls in Malawi are at risk of becoming child brides as a direct result of climate change.

There are other ways that existing gender roles interplay with climate change and sexual violence. In Malawi and across sub-Saharan Africa, gathering water and firewood is widely deemed the responsibility of women and girls. A lack of clean water and depletion of natural resources caused by environmental degradation means they often have to travel further to acquire scarce resources.

Not only does this use up precious unpaid time that could be spent on beneficial activities such as income generation or schooling, but it also heightens their exposure to rape and sexual assault. And in some instances, women and girls must contend with sexual exploitation and abuse by those who control access to limited natural resources, such as at water collection points.

The system is failing victims of sexual and gender-based violence

For the vast majority of victims of trafficking, sexual violence, and exploitation, justice goes unserved. Caleb Ng’ombo runs People Serving Girls at Risk (PSGR), a frontline organization in Malawi that works to end human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation, prostitution, and child marriages.

Caleb explains, “Victims are being failed by Malawi’s criminal justice system. Few cases make it to court. Those that do are plagued by multiple delays, and perpetrators are rarely punished.”

“Child marriage, sexual exploitation, and trafficking have blighted the lives of thousands of women and girls across Malawi, and the worsening climate crisis is putting more at greater risk. The government should not turn a blind eye to gender-based human rights violations. Addressing these problems must be central to climate response, including disaster and adaption planning.”

Malawi is a source, transit, and destination country for sex trafficking, and climate crisis is fueling it. PSGR and international women’s rights organization Equality Now have submitted a joint complaint to the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC) highlighting the poor implementation of anti-trafficking legislation by the Government of Malawi is leaving girls unprotected against sex trafficking.

Malawi’s criminal justice system needs to respond better to the realities and needs of survivors, including safeguarding them against further exploitation and ensuring support services are readily available.

Effectively addressing this crisis requires a gender-responsive, human rights-based approach from the state, one that targets the root causes of gender discrimination.

Climate change also demands action from wealthy industrialized nations that bare the largest responsible for global warming due to their high emissions, both historical and current.

Around the world, a growing climate justice movement is calling for Global North governments to provide countries like Malawi with international finance for climate adaption, restitution for damages already caused, and national debt cancellation so money can be redirected towards supporting those in need, in particular women and girls and other marginalized groups.

With global temperatures continuing to rise, it is vital that laws, policies, and funding deliver on the distinct vulnerabilities and requirements of women and girls so they are protected against gender-based violence and better able to cope with future climate shocks.

Tsitsi Matekaire is the Global Lead on End Sexual Exploitation at Equality Now and Tara Carey Head of Media.

IPS UN Bureau

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Sandy Recinos Executive Secretary against Sexual Violence, Exploitation and Trafficking in Persons (SVET) from Guatemala - Former congresswoman Rosi Orozco from México - Ann Basham Chief Executive Officer at Ascend ConsultingUnited State.
Mobile Units for the Prevention of Sexual Violence, Exploitation and Human Trafficking “UNIVET”, which allows sharing information, preventing these crimes and also promoting the culture of reporting among its inhabitants. Credit: Rosi Orozco

By Rosi Orozco
MEXICO CITY, Jul 12 2022 (IPS)

This is an alert message: if nothing stops the wave of violence in Mexico, by the end of 2024 the country could exceed the figure of 150,000 missing persons.

Just on May 17, Mexico crossed a the ultimate horror border: officially there are more than 100,000 people who cannot be located. The equivalent of the evaporation of two and a half times the population of Monaco. Most of those people are victims of organized crime.

It is an old problem in Mexico, but it has taken a new turn in recent months: in its most recent report, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances recognized that since 2006 the phenomenon has been concentrated in men between 15 and 40 years, but the pandemic changed that profile. Now, the great national drama focuses on girls and boys from 12 to 35 years old.

The coronavirus opened gaps in inequality and poverty like no other natural phenomenon. Sexual violence, human trafficking, and femicides increased in Mexico, and forced disappearances became an effective means to hide those crimes. Criminals act with a perverse idea: without a body, there is no crime and therefore no punishment.

The problem is so severe that the Mexican government has recognized that the number of girls and women has skyrocketed in recent months to more than 24,600 women waiting to be located. Many of them are not even 10 years old.

One of the latest national sorrows is a young woman called Debanhi Susana Escobar Bazaldúa, 18 years old, who disappeared on April 8 in Nuevo León, México, on a highway that reaches Texas, United States.

Her search kept the country in suspense after a photograph was released where she appeared alone and at dawn waiting for a taxi to return home after attending a party. The image became a symbol of fear and hope.

Magistrate Delia Davila and Former Congresswoman Rosi Orozco after a meeting with specialized judges to deal with human trafficking. Credit: Rosi Orozco

But after 13 days of searching, his body was found at the bottom of a hotel cistern frequented by human traffickers. While she was wanted alive, five more missing women were found. The causes of Debanhi Susana Escobar’s death are still unclear, but the family points to a crime of a sexual nature.

The death of the young woman who dreamed of being a lawyer strucked a chord in a country numbed to the horrors of human trafficking. And amid a pain that seems to make no sense, her father demanded that the life of Debanhi Susana Escobar be a symbol against the wave of missing women.

The mourning of Debanhi Susana Escobar’s family comes at a crucial moment for Mexico if we want to avoid reaching 150,000 disappeared people in the next two years.

On one hand, the Mexican Senate president, Olga Sánchez Cordero, close to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is promoting a series of reforms to the national general law against human trafficking that prevents the sexual exploitation of women in prostitution.

Senator Sánchez Cordero’s intention also seeks to punish whoever maintains a house of prostitution, which includes its administration, lease, or financing. That measure would meant a heavy blow to the human trafficking networks that make girls and women disappear.

This initiative comes as Mexico celebrates 10 years of the general law against human trafficking, promulgated in 2012. This law has been praised by international experts —such as the Spanish prosecutor Beatriz Sanchez, who is already studying Mexican legislation as an inspiration to create a comprehensive law and abolitionist in her country.

There’s another international experience on the southern border in Mexico from which we can all learn: in Guatemala a successful experiment is being carried out to stop sexual and labor exploitation with a novel approach.

For example, leaders like Justice Delia Dávila have taken on the responsibility of training judges to specialize in investigating human trafficking. The judges issue sentences in favor of the victims and work together with civil society, such as the World Vision organization.

In addition, Guatemala has a vehicle project known as UNIVET, which reaches the most remote communities to carry out prevention and education work for vulnerable girls, adolescents, and women.

In this way, Guatemala is at the forefront in Latin America by creating a national strategy against human exploitation, giving it the priority that this crime deserves, which is the second most lucrative globally.

The efforts in Mexico, Spain, France, Guatemala and dozens of countries with an abolitionist approach make us believe that it is possible to achieve what cynical voices tell us will be impossible: stop the trend of violence that will lead us to 150,000 disappeared people.

We have to do it for Debanhi Susana Escobar. For his family and the legacy they want to leave this country. For each missing person, for each survivor, for each future girl. For Mexico.

This is an alert message: we still have time. Let’s be brave and push for the changes that the most vulnerable need.

IPS UN Bureau

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The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted lives all over the world. According to this report, gender is emerging as a significant factor in the social, economic and health effects of Covid-19. Women have been hit much harder socially and economically than men. The greatest and most persistent gender gap was seen in employment and uncompensated labour, with 26% of women reporting loss of work compared with 20% of men globally in September 2021.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

UNESCO has projected almost 11 million girls might not return to school due to Covid-19’s unprecedented education disruption. This alarming number not only threatens “decades of progress made towards gender equality, but also puts girls around the world at risk of adolescent pregnancy, early and forced marriage and violence,” states this report. As almost 90% of the world’s countries have shut their schools in efforts to slow the transmission, this study estimates that 20 million more secondary school-aged girls could be out of school after the crisis has passed.

“The world has changed, and these changes are impacting women. Poverty has deepened, the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women are under attack, climate change is upon us, and changes in technology are also disproportionately impacting women. The world is facing a gender divide,” says Dr Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Chair of the Board at Women Deliver and former United Nations (UN) Under Secretary General and Executive Director of UN Women in an exclusive interview given to IPS News.

The impact of Covid-19 pandemic has threatened to reverse decades of progress made towards gender equality. Mlambo-Ngcuka says, in the last decade the world was heading in the right direction including addressing extreme poverty, but now things have changed.

“The pandemic has hit women disproportionately and young women, women are now facing food insecurity in a significant way, and of course we’ve seen that the conflicts have not ended, they have escalated. We have the war in Ukraine, and as you may know any situation that creates a humanitarian crisis, women are always likely to be the ones that pay the price more than men bearing arms. Women and children tend to be affected much more and then of course an increase in gender-based violence in trafficking of women,” says Mlambo-Ngcuka.

Women have faced compounding burdens from being over-represented working in health systems, to facing increased risks of violence, exploitation, abuse or harassment during times of crisis and quarantine. Women have been at the forefront of the battle against the pandemic as they make up almost 70% of the healthcare workforce, exposing them to greater risk of infection, while they are under-represented in leadership and decision-making processes in the healthcare sector.

This crisis and its subsequent shutdown response resulted in dramatic increase in unpaid emotional and care burden on women and families, women were already doing most of the world’s unpaid care work prior to the onset of the pandemic, only to have it increased since 2020.

Worldwide, women lost more than 65 million jobs in 2020 alone, resulting in an estimated US$800 billion loss of income, an estimate which doesn’t even include wages lost by the millions of women working in the informal economy – domestic workers, market vendors and garment workers – who have been sent home or whose hours have been drastically cut. COVID-19 has dealt a striking blow to recent gains for women in the workforce.

“Honestly, my heart goes out to our young people today just because of the difficulties we are facing. I do want to challenge older people like myself to really open the space through collaborations and co-creations with younger people, their involvement and engagement should not be token, but real.

“It’s important for us to mobilize allies from the other side so that it is not always women who are knocking on doors, there must be someone inside who is trying to open the door for you. Working with men and pushing an agenda for men to stand for gender equality is also very important. I go back to emphasizing on the need to have policies, we always must open a door for more people to come in and be empowered,” says Mlambo-Ngcuka.

However, one area where women stood out was where data supported the fact that countries led by women handled Covid-19 much better than their male counterparts. Countries with female leaders tend to have lower Covid-19 death rates and better economic performance, but the number of countries with women in executive government positions continues to remain low. As of 1 September 2021, there are only 26 women serving as Heads of State or government in 24 countries.

Whether it is balanced political participation, leadership roles in organizations or power-sharing between women and men, Mlambo-Ngcuka believes the answer lies in setting targets, quotas and policies for effective participation and representation of women.

“We need to have mechanisms for accountability towards those who are responsible for implementing these measures, and we also need women themselves to continue making demands, we must balance what happens in boardrooms policy-wise and outside through those who are carrying black cards.

“It’s hard to talk about progress but you cannot deny that there are more women leaders than before, that’s for sure there are more women in the labour force, more girls in schools, but our best is not good enough, there is still much more for us to do,” says Mlambo-Ngcuka.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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