Day: September 10, 2022

In the face of the crisis, the World Bank is deploying short- and long-term responses to boost food and nutrition security, reduce risks, and strengthen food systems.

These actions form part of the institution’s global response to the ongoing food security crisis, with up to $30 billion in existing and new projects in areas spanning agriculture, nutrition, social protection, water, and irrigation. This financing will include efforts to encourage food and fertilizer production, enhance food systems, facilitate greater trade, and support vulnerable households and producers.

Soaring prices

The shockwaves of the conflict are expected to have complex, long-lasting impacts for the world. Global prices are forecast to remain at historically high levels through the end of 2024, and the war is altering patterns of trade and production in ways that will aggravate food insecurity and inflation. These jolts come after two years of COVID-19 pandemic disruption, creating a blow to an already fragile global food system grappling with climate extremes.

Markets in the Sahel and across West and Central Africa are experiencing stark price rises of oil, rice, wheat and other commodities on the international market, and poorer households spend disproportionately more on food than those better off. The price of wheat, a food staple for many households, stood 60% higher at the start of June 2022 compared to January 2021, according to World Bank data.

The price of fertilisers too, essential for productive agriculture, has surged since the war and now stands almost three times higher than a year ago. The knock-on effect is expected to reduce food production over the coming years as soaring prices force many farmers to use less fertiliser.

Tackling root causes

The World Bank is mobilising support for emergency responses in the Sahel and West Africa to help countries at risk of food insecurity respond faster. It is also working with its humanitarian partners to monitor regional food insecurity and draw up Food Security Preparedness Plans.

The challenge of boosting the region’s food and nutrition security is also demanding long-term responses. And, as many root causes—and consequences—of food insecurity defy national borders, regional approaches are being adopted to build food systems resilience across Western and Central African countries.

The $716 million Food System Resilience Program (FSRP) is one such approach. It aims to benefit more than four million people in West Africa by increasing agricultural productivity through climate-smart agriculture, promoting intraregional value chains, and building regional capacity to manage agricultural risks.

The Great Green Wall

As food systems in the Sahel and West Africa face exceptional stress, there is also a growing demand for more climate-smart investments to support countries where communities face the compounded effects of climate change, conflict, and unprecedented environmental degradation.

The African-led Great Green Wall is a major regional initiative that promises such climate-smart solutions to transform both the region’s economies and ecosystems. By 2030, it seeks to restore some 100 million hectares of degraded land and generate 10 million jobs in rural areas, supporting people’s ability to respond and adapt to climate risks. The World Bank has committed to invest $5.6 billion between 2020 and 2025 in 11 countries taking part. Over 60 projects are focused on transforming livelihoods in the Great Green Wall through landscape restoration, improved food systems, and access to climate-resilient infrastructure.

Tangible results

“Before, I used chemical fertiliser every year and I could go through 20 or 30 bags of it,” says farmer Nama Boureima in Sapouy, Burkina Faso, one of hundreds benefiting from biodigesters installed in the country.

By adding a mix of cow manure and water to biodigesters, farmers can generate renewable biogas for cooking and organic fertiliser for their fields. This reduces CO2 emissions by capturing methane emitted by the manure, while lowering pressure on forest resources previously used for household fuel.

“Now I don’t worry anymore about the fertiliser problem,” Boureima says.

His farm illustrates some of the sweeping changes in progress under the Great Green Wall. Some 270,000 hectares of land have been brought under sustainable management in Burkina Faso; more than 2,500 micro-projects have been financed; 1.5 million people have seen their monetary benefits from forest products increase; and 10 million tons of CO2 have been reduced or avoided.

About 12.5 million people benefited from the US$900 million Nigeria Erosion and Watershed Project (NEWMAP) that reinforced the country’s ability to fight erosion, natural hazards and disasters, while creating 20,000 direct and 32,000 indirect jobs through Sovereign Green Bonds — a first for Africa.

In Niger, additional yields of as much as 58% have been achieved by agro-sylvo-pastoral communities thanks to training on climate-smart strategies.

Green future

As global food security challenges mount, tapping the potential of these ambitious climate-smart investments is seen as essential for making the region’s economy more resilient, achieving inclusive growth, and combating food insecurity.

“When these elements are put together, not only does it transform the economy, but jobs are created too. That allows young Africans to stay in Africa and make a living from their work by being in Africa,” says the World Bank’s Diagana.

Source: World Bank

Seventy-seventh session

Item 69 (c) of the provisional agenda*

Promotion and protection of human rights: human rights

situations and reports of special rapporteurs and representatives

The Secretary-General has the honour to transmit to the General Assembly the report of the Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, Gerard Quinn, submitted in accordance with Human Rights Council resolution 44/10.

Summary

In the present report the Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, Gerard Quinn, examines the protection of the rights of persons with disabilities in the context of military operations. The report focuses on the implementation and application of obligations under international humanitarian law towards persons with disabilities during the conduct of hostilities.

I. Introduction

The present report is submitted by the Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, Gerard Quinn, to the General Assembly. It contains a thematic study on the protection of the rights of persons with disabilities in military operations.

In preparing the report, the Special Rapporteur engaged in extensive regional consultations (in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa). The Special Rapporteur would like to thank the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the International Disability Alliance and the Diakonia International Humanitarian Law Centre for coordinating and assisting in the facilitation of the regional consultations. These first-of-their-kind consultations, bringing together the military with disability civil society, proved highly instructive. They lay the groundwork for continued dialogue of this kind in the future.

As part of the development process for the report, the Special Rapporteur also analysed the responses to a questionnaire addressed to States, their militaries, national human rights institutions, specialized agencies of the United Nations, persons with disabilities and their representative organizations. The Special Rapporteur received a total of 22 written inputs and expresses his deep appreciation to all respondents for their insightful contributions and cooperative demeanour.

This report is the second in a three-part series on armed conflicts and disability. The first – presented in 2021 to the General Assembly – assessed the overall visibility of persons with disabilities along all points on the conflict/peace continuum, from conflict prevention to the conduct of hostilities, to evacuation and humanitarian relief, to peacekeeping and to peacebuilding (A/76/146). It found that persons with disabilities were relatively to absolutely invisible along all points on this continuum. To build on this foundation, the Special Rapporteur resolved to produce a more focused report on the implementation and application of obligations under international humanitarian law towards persons with disabilities during the conduct of hostilities.

The third and final thematic report in this series will be presented in 2023, and will focus on peacebuilding and disability, including accountability for past wrongs. It will round out the series by focusing on how to make more intentional space in peacebuilding processes for the voices of persons with disabilities, who have key insights into rebuilding broken societies and creating a more resilient and sustainable future for the benefit of all. These three reports may be seen as a focused and coherent contribution to larger debates in the United Nations system threading together peace and security with human rights, and particularly as they touch on the rights of persons with disabilities.

The purpose of this report is not to paint a picture of a more inclusive kind of warfare. Far from it. It is predicated on the essential illegality of all warfare under the Charter of the United Nations and aims at drastically reducing the lethality of armed conflict as experienced by one of the world’s largest minorities, persons with disabilities.

Source: UN General Assembly

Nigeria’s economy continued to be resilient, and maintains an upward trajectory, despite disruptions in the global economy, Nigerian President, Muhammadu Buhari said, yesterday.

Buhari, while inaugurating an 11-man Presidential Committee, on the National Economy in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, said, the loss of substantial volumes of oil, the mainstay of the economy, as well as, the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, had brought negative impacts on the economy of Africa’s most populous country.

“Starting with COVID-19, and now the conflict in Ukraine, the past three years have been turbulent ones for the global economy. Global interdependence has become more apparent as we had to deal with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity,” the Nigerian leader said.

He said, while the global economy was largely affected by challenges, which include lockdowns as COVID-19 raged – with disruptions to supply chains around the world and sharp fluctuations in prices, the Nigerian economy continued to show resilience and growth, despite the adverse effects of rising interest rates, a stronger U.S. dollar and higher inflation across the world.

Buhari charged the national economic committee to look inward in addressing the issues peculiar to Nigeria.

Last month, Nigeria, one of Africa’s largest oil producers, recorded a decline in the production of crude oil, with an estimation that the country produced less than one million barrels per day, Buhari said. This is a figure far less than the target of 1.88 million barrels per day, in the president’s 2022 national budget speech, in Oct, 2021.

He attributed the fall in oil production to be “essentially due to economic sabotage.”

The newly inaugurated economic committee, headed by Buhari, will, according to the president, bring together all policymakers responsible for the economy, to share a common understanding and approach towards solving the economic challenges in a swift and efficient manner.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

Voice-operated smartphones are aiming at a vast yet widely overlooked market in sub-Saharan Africa — the tens of millions of people who face huge challenges in life because they cannot read or write.

In Ivory Coast, a so-called “Superphone” using a vocal assistant that responds to commands in a local language is being pitched to the large segment of the population — as many as 40 percent — who are illiterate.

Developed and assembled locally, the phone is designed to make everyday tasks more accessible, from understanding a document and checking a bank balance to communicating with government agencies.

“I’ve just bought this phone for my parents back home in the village, who don’t know how to read or write,” said Floride Jogbe, a young woman who was impressed by adverts on social media.

She believed the 60,000 CFA francs ($92) she forked out was money well spent.

The smartphone uses an operating system called “Kone” that is unique to the Cerco company, and covers 17 languages spoken in Ivory Coast, including Baoule, Bete, and Dioula, as well as 50 other African languages.

Cerco hopes to expand this to 1,000 languages, reaching half of the continent’s population, thanks to help from a network of 3,000 volunteers.

The goal is to address the “frustration” illiterate people feel with technology that requires them to be able to read or write or spell effectively, said Cerco president Alain Capo-Chichi, a Benin national.

“Various institutions set down the priority of making people literate before making technology available to them,” he told AFP.

“Our way skips reading and writing and goes straight to integrating people into economic and social life.”

Of the 750 million adults around the world who cannot read or write, 27 percent live south of the Sahara, according to UN figures for 2016, the latest year for which data is available.

The continent also hosts nearly 2,000 languages, some of which are spoken by tens of millions of people and are used for inter-ethnic communication, while others are dialects with a small geographical spread.

Lack of numbers or economic clout often means these languages are overlooked by developers who have already devised vocal assistants for languages in bigger markets.

Twi and Kiswahili

Other companies investing in the voice-operation field in Africa include Mobobi, which has created a Twi language voice assistant in Ghana called Abena AI, while Mozilla is working on an assistant in Kiswahili, which has an estimated 100 million speakers in East Africa.

Telecommunications expert Jean-Marie Akepo questioned whether voice operation needed the platform of a dedicated mobile phone.

Existing technology “manages to satisfy people”, he said.

“With the voice message services offered by WhatsApp, for example, a large part of the problem has already been solved.”

Instead of a new phone, he recommended “software with local languages that could be installed on any smartphone”.

The Ivorian phone is being produced at the ICT and Biotechnology Village in Grand-Bassam, a free-trade zone located near the Ivorian capital.

It came about through close collaboration with the government. The company pays no taxes or customs duties and the assembly plant has benefited from a subsidy of more than two billion CFA francs.

In exchange, Cerco is to pay 3.5 percent of its income to the state and train around 1,200 young people each year.

The company says it has received 200,000 orders since launch on July 21.

Thanks to a partnership with French telecommunications giant Orange, the phone will be distributed in 200 shops across Ivory Coast.

Source: Voice of America

Ethiopia once said it wanted to become the “China of Africa” — that is, a manufacturing hub — with the help of its industrial parks. But the global economic downturn and the country’s ongoing conflict have prompted companies to leave the parks and lay off thousands of workers.

The Ethiopian government hoped that one the country’s industrial parks — Hawassa, which was opened in 2016 with the potential to create 60,000 jobs — would help the country move from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy, and that the companies operating there would bring high-tech work.

Kalkidan Asrat, a logistics manager Nasa Garment at the Hawassa Industrila Park, shared those dreams.

Her birthplace, she said, is a small town and her family worked in agriculture for a living as subsistence farmers. When she completed her education, she joined the industrial park, where she said she was able to improve her prospects.

There are 10 other industrial parks like Hawassa spread across Ethiopia.

The government has said it hoped to make Ethiopia a lower middle-income country by 2025, with manufacturing playing a big part.

That is now looking less likely because of the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, a lack of foreign currency in the country, and conflict and human rights abuses.

“Two of the industrial parks have been directly impacted. They’ve been in the combat zone, effectively,” said emerging markets economist Patrick Heinisch. “The most severe hit to the industrial parks is from the loss of access to AGOA. One week after the announcement, the first company announced they would retreat from the Ethiopian market; they sold their factories in Ethiopia. This has been followed by other companies.”

The African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, passed in the U.S. in 2000 to aid development in sub-Saharan Africa, gave Ethiopia duty-free access to the U.S. market for several products.

With Ethiopian wages much lower than those in China, a country synonymous with manufacturing, and AGOA making it cheaper to import goods to the U.S., many international manufacturing companies set up in Hawassa’s industrial sheds.

On January 1, however, the U.S. withdrew Ethiopia’s access to AGOA due to “gross violations of human rights.”

Rights groups have accused the Ethiopian government and its aligned military forces of large-scale human abuses, including ethnic cleansing, against Tigrayans during the country’s nearly two-year conflict.

Tigrayan forces have also been accused of abuses.

Thirty-five thousand people worked at Hawassa, but in June, one firm laid off 3,000 workers and others laid off hundreds.

One factory owner in Hawassa, Raghavendra Pattar, said the country is struggling to adapt.

“We are forging towards a new market, but it will take more time to roll up the market again, so that’s why we are suffering a lot,” he said. “The country is suffering because of foreign currency availability in the country today. They also need support from other countries, big countries, like America.”

The deputy general manager of the park, Belante Tebikew, said the withdrawal of AGOA was causing more problems than the pandemic or inflation.

“There are some, as I told you, reductions on orders, because they are being injured by the customs, duty-free privileges in the American markets, since most of the commodities are being exported to the U.S.,” he said.

In another bad sign for the country’s economy, fighting between government and Tigrayan rebel forces broke out again in late August after a five-month cease-fire.

Source: Voice of America

In Ethiopia’s Gambella region, a June attack on the capital by a rebel group, the Oromo Liberation Army, has raised fears of more civil war spreading in the country. VOA spoke to local officials and analysts about what’s behind the violence and what it could mean for Ethiopia’s security.

In Gambella city, security has been beefed up. Officials say local police have started working in cooperation with troops recently sent to the region by the federal government.

A major attack by two rebel groups, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) and the Gambella Liberation Front (GLF), caught the city by surprise in June. Local media said up to 37 people were killed.

Analysts say it is the first time the Oromo conflict, a decades-old fight among local, federal forces and ethnic Oromo rebels, has reached Gambella city.

One witness, civil servant Abdu Abubeker, recounts seeing the OLA enter the city.

He said the shooting began at around 6 a.m. No one was expecting it, so no one was well prepared, Abdu said the OLA and the GLF entered the city as far as the regional council building. He recalled that “they entered the city from three directions. I think the Gambella Liberation Front was leading the OLA.”

Less than a week later, in the Oromia region, around 400 ethnic Amhara were killed by OLA militants.

The rapid uptick in violence in what Human Rights Watch calls Ethiopia’s “other conflict” has led some to question if it constitutes a second civil war for the country.

Information from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project shows that from August 2021 to July 2022, there were 3,784 deaths linked to the OLA, compared with 651 the previous year, a nearly five-fold increase.

William Davison, an analyst with International Crisis Group, a Belgium-based research organization, said the increased violence is the result of long-standing grievances related to Oromo self-determination and lack of political representation in Ethiopia’s federal system, especially since the current government came to power in 2018.

“I think that added fuel to the Oromo Liberation Army insurgency, after a failure to reintegrate those fighters and their rebellion.”

The Oromo comprise the largest ethnic group in the country.

Asked if the conflict is as significant as Ethiopia’s headline-grabbing war with Tigrayan rebels in the north of the country, Davison said that it is a conflict in its own right.

“It probably doesn’t immediately threaten the regional government authority in Adama or the federal government authority in Addis Ababa, but it is affecting a huge number of people in Oromia, as well as leading to direct violence that’s killing combatants and civilians.”

Adama is a city in Ethiopia’s Oromia region.

For now, Gambella is calm, but fewer than 10 kilometers beyond its outskirts, local police say there are regular firefights with the OLA.

Local officials are keen to project stability.

Chankot Chote, head of the Gambella Regional State Peace and Security Office, said with the help of the special forces, federal police and regular police and the community, the situation has improved. He added that, although the OLA is trying to attack on the outskirts of town, they will never enter the city again.

The OLA is an offshoot of another rebel group, the Oromo Liberation Front, which signed a peace deal with the Ethiopian government in 2018.

Source: Voice of America