By Robert Jenkins, Lauren Rumble and Verena Knaus
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 11 2023 – Did you know that the power of computers has been doubling roughly every two years since the 1960s? Every day it seems there’s a new app or piece of tech that unlocks new and efficient ways to do things; to better engage with the world, or with learning.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the longstanding gender digital divide. Even though digital tech can be used to continue education at scale and is rapidly becoming core to the educational enterprise, it only benefits those who can access it.

And millions of girls often don’t have access to digital technology for many reasons: because communities, schools or families think that technology is a male-only domain, because of online safety risks, because they have been uprooted from their homes or forced to leave school before they learn to use computers, or because they never go to school in the first place.

Even when girls can access digital learning, the content may be rife with harmful gender norms – just as it often is in textbooks. Stereotypes are perpetuated and girls’ education suffers.

Providing access to the tech hardware can make an enormous difference, but it is not a silver bullet. Digital learning isn’t just putting existing materials on a screen instead of on a chalkboard or in a textbook.

It is about taking the opportunity to make education systems better and more responsive to the gender-specific needs of children and young people and equipping teachers with the skills to do so. It can only do that if we’re intentional about how we want to use it.

Recently, the Transforming Education Summit (TES) has committed to doing just that: to “harness the power of the digital revolution to ensure quality education is provided as a public good and a human right, with a particular focus on the most marginalized.”

Unlocking the power of digital learning for these children and young people, especially girls, relies on three keys:

• Connecting children to digital learning irrespective of their gender identity, or where they live or where they come from, UNICEF is working to connect every school to the Internet by 2030 through the Giga initiative.
• Developing and adapting high quality learning content so that it’s context-specific, curriculum-aligned, and accessible to all. UNICEF with UNESCO and partners launched Gateways to Public Digital Learning, a new global initiative to ensure that every learner, teacher, and family – especially the most marginalized – can easily access and use high-quality digital education content. To facilitate access to high quality content, UNICEF’s Learning Passport is helping meet the specific needs of learners- especially those forced to leave their homes – and educators in over 28 countries reaching three million children.
• Equipping teachers with the capacity to use digital technology to improve learning as well as with gender-responsive pedagogical skills so they can support children in all their diversity to develop the skills they need for school, life, and work – including supporting girls and young women to develop digital literacy.

One way UNICEF is forging this third key is through the new Gender Responsive Digital Pedagogies guide for educators. The Guide uses practical exercises to help teachers produce gender-responsive lesson plans, learning materials, and instruction, as well as guidance on protecting girls and boys from online bullying, violence, and sexual violence – critical skills in the digital age.

It also outlines strategies to engage parents and caregivers in their child’s learning using digital tools. In Lebanon, UNICEF has worked closely with the Center for Educational Research and Development (CERD) – a national organization charged with modernization and development of education, based on educational planning – to integrate part of the guide into their teachers’ training curricula.

This national uptake reflects our commitment:

We want to ensure that, as the world accelerates the use of digital technologies for education, we don’t simply carry over existing biases and harmful gender norms into teaching and learning.

With digital tech, learning tools can easily be replaced or updated – unlike printed materials. Educators can thus hone materials to be context-specific and, critically, remove harmful gender references and stereotypes from curricula.

How teachers interact with girls and boys can model more equal and gender-transformative expectations of themselves and each other.

Digital learning has the advantage of being mobile, opening doors for alternative learning pathways for children and adolescents who are excluded or need flexible arrangements.

It can make quality learning accessible to children who speak minority languages and children and young people on the move – especially important for girls on the move, some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

In situations that are otherwise hostile and uncertain, digital learning can be a way to help children to feel included and prepare them to succeed in school, work, and life.

Ensuring that girls’ access to digital technology is keeping pace with its proliferation and technological changes is and will not be easy. But it is essential.

The new Guide is a global public good – a critical building block for action on the TES commitments. Furthermore, as the 67th Conference on the Status of Women focuses on how innovation and education in the digital can promote gender equality, policymakers can be catalyst for digital learning.

To keep pace, our learning tools, practices, and policies need to stay up to date to match the technology – and champion the rights of all children, in all their diversity.

Robert Jenkins is the Global Director of Education and Adolescent Development at UNICEF; Lauren Rumble is the Associate Director of Gender Equality at UNICEF; Verena Knaus is the Global Chief of Migration and Displacement at UNICEF.

Source: UNICEF

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);  

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 11 2023 – Going back to the 16th century and continuing through the late 1960s, France was described as the world’s second largest colonial power—just behind the British Empire.

As the old saying goes: The sun would never set over the British Empire because God wouldn’t trust an Englishman in the dark. But would that also apply to the French colonial empire?

The military coups in three former French colonies — Burkina Faso, Mali and more recently Niger – are perhaps an indication of the beginning of the end of French post-colonial and neo-colonial ties to West Africa.

The three military leaders are turning towards Russia and the Russian mercenary group Wagner for new political, economic and military alliances.

The headline in a New York Times article last week read: “Waning Influence for France, the Colonizer that Stayed in West Africa “

The coup in Niger, a landlocked country of about 25 million people, is likely to result in the departure of more than 2,500 Western troops, including 1,100 Americans, who were stationed in the West African country to battle anti-US and anti-Western militant groups.

In Niger, there was also strong public support for the Russians, with demonstrators waving Russian flags.

Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco, told IPS many Africans harbor understandable resentment towards French neocolonialism and their local collaborators.

“Unfortunately, despite the lack of a colonial legacy, the Russian influence is even worse. They are backing some of the region’s worst warlords, reactionary military leaders, and criminal elements,” he said.

Asked for his comments, US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters: “I have heard questions about these protests, sometimes in this briefing room, and sometimes you see people assume that because you see people on the streets it is an expression of actual support rather than people who might have been paid to show up at protests”.

Playing down the pro-Russian demonstrators, he said: “It does seem odd to me that if your country is suffering an attempted military takeover, the idea that the first thing anyone would do is run to a store and buy a Russian flag. That strikes me as somewhat an unlikely scenario.”

Miller also said that Yevgeniy Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, was publicly celebrating the events in Niger and “we certainly see Wagner take advantage of this type of situation whenever it occurs in Africa”.

“We, as I’ve stated before, did not see any role by Wagner in the instigation of this attempted takeover, and we have not seen any Wagner military presence as of yet in Niger. I don’t have any specific Wagner activities to – that I can make public at this point, but we saw Yevgeniy Prigozhin publicly celebrating what’s happened. And as I said, it did seem a very odd event that we had a bunch of Russian flags show up at so-called protests – in support of the junta leaders,” he added..

Perhaps the longest and bitterest battles against French colonialism took place in North Africa during the Algerian war of independence.

That battle was a major armed conflict between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front (NLF) from 1954 to 1962, which led to Algeria winning its independence from France and represented “the most recent and bloodiest example of France’s colonial history on the African continent”, with approximately 1.5 million Algerians killed and millions more displaced in the eight-year struggle for independence.

A posting on the Foreign Policy website August 8 said Niger’s coup leaders had one week to relinquish power and reinstate ousted President Mohamed Bazoum or else face military intervention by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

At midnight on Sunday, that deadline expired without Bazoum being reinstated. Now, Niger and its neighbors are preparing for possible war—and ECOWAS, which plans to hold a second emergency summit is questioning whether issuing its unprecedented threat was a smart idea to begin with.

On Sunday, Niger’s junta government sent troop reinforcements to the capital, Niamey, and closed Niger’s airspace to brace for ECOWAS’s potential invasion. A senior U.S. diplomat held “frank and at times quite difficult” talks on Monday with junta leaders, who rejected calls to restore democracy, according to Foreign Policy.

Asked about the Russian influence in Niger, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters August 7 “for sure we have concerns when we see something like the Wagner Group possibly manifesting itself in different parts of the Sahel, and here’s why we’re concerned: because every single place that this group, Wagner Group, has gone, death, destruction, and exploitation have followed.”

He said insecurity has gone up, not down. It hasn’t been a response to the needs of the countries in question for greater security.

“I think what happened and what continues to happen in Niger was not instigated by Russia or by Wagner, but to the extent that they try to take advantage of it – and we see a repeat of what’s happened in other countries, where they’ve brought nothing but bad things in their wake – that wouldn’t be good,” Blinken declared.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);  

By Ifeanyi Nsofor and Sowmya R Rao
ABUJA, Aug 11 2023 – A recent publication in the journal PLOS Medicine reviewed the relationship between COVID-19 and mental health in eight low- and middle-income countries, collectively referred to as LMICs. As important as this publication is, we are appalled by the widespread use of the term “low- and middle-income countries” utilized in this article, and indeed in the majority of the global health literature and discourse.

This term vastly oversimplifies the relationship both between individual LMICs, and between LMICs and High-income countries (HICs). It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the term is colonial and racist. It divides rather than unites. It is time to change the narrative and use an equitable term to describe countries in the Global South.

Terms such as “low- and middle-income countries” perpetuate these inequities and use the same brush to paint 85% of the world’s population as the same. The Global South has almost six times the population of the Global North, is incredibly diverse, and has pockets of high-, middle- and low-income communities. Even within a single LMIC there is incredible diversity

We are both from the Global South and now work in the Global North. Sowmya is from India while Ifeanyi is from Nigeria. We both live in the U.S. Indeed, Sowmya has lived there for more than 30 years. In our global health careers, we have experienced inequities meted to us and people like us simply because of where we are from.

Terms such as “low- and middle-income countries” perpetuate these inequities and use the same brush to paint 85% of the world’s population as the same. The Global South has almost six times the population of the Global North, is incredibly diverse, and has pockets of high-, middle- and low-income communities. Even within a single LMIC there is incredible diversity.

Without a doubt, categorizing countries into “low- and middle-income countries” and “high income countries” is not appropriate for studying healthcare systems and population health. It is misleading to categorize countries for convenience of data analysis and interpretation.

According to Google Scholar, so far in 2023, over 12,100 publications have used “low-and-middle income countries ” in their titles or in the text. A couple of editorials calling for a change in the classification were published in 2022 and yet, the same journal has over 15,000 publications since 2022 (more than 6000 in 2023) using these terms. Is this classification appropriate for healthcare-related research? We also do not believe that World Bank classification of countries using the gross national income (GNI) is appropriate in this scenario.

Furthermore, funding agencies and peer-reviewed journals perpetuate this problem by requiring the investigators to generalize studies conducted in one country (even one city/town/village) to not only the entire country but beyond that to other “low- and middle-income countries”.

Countries vary in their population sizes, demography, cultures, type of governments, education systems, health care policies, health care access, diseases, and socio-economic problems. Summarizing data across these countries and studying them as a unit to find a one-size-fits-all solution undermines the problems.

For instance, Nigeria has an estimated population of more than 200 million, more than 250 ethnicities that speak over 500 languages. On the other hand, India is the most populous country in the world, with a population of over 1.4 billion. It has more than 2000 ethnic groups that speak over 19,000 languages or dialects.

First, begin to rectify this issue by ensuring that studies are customized to each country so appropriate policies can be implemented to improve healthcare in the country being studied. Most problems and solutions are local and must be studied in this context.

Second, funding institutions and peer-reviewed journals should not insist on generalizability of the results beyond the targeted populations but focus on the possibility of the solutions being adaptable to different populations and situations.

Studies that can positively impact these populations even if small are worth being conducted and published. It may then be further researched and adapted as necessary in different settings but that should not be a condition for funding or publishing.

Third, knowledge transfer should be bi-directional and not unidirectional as is currently done. Therefore, countries in the Global North should be open to learning from solutions found in the Global South (what are also termed as “resource-limited or resource-poor” countries).

There are many lessons in this regard: African Union’s coordination of country COVID-19 responses through the Africa Centre for Disease Control, and diverse experiences on managing epidemics in the Global South.

Finally, researchers must tap into the power of local knowledge. This means including Ministries of Health and local investigators to identify the main problems that need studying and finding solutions to mitigate them – another step towards creating equity.

Having countries from the Global South involved with setting study priorities and also funding portions of studies will ensure that they are vested in the process and are equal partners in studies that impact their own populations. Indeed, no country has infinite resources as was seen during the recent COVID-19 pandemic and any solution that uses the available resources efficiently should be welcomed.

LMICs and HICs are vestiges of colonialism. They divide instead of unite by making the most populous parts of the global community inferior to the least populous. Most importantly, they perpetuate inequities which pose serious consequences for global solidarity.

Using ‘Global South’ versus ‘Global North’ to refer to LMICs and HICs respectively in global research vocabulary is the most equitable thing to do.

Dr. Ifeanyi M. Nsofor, MBBS, MCommH (Liverpool) is Senior New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute, Senior Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity at George Washington University, 2006 Ford Foundation International Fellow.

Dr. Sowmya R Rao is a Senior Research Scientist with the Department of Global Health at Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a biostatistician primarily interested in global health disparities.