By Mario Osava
SETE LAGOAS, Brazil, Aug 18 2024 – Water shortage is over, springs have emerged or become perennial, small ponds with fish have formed and pastures have become greener and more permanent, all thanks to the ‘barraginhas’, the Portuguese name given in Brazil to micro-dams that retain rainwater and infiltrate it into the soil.

This is a common claim among the many farmers who have adopted the technique developed and promoted by Luciano Cordoval, an agronomist and researcher at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), a public entity comprising 43 research centres throughout the country.“The more the climate crisis worsens, the greater the need to capture rainwater and accumulate reserves”: Luciano Cordoval.

Cordoval has worked since 1983 at the Embrapa Maize and Sorghum unit, based in Sete Lagoas (Seven Lagoons, in Portuguese), a municipality with a population of 227,397 in the southern state of Minas Gerais, where he further specialised in irrigation and soil conservation.

His Barraginhas Project was launched in 1997 with government investment. But the specialist has been promoting micro-dams long before as a way to “capture water from streams and promote its storage in the soil, avoiding erosion, sedimentation and environmental pollution, with increased volume in the springs”, according to his resumé.

Luciano Cordoval explains the functions of barraginhas in his office at the Maize and Sorghum unit of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation in Sete Lagoas, a municipality in central Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

One hundred micro-dams create a lagoon

Antonio Alvarenga, a pioneer of the initiative, built 28 micro-dams on his 400-hectare farm in Sete Lagoas in 1995, with the support of Cordoval’s project. “These were degraded and dry lands, affected by major erosion,” he recalled.

In a short time, the barraginhas filled and emptied several times and water began to flow in the lower part of the farm, which had previously been totally dry. The engineer by profession, who became a part-time cattle farmer, was then able to have his dream pond, which after extensions now covers 42,000 square metres of his land.

With the other micro-dams already built, he now has “more than 100” and has plans for another 40. The effect can be seen in the recovered springs and the abundance of water that allows him to irrigate the pastures in the dry season and double his livestock productivity.

“Before I used to raise only one cow on two hectares, today there are two animals on each hectare,” he told IPS in Sete Lagoas, highlighting the good results of the innovation.

“I became a producer of water, which fills my ‘artificial’ lagoon. Water is everything,” he praised. The benefits visible to the naked eye encouraged his neighbours to build their own micro-dams, with help from the mayor’s office. In addition, a television report helped spread the word about this ‘social technology’, as it is called.

Some of the micro-dams built in 1998, including on the farm of engineer Antonio Alvarenga. Credit: Luciano Cordoval

Also in the Amazon

In Floresta do Araguaia, 1,800 kilometres from Sete Lagoas, in the southeast of the northern Amazonian state of Pará, another cattle farmer, with some 6,000 hectares and 2,000 head of cattle, also points out impressive data.

“This part of Pará is not rich in water,” contrary to the general belief that it rains profusely in the whole Amazon region, says Pedro de Carvalho, a veterinarian from Minas Gerais, a state in southeastern Brazil, but who lives in the eastern Amazon since 1974.

“It rains a lot in the last two months of the year, but not the rest of the year,’ he told IPS in a telephone interview from his ranch. There is cerrado, a kind of Brazilian savannah, in the area, not Amazonian forest, he adds.

“I didn’t have enough water, I had to buy it from tanker trucks, and a lot of my cattle died of thirst,” he recalled.

But having been friends with Cordoval since they were young, he knew his ideas and began to build his barraginhas. He believes he now has 168 in all, although he is uncertain of the precise number. He bought an excavator to build and improve them, “because everything can be improved.”

João Roberto Moreira in the lagoon formed by water from springs revitalised by a chain of 11 barraginhas on the hill of preserved forests on his 200-hectare property in Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Some sceptics of such innovation in the region recommended artesian wells. “Pure ignorance. Where you draw water and don’t replenish it, it tends to run out. The barraginhas supply the water table,” he observed.

An example is Unai, a city in Minais Gerais, which drilled many artesian wells and then had to deactivate 70% of them, “because they dried up,” he explained.

In his case, he no longer needs to buy water, having it stored in ponds where there are fish. Animals such as the capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), a large rodent native to South America which lives around water, the collared peccary (Dicotyles tajacu, an American wild pig), various birds and even bees, wasps and ants have proliferated on his farm.

Carvalho, a veterinarian specialising in reproduction, was one of the pioneers of Amazon colonisation in the 1970s. He first settled near Araguaína, a municipality of 171,000 inhabitants in the north of the state of Tocantins, where he has a farm of “between 3,000 and 4,000 hectares”.

Today, however, he is more dedicated to the farm in Floresta do Araguaia, a municipality with only 18,000 people, but where he foresees a promising future due to the expansion of soya bean.

A group of 23 engineers from 20 African countries visited different experiences of the Barraginhas Project, a social technology of easy application to capture, collect and disseminate water in rural areas. Credit: Barraginhas Project Archive

The multiplication of water

The barraginhas have spread throughout Brazil, from large to small farms. Cordoval and Embrapa were directly involved in the construction of some 300,000, but he estimates there may be two million of these micro-dams nationwide.

The first project, sponsored by the federal government’s Water Resources Board starting in 1997, sought to build 960 units near Sete Lagoas, Cordoval recalled in an interview with IPS at his Embrapa office in Sete Lagoas.

Between 2005 and 2008, some 3,600 were built in the northeastern state of Piauí, in a project promoted by then congressman Wellington Dias, later governor of the state and now minister of Social Development.

From the beginning, a priority was to train disseminators. “The results often turn the beneficiaries into my ‘clones’, who incorporate the DNA of the barraginhas and disseminate them out of passion, without thinking about the money,” Cordoval said.

“Barraginhas are like financial savings. You should stockpile water when there is abundance, for times of scarcity. The more the climate crisis worsens, the greater the need to capture rainwater and accumulate reserves. The growth of the country, cities and population demands more water for water sustainability,” he explained.

In 2011, a group of 23 engineers from different parts of Africa came to Sete Lagoas to learn about the local experience with micro-dams.

This social technology has received several national awards that promote other technologies also seeking to produce or protect water.

This is the case of septic tanks and biodigesters that prevent contamination of the water table. They are small multi-purpose ponds with an impermeable canvas floor to prevent water losses and an irrigation system for family farmers.

An alternative for plots of land with a slope above 10%, which is the recommended limit for establishing barraginhas, is a linear ditch that follows the contour line and withstands torrents on slopes of up to 25%.

Barraginhas and their annexes are a health factor, by improving the availability of good quality water, reducing medical expenses and increasing family income. In addition, they contain erosion, thus reducing sedimentation of watercourses, Cordoval pointed out.

A variant of this technology is built on roadsides, precisely to prevent deterioration due to erosion.

Barraginhas also prevent erosion on unpaved roads near their edges. Credit: Courtesy of Luciano Cordoval

Reclaimed springs and wells

For João Roberto Moreira, a.k.a. Betinho, a small cattle farmer with a herd of about 50 dairy cows, the major benefit of the 11 barraginhas built in 1998 on the hill of his farm was to intensify and perpetuate the springs that supply the three families that share the 200-hectare property.

“It was a blessing. The springs used to dry up, the water didn’t drain to the houses and attempts to pump it failed. Now there is water all year round. I’ve never seen so much water reaching us by gravity”, through four hoses from the top of the hill, he said.

There is also water left over for three lagoons, where they raise fish.

In Cáceres, a municipality of 90,000 inhabitants in central-western Brazil, Samuel Laudelino Silva, a chemist and retired professor at the State University of Mato Grosso (Unemat), has built 43 barraginhas of different sizes and a kilometre-long ditch on his increasingly water-scarce farm.

A 208-metre deep well, which did not produce water after a landslide reduced it to a depth of 135 metres, now provides 2,640 litres per day, enough for essential needs on the farm. It has water starting at a depth of 48 metres.

“Governments should promote the large-scale installation of this technology, including as a way to mitigate the droughts and fires that have been plaguing the Pantanal, a large wetland area on Brazil’s border with Bolivia and Paraguay, in recent years,” Silva told IPS in an interview by email.

Cáceres is located in the upper Pantanal, in the state of Mato Grosso.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Aug 16 2024 – During the first half of the 20th century, antisemitism was endemic in Europe and eventually burst out in full force when Nazi-Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945 systematically (and well-documented) murdered six million Jews across German-occupied Europe. In an environment mined by hostile public opinion, the Zionist Nahum Sokolow popularized the Hebrew term Hasbara. The word has no real equivalent in English, but might be translated as “explaining”, indicating a strategy seeking to explain actions, regardless whether or not they are justified. As a skilled diplomat, Sokolow based his widely publicized opinions on in-depth research of actual events, though he presented his findings in a manner that favoured his cause.

David Alfaro Siqueiros: Echo of a Scream. 1937

The State of Israel has often used hasbara, now generally described as public diplomacy, meaning that policies and actions have not been denied, but at the same time has any criticism of such facts been presented as biased and/or tinged by “antisemitism”. To avoid being labelled as antisemitic the following article is mainly based on two books by Ilan Pappé – The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Pappé is considered to be a member of the New historians, a loosely defined group of Israeli historians who challenge the official version of Israel’s role in the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians. An event which among Palestinians is called Nakba, the Catastrophe.

In 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, about half of the former British controlled Mandatory Palestine’s predominantly Arab population, fled from their homes. At first they were attacked by Zionist paramilitaries and after the establishment of the State of Israel by its regular army, acting on direct orders from the newly founded nation’s leaders. Dozens of massacres targeted the Arab population and between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Village wells were poisoned and properties looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning.

The New historians debunked several myths. For example, that the British Government tried to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state – it was actually against the founding of a Palestine state. The official version states that Palestinians fled their homes on their own free will, instigated to do so by surrounding Arab states. However, the majority of them were actually expelled, and/or fled out of a well-founded fear of the Israeli army. Furthermore, general opinion has been that the surrounding Arab nations at the time were united and more powerful than the newly established State of Israel – as a matter of fact, Israel had the advantage both in manpower and arms, while the Arab nations were divided by internal strife and did not have a coordinated plan to destroy Israel. The recurrent praise that the Israelis made the desert bloom and took over a land without a people for a people without a land, are according to Pappé unfounded clichés. Before the ethnic cleansing the vast majority of agricultural land was being cultivated by Palestinians. It is estimated that on the eve of the 1948 war, around 739,750 acres of agriculturally apt land were being cultivated by Palestinians, actually greater than the physical area which was under cultivation in Israel almost thirty years later.

The appropriation of Palestinian land occurred in conjunction with a Land Acquisitions Law allowing for a mass transfer of the entire Palestinian economy to the Israeli state. Practically overnight, the State gained control of a vast amount of fertile land, 73,000 houses, and 7,800 workshops. This dropped the average cost of settling a Jewish family in Palestine from 8,000 USD to 1,500 USD.

Furthermore, the whole issue whether Palestine belongs to “Jews” or “Arabs” is somewhat spurious. It is a myth that any region constitutes a closed environment. Trade, immigration, invasion and intermarriage are part of any nation’s history. Across the millennia, additions and losses have befallen people living in Palestina (it was the Romans who in 131 CE changed the denomination “Judea” into “Syria Palaestina”). Conquerors, like those of the Muslim faith, seldom replaced an entire native population, they only added to it. Many of the Palestinians of today are the Jews of yesteryears. Palestinian Arabs did not suddenly appear from the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century to settle in Palestine, most of those “Arabs” living there now are descendants of indigenous peoples who lived there before. People who, like most others, over time have changed their beliefs and traditions. For example, Sardinians eventually became Italians, but no one would suggest that Sardinians were kicked out and replaced by a foreign Italian people. We ought to separate political nationalist identities from the actual reality of a human being. Nationalism is a relatively modern concept, especially in the Middle East.

Likewise, the Jewish diaspora was not the result of a sudden expulsion of Jews from their Holy land. It was, just as current migration, a result of various factors, including refugees from war and repression, forced labour, deportation, overpopulation, indebtedness, military recruitment, and not the least opportunities in business, commerce, and agriculture. Before the Romans in 70 CE destroyed Jerusalem and its temple and in 131 forbade Jews to settle there, large and prosperous Jewish communities existed in provinces like Egypt, Crete, Cyrenaica, Syria, Asia, Mesopotamia, and in Rome itself. However, the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem motivated many Jews to formulate a new self-definition and adjust their existence to the prospect of an indefinite period of displacement, that eventually would culminate in a return to a mostly imaginary realm of Israel. In 1948, this religious dream became a reality through the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel. A development that by most the U.S. and European politicians was considered to strengthen a “Western” strategic, economic, and political presence in the Middle East, at the same time as the establishment of Israel could ease the burden of a bad conscience for not having done enough to hinder the extermination of Jews, combined with easing the pressure to resettle and compensate the victims.

Nowadays, the Sate of Israel does not only control the land granted to it by the British, but also territories inhabited by also areas like the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Gaza strip. In Gaza, Israel maintains control of its airspace, its territorial waters, no-go zones within the strip, and the population registry. Pappé has stated that

“the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story – hard to understand and even harder to solve. Indeed, the story of Palestine has been told before: European settlers coming to a foreign land, settling there, and either committing genocide against or expelling the indigenous people. The Zionists have not invented anything new in this respect. But Israel succeeded nonetheless, with the help of its allies everywhere, in building a multilayered explanation that is so complex that only Israel can understand it. Any interference from the outside world is immediately castigated as naïve at best or anti-Semitic at worst.”

On October 11th 2023, Hamas-led fighters breached the Gaza-Israel barrier, attacking military bases and massacring civilians in 21 communities, killing 1,139 people, including 695 Israeli civilians, among them 38 children, 71 foreign nationals, and 373 members of the Israeli security forces, while taking about 250 Israelis as hostages. Incidents of great brutality and rape were witnessed and reported.

Israeli repercussion was swift and merciless. Israel has ravaged the Gaza Strip. Apartment buildings, mosques, schools, hospitals, and universities have been reduced to rubble. During their hunt for Hamas fighters Israel has deliberately targeted and destroyed civilian structures where civilians have sought refuge. On May 21st 2024, Israeli government offered its first estimate of the operation’s death toll, claiming its troops had killed 14,000 terrorists and 16,000 civilians. A week earlier the U.N. reported that approximately 35,000 individuals had died during the conflict, including 7,797 minors, 4,959 women and 1,924 elderly, the latter three groups with confirmed identities. Among the victims were 103 journalists and 196 humanitarian workers. At almost the same time, Save the Children reported that more than 13,000 children had been killed, while WHO stated that at least 1,000 children have had one or both legs amputated. On the 11th of August the death toll was estimated to be approximately 39,000 people.

The killing is continuing unabated, worsened by starvation. WFP recently reported that 1.1 million Gaza inhabitants are facing catastrophic hunger. In northern Gaza, one in three children under two years of age suffer from acute malnutrition. According to estimates by UNICEF, people’s daily nutritional intake is down to 245 calories, i.e. less than a can of beans. This is mostly attributable to an Israeli blockade that according to UNICEF since March 1 has stopped 30 percent of aid missions, letting in a daily average of only 159 of the required 500 aid trucks.

Even before October 11th people of Gaza had an intolerable existence, lacking sufficient access to electricity, potable water, food, and medical equipment. Unemployment rate was more than forty per cent, while children grew up in a world of intermittent war and persistent trauma, of barbed wire and surveillance. Israeli attacks continue while remains of Hamas’ military branch has become a drastically diminished insurgent force, which fighters pop up from the rubble to shoot at Israeli soldiers.

An entire population has been severely punished for the presence of a fanatical, political party, which according to polls conducted in September 2023 by the majority of Gazans was considered to be repressive and corrupt, but which they were frightened to criticize. Hamas’s support was estimated to be between 27 and 31 percent, though since many Gazans are unable to perceive a viable solution to Israel’s iron grip on their confined strip of land, they consider armed resistance to be the only way out.

In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu’s two decades long regime has tried to sabotage a two-state-solution by weakening the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, allowing for vast amounts of mainly Qatari money to reach Hamas, in exchange for maintaining a ceasefire and sowing division within Al-Fatah, the party governing the West Bank. Part of this policy has also been the increased support to 144 Israeli settlements within the West Bank, including 12 in East Jerusalem, and a discreet sustenance to over 100 “Israeli outposts”, i.e. settlements not authorized by the Israeli government. Over 450,000 Israeli settlers reside in the West Bank, with an additional 220,000 in East Jerusalem. Living in a settlement is made attractive through lower costs of housing compared to living in Israel proper. Government spending per citizen in settlements is double, in some cases triple, than what is spent per Israeli citizen in Israel proper.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled that Israeli settlements on occupied territory is, according to international laws, illegal and established that Israel has “an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities and to evacuate all settlers from the occupied territories”. The Court is talking to deaf ears. A current expansion of settlements has involved the confiscation of Palestinian land and resources, leading to displacement of Palestinian communities while creating a source of tension and conflict. The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that from 1 January to 19 September 2023, Israeli settlers killed 189 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and wounded 8,192. The violence increased after October 3rd, after that date 460 Palestinians have so far been murdered by settlers. On average, there are every day three cases of settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank, resulting in the killing and injuring of Palestinians, harming their property, and preventing them from reaching their land, workplace, family, and friends.

International ramifications are continuously unfolding – armed exchanges between Israel and Iran, between Israel and Hezbollah, Iran supported Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, followed by Israeli counterattacks on Yemen, waves of pro-Palestine demonstrations across Europe, the U.S., and Arab capitals, combined with increased antisemitism. All this could for Israel mean its worst defeat ever, while at the same time it may for Palestinians prove to be more deadly and devastating than the Nakba.

IPS UN Bureau

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By Anis Chowdhury, Khalilur Rahman and Ziauddin Hyder
SYDNEY, NEW YORK, WASHINGTON DC, Aug 16 2024 – Bangladesh has become increasingly indebted since 2009. The country’s external debt stock increased from US$23.3 billion in 2008 to US$100.6 billion in December 2023 (see figure below). Thanks to the country’s mega-projects led so-called development with borrowed money under the now deposed authoritarian regime of Sheikh Hasina.

Anis Chowdhury

The new government should urgently put a moratorium on debt re-payments using UN Security Council resolution 1483 that granted a debt-shield to prevent creditors from suing the government of Iraq to collect sovereign debt. The new government then initiate an independent review of all debt contracts under the autocratic regime to determine beneficial uses of incurred debts. The review should declare the proportion that was wasted through corruptions or used for financing repressions of the regimes as “odious”.

Odious debt is a concept in international law that refers to debt “incurred by rulers who borrowed without the people’s consent and used the funds either to repress the people or for personal gain”. There are moral, economic and legal arguments for not re-paying the odious portion of debts.

Autocrat’s debt bonanza
Bangladesh’s average external debt stock jumped from US$10.7 billion over more than 3 decades (1972-2008) to US$52.6 billion during 2009-2023 when Hasina’s autocratic regime consolidated power by unprecedented machinating three consecutive elections, making State institutions partisan and unleashing brutal repressions.

Corruptions, money laundering, and poor project management as well as selections meant that the revenue flows or returns from these mega-projects are far less than what is required for servicing the debt. Gross external debt-GDP ratio increased from around 28% in 2016 to around 37% in 2023. Likewise, external debt-export earnings ratio increased from 56.3% in 2016 to 116.6% in 2023. These key indicators indicate that Bangladesh is heading for a corruption induced debt crisis, temporarily given respite by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The IMF’s loan will have to be repaid with interests; paying debts by borrowing; or using one line of credit to pay for another line of credit cannot be sustained for long. There are better ways to deal with unstainable debts, especially when the indebtedness is due to creditors’ continued lending despite well documented evidence that the borrowed money is misused and siphoned off the country.

Khalilur Rahman

Irresponsible lending is odious
Lenders should be held responsible for irresponsible lending knowing the extent of corruption, misuse and repression in the country, and that the borrowed money was providing a life-line to a highly corrupt and repressive regime. The debt-funded mega projects were used by the regime to legitimize its misrule and suppression of people’s democratic rights. Such debts are odious.

Such debts are odious, and violet the “Principles on Promoting Responsible Sovereign Lending and Borrowing”, developed by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). These Principles demand that lenders refuse to lend to the regime, thus preventing wasteful or harmful spending. These Principles not only make a repressive regime less likely to survive, but also ensure debt sustainability.

Core international legal norms and principles, such as Good Faith, Transparency, Impartiality, Legitimacy and Sustainability are applied in the UNCTAD Roadmap and Guide to Sovereign Debt Workout Mechanisms and in the UN General Assembly resolution A/RES/69/319 on Sovereign Debt Restructuring Processes, adopted in September 2015.

Moral, economic and legal arguments for repudiating odious debts
The prospect of yoking innocent generations of citizens to the repayment of a corrupt and repressive regime’s profligate debt is simply distasteful; morally repugnant; economically untenable, and legally indefensible.

Ziauddin Hyder

The moral case for repudiating odious debts arises from the premise that some regimes are so repugnant that they should be actively condemned by the international community. The world should not stand by silently as a regime murders its own people or loots the country’s wealth while ordinary citizens starve.

The economic justification for repudiating odious debts rests on the prospect of increasing the welfare of the country in at least three ways: (1) there will be a lower debt burden to service; (2) odious regimes, which reduce welfare, are less likely to emerge; and (3) should they emerge, they are less likely to survive for a long time.

The legal argument for repudiating odious debts is consistent with the accepted view that equity constitutes part of the content of “the general principles of law of civilized nations”, one of the fundamental sources of international law stipulated in the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Thus, the international law obligation to repay debt can never be absolute, and has been frequently limited or qualified by a range of equitable considerations, some of which may be regrouped under the concept of “odiousness.”

In many countries legally individuals do not have to repay if others fraudulently borrow in their name, and corporations are not liable for contracts that their chief executive officers or other agents agree to without any authority.

An analogous legal argument is: sovereign debt incurred without people’s consent and not benefiting the people should not be transferable to a successor government, especially if creditors are aware of these facts in advance.

Historical precedence
The doctrine of odious debt originated in 1898 after the Spanish-American War. The United States argued during peace negotiations that neither it nor Cuba should be held responsible for debt the colonial rulers had incurred without the consent of the Cuban people and not used for their benefit.

Other historical cases of repudiating odious debts include: Soviet repudiation of Tsarist debts; Treaty of Versailles (1919) and Polish debts; Tinoco arbitration (1923) – (Great Britain vs Costa Rica); German repudiation of Austrian debts (1938); Treaty of Peace with Italy (1947).

In recent decades, major shareholders forced the IMF to cut all lending to the former President of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, in 1997, after he was accused of resorting to political violence and appropriating public funds.

The Khulumani Support Group, representing 32,000 individuals who were “victims of state-sanctioned torture, murder, rape, arbitrary detention and inhumane treatment” filed a law suit in 2002 in the New York Eastern District Court against 8 banks and 12 transnational companies demanding apartheid reparations.

In 2003, the concept of odious debts was used by the US to argue for cancelling Iraq’s debts of over US$125 billion incurred by Saddam Hussain after his overthrow. It was argued that such debt not only impeded a successful rebuilding of post-authoritarian States, but that the debts were never legitimate inheritances of the new government.

Treasury Secretary John Snow held “the people of Iraq should not be saddled with those debts incurred through the regime of a dictator who has now gone.” Undersecretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz emphasised that much of the money borrowed by the Iraqi regime had been used “to buy weapons and to build palaces and to build instruments of oppression.”

After an evaluation, the Government of Norway in 2006 determined that obligations arising out of lending to certain developing countries as part of the Ship Export Campaign of 1976–1980, and guaranteed through the Norwegian Institute for Export Credits, should be cancelled on grounds that Norway ought to share responsibility with debtor countries for the programme’s failure.

The Norwegian case is not an example of “odious debt”, but is due to the notion of co-responsibility and reflect the idea that repayment may be subject to broader considerations of the equities of the debtor–creditor relationship.

What needs to be done
The Interim Government of Bangladesh should immediately put a stop to external debt servicing and request the UN Secretary-General to set up an UN-led independent commission to review all debts incurred by the repressive autocratic regime that it replaced. The UN-led review commission must not include lenders – multilateral and bilateral – due to likely conflict of interest, especially when they irresponsibly continued to lend to the regime, knowing its corruptions and usurpation of democracy.

This requires political will as powerful countries and international financial institutions may be offended.

The people have expressed their strong will to build a new country based on the principles of accountability, fairness, equity, inclusiveness and justice.

The burden of odious debts of the repressive regime and irresponsible lendings must not weigh on rebuilding of a new Bangladesh.

Anis Chowdhury, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University (Australia) & former Director of UN-ESCAP’s Macroeconomic Policy & Development Division.

Ziauddin Hyder, Adjunct Professor, University of the Philippines at Los Banos and former Senior Health Specialist, World Bank

IPS UN Bureau

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By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Aug 16 2024 – After years of reporting on the frontlines of climate change, I have witnessed the devastating impact extreme weather events have on women and girls. In Kenya’s pastoralist communities in far-flung areas of Northern Kenya, West Pokot, Samburu and Narok counties, droughts mean a resurgence in harmful cultural practices such as outlawed female genital mutilation (FGM), beading and child marriages.

When I visited Samburu County in 2019, beading was in the past. A young girl will be given a specific type of necklace to wear to signal that a Moran or male youth has booked her for marriage. In turn, the Moran is allowed to exploit her sexually for favors extended to her family in the form of gifts such as a goat, milk and meat.

During the recent severe drought of 2022–2023, such harmful practices made a comeback. Child marriages are used as a coping mechanism to recover lost livestock or, in the case of beading, to put food on the table. A pregnancy during the beading process is brutally terminated. It is taboo to have a child outside of wedlock.

Even when deadly floods rocked the country earlier in the year, women and children were crying out for help. In my experience reporting about climatic disasters, UN estimates ring true. Women and girls are 14 times more likely to die when disaster strikes and nearly 80 percent of all displaced people are women and girls.

Their vulnerability and exposure to natural disasters come from pre-existing social and economic inequalities. Growing up, every last Sunday of the month, my mother, aunts and grandmother would attend or host a merry-go-round. Women formed groups and, once or twice a month, they would visit each other in turn and bring household items bought from a set monthly or bimonthly contribution.

My earliest memories are of household items such as kitchen appliances, beddings and food items. Later on, they phased out these items for cash to be spent on the most pressing needs in various households, including school fees.

From the merry-go-round, the revolutionary table banking movement was born—a group funding strategy where all contributions are placed on the table once or twice a month, and shared out among members in the form of low-interest short- and long-term loans.

It took many years for me to understand why women went to such lengths to raise money. They had been locked out of formal financial institutions due to historical and structural gender inequalities. Even today, women still account for the majority of the unbanked in Kenya.

Women could only open a bank account if accompanied by a male chaperone, and I saw, growing up that women could only access land through male relatives. Only 1 percent of Kenya’s land title deeds are in the hands of women today.

When a climatic disaster strikes, women have nowhere to go. They sit out dangerous climatic events, hoping that it is only a passing cloud. But for women, such as Benna Buluma, alias Mama Victor, a well-known human rights defender who perished in the April 2024 floods while in her house in Mathare informal settlements, and millions of others, its a disaster that can destroy lives and livelihoods.

Jane Anyango Adika of serikali saidia (government help!) fame became the face of the enduring cry for gender-sensitive responses in times of floods through repeated media coverage in a region ravaged by perennial floods. By the time Anyango came into the limelight, she had been battling floods for two decades. As recently as 2022, she was still crying out to the government for help.

Now we are becoming increasingly aware that extreme weather patterns such as heatwaves and floods create favorable conditions for vector-borne diseases such as Zika virus, malaria and dengue fever, which cause miscarriages, premature birth, and anaemia among pregnant women.

I am yet to hear of arguments disputing that climate disasters affect women and girls more than men and boys, the lack of women in decision making is simply a manifestation of widespread gender discrimination that takes on different shapes and forms in everyday life. In our patriarchal societies, where women are to be seen and not heard, it is playing out in the very serious and consequential climate arena.

As a result, men still fill 67 percent of climate-related decision-making roles and women’s representation in national and global climate negotiating bodies remains below 30 percent. The 2022 SDG Gender Index, published by Equal Measures 2030, a leading global partnership on accountability for gender equality and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), exposes alarmingly insufficient progress on gender equality at the global level between 2015 and 2020.

In fact, of the 17 SDGs, Goal 13 on climate action was one of the three lowest-scoring goals and even high-performing countries on the index had weaknesses on gender equality under SDG 13. It is highly concerning that even though men own land and control natural resources, in two-thirds of all the States in the world, women are the pillars of agriculture and land management.

My hope that the world is slowly recognizing that there is no escaping the climatic onslaught when half of the world’s population—women—are left behind critical decision-making structures related to climate has recently been ignited by the Conference of Parties (COP) climate and gender equality agenda.

Since COP25, experts have told world leaders that gender equality and climate change are not only two of the most pressing global challenges, but that they are inextricably interlinked. At COP 25, Parties adopted the five-year enhanced Lima work programme on gender and its gender action plan (GAP). Followed by an intermediate review of the implementation of the gender action plan and amendments to the GAP adopted in COP27.

At COP28, a new UN Women report stated that by 2050, climate change may push up to 158 million more women and girls into poverty and cause 232 million to face food insecurity. During the conference, Parties agreed that the final review of the implementation of the enhanced Lima work programme and its GAP would commence in June 2024, identifying challenges, gaps and priorities.

In my opinion, the road to COP29 should be littered with gender and climate blueprints from countries that are already making headway. Zimbabwe is now establishing a renewable energy fund to create entrepreneurship opportunities for women. Bhutan in South Asia has trained gender focal points in various ministries and women’s organizations to better coordinate and implement gender equality and climate change initiatives.

This will in turn ensure that there is gender equality and equity at all levels of climate-related decision-making, and representation at all levels of climate negotiating bodies around the world will not deliver an effective and sustainable climate agenda if half the world’s population remains on the margins.

Note: This opinion piece is published with the support of Open Society Foundations.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Abebe Adugna
WASHINGTON DC, Aug 16 2024 – Every year in Western and Central Africa, 6 million young people enter the labor force, while only about half a million new jobs are created. This enormous jobs deficit means that most entrants into the workforce work in the informal sector, with insecure income, low quality employment, and very little hope of escaping poverty.

The repercussions of this unemployment epidemic are profound: a breakdown in the social contract, social and political unrest, wasted human potential and increased poverty.

What is holding back Western and Central Africa from the kind of dynamic job creation seen in other developing regions?

Highly commodity-dependent economies that rely on export revenue but do not create jobs. Low levels of trade due to high trade barriers. Onerous presence of state-owned enterprises that crowd out the private sector. And declining foreign investment, which prevents the countries in the region from reaping the benefits of technology transfer, access to global markets, and job creation.

The Catalyst: Private Sector Development

Addressing the unemployment challenge is no easy task. But developing and nurturing a vibrant private sector has to be at the core. The private sector is an engine of economic growth, innovation, and job creation. And the tax revenues generated from thriving businesses enable governments to invest in essential public services such as healthcare, education, and infrastructure, further improving the overall quality of life for citizens.

Yet the private sector has been repressed in many countries in Western and Central Africa and its role in generating jobs is falling woefully short.

So, what can be done?

To unleash the private sector’s power to invest, generate jobs, catalyze a green transition and drive economic transformation, this is what needs to change:

• Improving the business enabling environment to enable private investment and promote market competition. For example, the World Bank is supporting countries such as Ghana, Liberia, Togo, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Sierra Leone to simplify and shorten the process of starting and closing a business, reform laws and regulations related to foreign direct investment (FDI), speed up the resolution of commercial disputes, and bring security and clarity to land and property titles. And the bedrock of many of these reforms is the digitization of government-to-business services.

• Enabling market access, investment and trade: More predictable trade and investment policies aligned with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) would improve the conditions for domestic production of higher valued goods, economic diversification and regional integration. The pact connects 1.3 billion people across 55 countries with a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of $3.4 trillion. Yet the potential is not being realized due to a lack of progress in the implementation of the AfCFTA in West and Central Africa as yet.

For example, countries of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC) have very low levels of intra-regional trade, with widespread global and sectoral trade barriers that elevate costs and diminish export potential. Governments could and should adopt policies that facilitate market entry, increase competition, and at tract private investors, and avoid excessive state involvement in productive sectors.

All of these actions will help enable and mobilize private capital, expand market networks, reduce trade transaction costs and uncertainty, strengthen compliance, and enable digital trade. The World Bank supports implementation of the AfCFTA through Trade Facilitation West Africa (TFWA), which is a $25 million technical assistance program over 6 years. This includes support for 6 trade corridors between sea ports and landlocked countries in the region, covering 9 countries.

• Improving sector and firm performance

Building a stronger private sector requires policy actions at the sector and firm levels to improve competitiveness and performance. Firm-level interventions should include incubator/accelerator programs, expanding access to finance for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and start-ups, and supporting technology adoption.

In the Republic of Congo, under our Support to Enterprise Development and Competitiveness Project, this set of firm level interventions has led to nearly all SMEs who received support to become formal, registered businesses. And our Senegal Jobs and Economic Transformation has already created or protected more than 21,000 jobs and provided support to over 4,000 firms, of which more than half are women-owned businesses.

Sectoral-level interventions hold even more promise in economies with high potential sectors such as in manufacturing (automotives, textiles and garments), tourism, wood, and construction.

• Climate smart is business smart: Countries in Western and Central Africa have an abundance of natural assets that could help create jobs, increase exports and build climate resilience for local and global communities. Wood, eco-tourism, fisheries, critical minerals are all examples where job creation and the preservation of natural assets can be reinforcing.

In Sierra Leone, the Economic Diversification Project is not only creating local, formal sector jobs through tourism sites, but incentivizing local communities to protect beaches from erosion, slow down deforestation, and protect chimpanzees from poaching. Although this agenda goes beyond job creation, it is also about businesses themselves being the solution to climate resilience.

New decarbonization technologies for manufacturing, sustainable sourcing of local materials, renewable energy for production is critical and they require financing. That is why in Burkina Faso and Ghana, we are piloting a ‘green window’ in an existing credit guarantee program to increase commercial credit for green investments. This is also helping raise awareness among SMEs about green solutions to strengthen resilience and adapt production to a changing climate.

Governments in Western and Central Africa can no longer rely on a narrow band of extractives and exports to keep their economies strong. To create the jobs needed, the private sector must be allowed to flourish, creating a virtuous cycle of job creation, competition, productivity, and exports. There simply is no other option.

Abebe Adugna, the Regional Director for Prosperity in the Western and Central Africa region at the IMF, was the former Practice Manager for the Macroeconomics, Trade, and Investment global practice in Africa, specifically in the East Africa region.

IPS UN Bureau

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