Alison Evans and Dirk Willem te Velde, "The UN, the great recession, and the world's poor," openDemocracy, June 23, 2009

[What interests me most about openDemocracy's discussion of the UN Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development currently under way in New York, is that is gives not so much as a hint of a reason behind the bizarre outburst disguised as a news story in which CanWest Global's Ottawa Citizen announced that economist and PM Stephen Harper would not be attending this important meeting. (See Steven Edwards, "Harper among leaders to skip UN 'summit' on financial crisis," Ottawa Citizen, June 24, 2009.) Heaven forbid that our glorious leader should muck about with those from countries facing bankruptcy. Insolvency might be catching. For his part, Harper has decided he would rather do some pre-season election campaigning in Quebec instead. -jlt]

The title of the summit being held at the United Nations in New York on 24-26 June 2009 - the United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development - suggests a large ambition that some observers already think is misplaced. Their argument is that it has already been overtaken by events. After all, the global financial crisisis already almost two years old. The problems in the United States housing market emerged in Augu st 2007, in banks and financial institutions (such as Bear Stearns and Northern Rock) by early 2008, and the implosion of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The crisis is, in this perspective, well into its third wave. A summit held now to pinpoint the action needed to ease its impact, particularly on the most vulnerable, seems - at first sight - "too little, too late".

There are arguments to the contrary - status (it is being attended by heads of state and government, as mandated in December 2008 at the Financing for Development conferencein Doha), timing (it comes neatly between the G20 summit in London on 2 April 2009 and its follow-up in Pittsburgh on 24-25 September), and reach (this, unlike the G20 discussions, is a meeting of the entire UN membership - the most wide-ranging and inclusive body able to reflect seriously on the scale of the global financial crisis and its impact on development). The last point in particular should in principle be the summit's strength; but it could also be its weakness.

Quotation Author

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Paul Rogers, "Climate change: a failure of leadership," openDemocracy, May 8, 2009.

[Rogers main emphasis is on the convergence of climate change and economic crisis ("the great recession"), but at the very beginning he adds yet another item--the Millennium Development Goals. Not long ago Stephen Harper announced that Canada hadn't met the token Kyoto targets and wasn't going to. That was a systemic failure that he managed to unload onto the Liberals. However, we may suppose that gushing carbon dioxide is one of the perils of industrial society regardless whether it may organized along capitalistic or socialistic lines. Small, disciplined and modestly socialistic countries that weren't much of the problem in the first place did manage to meet their Kyoto targets--and to allocate 0.7% of GDP to foreign aid as well.

In countries like Britain, the US and Canada where noblesse oblige has been part of the official line we like to repeat about ourselves for many generations, it takes the threat of losing job and home to interrupt our carbon frenzy.

Add to that the failure to reach MDG targets and the failure to relieve the debt burden of even the most desperate and/or deserving nations (HIPC), and we have what many are saying we have--a wholesale, systemic failure. While the political classes babble about market-based solutions, voters for whom the loftiest ethical aspiration is "rational self-interest" reject Dion's Green Shift. Closer to home, political expediency motivates the BC NDP to oppose a carbon tax and to propose market-based green bubble bonds instead. It's not Obama who can't change. It's the lot of us. We are trapped in a system that can still buy soporific PR it likes ("this is the worst recession since the 90s"), but doesn't have the wherewithal to stop treating its support like suckers (still needs suckers for a good day). -jlt]

The spreading effects of the global economic recession are making the hopes of reaching even the modest Millennium Development Goals (MDG) by the target date of 2015 recede even further.

The Global Monitoring Report 2009: A Development Emergency, released on 24 April 2009, outlines some of these likely effects in stark terms. The economic growth-rate of countries in the global south, which was 8.1% in 2006-07, is expected to fall to 1.6% in 2009. The worldwide recession will mean that huge numbers of people - estimated as between 55 million and 90 million people - will be additionally trapped in extreme poverty this year. The recent gains in fighting malnutrition (whose elimination is the first goal of the MDG) will be reversed, as the number of chronically hungry people is expected to climb to over 1 billion.

The overall political reaction from governments and transnational bodies is a very long way from guaranteeing any fundamental changes to the world economy.

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Thalif Deen, "Food, fuel, water crises converging," IPS, August 22, 2008.

...water and sanitation are not far behind the food, energy, and climate crises.

STOCKHOLM, Aug 22 (IPS) - A specter is haunting the cities and villages of most developing nations, warns a senior official of a World Bank-affiliated organization.

"It's the specter of a food, fuel and water crisis," says Lars Thunell, executive vice president of the Washington-based International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank group.

"I believe we are at a tipping point," he said, because the scarcity of water poses a threat to the food supply just when the agricultural sector is stepping up production in response to riots over food prices, growing hunger, and rising malnutrition.

Speaking at the conclusion of the weeklong Stockholm International Water Conference Friday, Thunell said the growing demand for water is outpacing supply.

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11th AWID International Forum on Women's Rights and Development, Capetown, November 14-17, 2008.

Fundamentalist forces have gained ground around the world, exerting an increased control on women’s lives. The Millennium Development Goals alongside the new aid architecture have restructured development assistance with women’s rights taking a back seat. From November 14–17, 2008, up to 1,500 women’s rights activists from around the world will gather in Cape Town, South Africa to debate and strategize about how to build stronger movements to advance women’s rights and gender equality globally.

Register here=>

[Although the Call for Proposals is closed, the Introduction articulates the issues in a way that will be useful to people in a variety of different movements. -jlt]

When people struggle together, what was once unimaginable suddenly becomes possible.

Some of the most profound changes in our world have come about as a result of struggles in the form of social movements. Often, these movements germinated in a handful of people who rose up against an entrenched injustice, then blossomed into mass mobilizations that have ended up toppling governments, deposing powerful leaders, ending military occupations, and bringing rights and freedoms to millions of people.

This is the power of movements - what people without access to power cannot accomplish alone, they can accomplish together through collective action.

Among the most compelling examples of the power of movements is unquestionably the global women's movement-a fact recognized by civil society scholars worldwide. Over many hundreds of years, women in solidarity have forcefully challenged prevailing patriarchal ideologies, eradicated institutions and customs that supported discriminatory practices, compelled women's voice and representation in a multitude of institutions, created formal and informal structures to monitor the implementation of women's equality, and mobilized and empowered women in communities around the world. The effect of these combined efforts has been, over time, a gradual but significant improvement in the lives of women and girls around the world.

Despite these successes, the struggle for women's rights continues to face formidable obstacles. Recent years have witnessed a marked increase in the fragmentation of activists, as well as decreased investment by funding agencies in movement-oriented as opposed to project-oriented work. But there has been little space to discuss the implications of these trends, or to think about strategies to confront them. There has been even less space to reflect on the health of our movements, to critically examine our successes a well as our failures, to update and re-cast our understanding of movements in the current global context, and to find a better way forward, working in cooperation with other, like-minded social movements towards the common goals of peace, social justice, environmental sustainability and human rights for all.

The questions we need to answer are complex and multi-faceted: How do we build movements that allow us to be strong but flexible, diverse without being fragmented, adaptable without compromising our core values, strategic without being expedient? What kind of collective power is possible in the 21st century, what types of mobilizations work - and in what contexts? What are the contradictions we need to confront in our movements in order to move forward? How do we build solidarity across different movements? And what is the cost of simply letting things drift along the present path?

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"Seven million Afghan children missing an education, warns Oxfam ahead of NATO summit on Afghanistan," Oxfam (Press Release), November 27, 2006.

More than half of all Afghan children still do not go to school despite a five-fold increase in enrolments since 2001, according to a new report published today by international agency, Oxfam. The report is released a day ahead of a NATO summit in Latvia to review progress in Afghanistan.

Girls are particularly losing out with just one in five girls in primary education and one in 20 going to secondary school.

The report, entitled "Free, Quality Education for Every Afghan Child" says that aid from rich countries is not being delivered meaning millions of children are being denied an education.

Seven million Afghan children are currently out of school while five million children attend school, up from 3.1m in 2003 and around 1m in 2001, when the Taliban were in power.

Many of those lucky enough to be in school are being taught by untrained teachers: a survey in northern Afghanistan revealed only five per cent of primary school teachers could pass the exams which their pupils must take.

"Educating Afghanistan's children is crucial in improving their lives and in the rebuilding and development of the country. But poverty, crippling fees and huge distances to the nearest schools prevent parents from sending their children to school. Those children who are lucky enough to be in school must endure untrained teachers, inadequate school buildings and poor textbooks. If Afghanistan is to meet its ambitious aims for primary and secondary education there must be a dramatic increase in aid to the government from rich countries," says Grace Ommer, head of Oxfam GB in Afghanistan.

Oxfam's report shows that extra investment in school buildings is desperately needed. Over half of pupils do not go to school because there is no school nearby. More than half of Afghanistan's schools need major repairs, the majority are without clean drinking water or toilet facilities while two million children study in tents or the open air. Oxfam calls on the international community to invest US$563m to rebuild 7,800 schools across the country. Rich countries are not providing nearly enough aid to Afghanistan despite their many promises. So far they give only $126m a year.

Oxfam estimates Afghanistan needs nearly 53,000 trained primary school teachers immediately and a further 64,000 teachers in the next five years. There is also a distinct shortage of female teachers as currently less than three in 10 teachers are female.

Recruiting these new teachers will be difficult given the low level of morale amongst Afghanistan's existing teachers. Their pay is very poor - in Daikundi province in central Afghanistan most teachers are only paid US$38 per month – and many teachers have to pay a bribe before they are given their salaries.

There are also up to 20,000 "ghost" teachers who collect their salaries but don't go to work, or who collect more than one salary. Oxfam is calling for better budgeting systems, more consultation and the creation of a national database of teachers to stamp out corruption in the education system.

Schools are supposed to be free but in some areas up to 85 per cent of schools charge. The average fee per student is $6 per year, compared to the average Afghan income of only $293 per year.

To ensure that the Afghan government meets its Millennium Development Goals, Oxfam is calling for:

• Rich countries to invest US$563m in school rebuilding and $210m in printing and distributing text books over the next five years.

• The abolition of all school fees. Uniforms, books and transport costs need to be subsidised as far as possible.

• Training over 116,000 teachers in the next five years. Half of these should be female.

• Schools to provide a free midday snack for all pupils.

• The government of Afghanistan to work with labour unions to make budgeting and procedural reforms which will reduce waste and corruption, improve the planning process and ensure all schools across Afghanistan are equitably-funded.

• Donors must fund education through the Afghan Ministry of Education to ensure better coordination.

Note to editors

1. Donors and the international community have given US$125.6m to the Afghan education sector. USAID and the World Bank are the largest contributors. The military forces operating in Afghanistan also fund education.

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