• 07 July 2011 – The UNCAC Coalition today calls on the Kenyan authorities to investigate attempts to intimidate Kenyan activists engaged in a peaceful demonstration related to allegations of misappropriated funds.
• On 23 and 29 June, 2011 activists conducting a sit-in protest at the Ministry of Education were attacked by unidentified assailants and splashed with excrement. The UNCAC Coalition has received a disturbing report, photographs, and video footage of intimidation carried out towards young protesters who were conducting the fourth day of their sit-in at Jogoo House over this corruption scandal.
•  On 4 July 2011 some of the same activists were attacked by a gang of youths who were repulsed by members of the public. When the activists went to report the incident at the nearest police station, the police officers on duty refused to record their complaint until pressure was brought to bear via a public outcry. Since then strangers have walked up to the activists on the street and said “we shall finish you”.

 The UNCAC Coalition deplores these efforts at intimidation and calls on the Kenyan authorities to react with appropriate steps including a full investigation of the attacks and appropriate protection to the activists involved in light of the ongoing threats to their safety. The Coalition has learned that two suspected assailants in the incidents in June have been arraigned in court. We welcome these steps to follow up on the attacks and call on the Kenyan authorities to fully investigate all the attacks

 We also urge the Kenyan Government to hear the activists’ call for justice and stronger anti-corruption efforts and in particular, their call for the authorities to conduct a full investigation of the allegations of misappropriated funds and for appropriate officials to be held to account. Such steps are in line with Kenya’s obligations under the UN Convention against Corruption and the African Union Anti-Corruption Convention as well as with international human rights agreements, including the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights.

 Protesters have been seeking the resignation of the Minister of Education and a transparent, independent investigation into the reported Kenyan Ministry of Finance findings that approximately KES 4.62 billion (about US$ 54.74 million) intended for the Kenyan education sector support programme has been misappropriated in the Kenyan Ministry of Education. The Kenyan Anti-Corruption Commission has called for the resignation of the responsible Minister of Education.

Note

:The United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) is the most comprehensive global legal framework for combating corruption. It is a binding agreement ratified by 148 states including standards and requirements for preventing, detecting, investigating and sanctioning corruption. The UNCAC Coalition was formed in 2006 and is composed of over 350 civil society organisations in more than 100 countries. Its goal is to promote the ratification, implementation and monitoring of UNCAC. 

KENYA: Turkana reels from severe drought

Photo: Kenneth Odiwuor/IRIN

Selling brooms to buy food. The government has declared the current drought a national disaster

LODWAR, 12 July 2011 (IRIN) – Battling the scorching sun and rising dust in northern Kenya’s Turkana region, 11-year-old Ekiru* carries handmade brooms on her head to the nearby market. She has skipped school because she has to sell the brooms to buy food for her family.

“I am going to the market and when I sell these brooms, I will buy food so that we can eat,” she said. “We haven’t had food for three days now and we just drink water and sleep. If somebody can buy these brooms, I will buy fish and we can eat.”

A worsening drought is continuing to ravage many parts of northern Kenya. The UN estimates that at least 3.5 million Kenyans are food insecure.

In Turkana, as in other areas in the predominantly pastoralist north, families are selling their surviving livestock to buy increasingly expensive food. “I have to sell my goat because just like me it has nothing to eat; I don’t have money to feed my family and only that goat, which is very thin, is my wealth. Now I have turned it [the goat] into money to buy food,” Johannas Nanoru, a father of seven, told IRIN.

The government has declared the current drought a national disaster and relief agencies are stepping in with emergency food aid, but this has done little to alleviate the suffering of families in the larger Turkana area.

“We have food aid programmes that target extremely vulnerable families but we can’t cover everybody and many more still need the food aid but they aren’t receiving it. Many will still die of hunger unless more food aid comes in,” an aid worker, who requested anonymity, said.

Turkana has experienced malnutrition rates of up to 37.4 percent; the highest recorded in 20 years and more than double the UN World Health Organization (WHO) emergency threshold of 15 percent.

Aid workers say there has been an increase in admissions of severely malnourished people to stabilization centres, with children younger than five most affected.

“We have seen higher cases of severely wasted children aged under five,” Theresa Fovo, Turkana field coordinator with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), told IRIN.

The truth is that the government has not been as proactive in arresting the recurrent food insecurity in arid regions such as Turkana…

Longer-term solutions

The IRC and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) are running a food-for-work programme in Turkana in a bid to create a long-term solution to recurrent food and water shortages. Participants engage in activities such as the construction of water points that can be used for irrigation; in turn they receive food.

At present, WFP has 265,000 food aid and food-for-work beneficiaries in Turkana. The school-feeding programme is reaching up to 179,000 pupils.

“When you engage residents in activities that create some sustainability and give them food in the process, that creates a more secure future than relying purely on just perennially giving food aid,” Fovo said.

According to an agriculture economics lecturer at Kenyatta University, Julius Nabwire, the Turkana and other communities in Kenya’s north cannot always rely on food aid. “It is unsustainable and the government must create irrigation schemes and utilize those large swathes of land to produce food to feed the residents there,” he said.

Peace building has also been identified as key to creating sustainable solutions in the region, which is often characterized by resource-based conflicts. “The government should help us create peace, then people can settle and work and produce food for themselves,” said Nathan Lolong’, a member of a security committee established to build peace between the Turkana and Pokot communities. “But even if you create irrigation schemes and there is no peace and people still want to fight over livestock, it is useless.”

Officials say the government should prioritize the development of the arid and semi-arid parts of Kenya to stem perennial food insecurity. “The truth is that the government has not been as proactive in arresting the recurrent food insecurity in arid regions such as Turkana but now that for us is a priority and we shall set aside funds to scale up development projects in these areas,” said Mohamed Elmi, the Minister for Development of Northern Kenya and Other Arid Lands.

“The government [appreciates] the need to open up these areas for development because as many people are pointing out, people cannot continuously rely on aid, because the moment donor fatigue sets in, the programmes fizzle out and people die.”

*not her real name

ko/js/mw source irinnews.org

ASIA: Indigenous people gain greater forest rights

Photo: Angela Dewan/IRIN

Indonesia is clearing its forests faster than any other country, Greenpeace says

JAKARTA, 12 July 2011 (IRIN) – More and more Asian governments are giving indigenous people greater control over their natural resources and habitat in a bid to stem deforestation, a new report states.

Countries such as China, India and Vietnam are making “dramatic” progress, not only in stopping deforestation, but also in expanding their forests, thanks to reforms that include giving more rights to communities and indigenous groups, according to the report by the Washington-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) released on 12 July.

“The state remains the predominant actor in the region’s forests, but the trend towards increased and legally recognized local control now emerging is incredibly important,” Andy White, coordinator of RRI, a global coalition of groups advocating forest land tenure and policy reforms, said in a statement accompanying the report.

“It’s no coincidence that the countries granting more rights to communities and indigenous groups are the same ones making progress toward more sustainable management of their forest resources,” he said.

According to the report, The Greener Side of REDD+: Lessons for REDD+ from Countries where Forest Area is increasing, between 1990 and 2010, 78 nations in the world with significant forest cover either maintained or increased their forested areas.

REDD stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, a global initiative to help developing countries reduce carbon released into the atmosphere by tropical forest destruction.

And while Nepal, Thailand and Cambodia have all increased the amount of land devolved to communities since 2002, the report says the pace of change in the region remains uneven.

Indonesia, home to the world’s fifth-largest forested area, remains excluded from the promising regional trend, the report said. There are almost 30,000 villages on land claimed by the Indonesian government, yet communities have rights to less than 1 percent of the nation’s forests.

Indonesia reserved 600,000 hectares for communities in 2002 but the area appeared to shrink to 230,000ha by 2008, according to government figures cited by RRI.

The new data shows that in 2010, fewer than 100,000ha had been legally recognized as under local control, far short of an Indonesian government target to devolve at least 500,000ha per year, the report said.

Signs of progress

But RRI also reported signs of progress. In the past few years, the country has made efforts to improve its policy, including creating a process for designating new areas as “community” and “village” forests that would be under local control.

Moreover, Indonesia is co-hosting an international forestry conference on Lombok island focusing on forest tenure and governance from 11-15 July.

That fact alone “says a lot about the realization at very high levels that the status quo is not a perfect one and it needs improvement”, Boen Purnama, an adviser to the country’s Forestry Ministry remarked.

According to Hedar Laudjeng, chief of community affairs at the government-sponsored National Forest Council, conflicts between local communities, companies and the government stem from unclear regulations governing forests.

“Foresty-related laws are not in favour of local communities, making the risk of conflicts high,” he said in a statement at the start of the Lombok forestry conference.

atp/ds/mw source www.irinnews.org