By api

According to the Kenya Media there is  the US government is planning to force Africa to recognise lesbian and gay rights. Those countries not doing so will loose aid. This US plan has sparked outrage in Kenya.

This is not what the leaders of Africa want. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda has stated that Africa is tired of lectures from the west.

Kenyan religious leaders have come out strongly accusing the US of trying to impose homosexuality on Kenya citizens, for the sake of giving money for development in the country. They say they will resist and even if the US stops aiding Kenya, they will not relent.

The US Secretary of  State, Hillary Clinton, while addressing diplomats in Geneva, Switzerland on Tuesday, told them that her country would from now and on use foreign aid and diplomacy to force foreign governments to recognise the rights of lesbians and gays.

By doing this, the US is now abusing her powers as the most powerful nation in the world. You cannot force people to go against their traditions and cultures for the sake of aid and diplomacy. This is colonialism through aid.

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by api

DURBAN,  - People are the victims and the drivers of climate change, so the success of any response to the impact of climate change depends on the people it is supposed to help, say 20 UN agencies at the UN talks in Durban, South Africa.
Riding on this simple premise, the agencies have been pushing to put a people-centred, bottom-up approach at the heart of policies to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

A document explaining the approach was released by the UN Task Team on Social Dimensions of Climate Change and discussed on the sidelines of the talks on 7 December.

“There are organizations even within the UN system that do not have people in their DNA,” said a UN official who did not want to be named.

The “current climate change discourse – including the way mitigation and adaptation measures are designed and appraised – tends to emphasize environmental, economic or technological inputs and costs. The social dimensions of climate change are not well understood or addressed,” the task team notes.

Peter Poschen, of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), illustrates the point in a climate change impact scenario and a typical response. For instance, if a certain part of a country that grows rice increasingly experiences flooding, a disaster risk reduction expert might step in and advise the people in the area to switch from growing rice to planting trees to help break the water flow.

“But often the expert would not have taken into account the other people in the area, who work as farm labourers on the rice field. With one policy move, the expert would have devastated the lives of so many others, and the linkages and impacts between paddy cultivation and the entire community. The problem is policy decisions are made by technocrats, who just see the problem and the solution, but not the people.”

People are the pivot

There are organizations even within the UN system that do not have people in their DNA

Climate change will potentially affect a wide range of sustainable development issues – health, food security, employment, incomes and livelihoods, gender equality, education, housing, poverty and mobility – either directly or indirectly, the agencies say in their paper.

To make the transition to a greener world and a more resilient people, basic human development needs will have to be addressed to make them less vulnerable and inform the choices they make, which will affect the path of the country’s economy.

Where and how people live, their access to basic services – health, water and education, employment opportunities, social protection, good governance – determines their vulnerability to risks from natural hazards such as floods, which are expected to become more intense as the world becomes warmer.

Choices such as driving a vehicle or using public transport, consuming more meat or adopting a vegetarian diet, choosing to have many children, a few, or none, the construction of large or small homes will shape the path of the country’s economy.

Next steps

To integrate social dimensions into climate change policies, the task team suggests six steps.

1) Conduct social impact assessments at each step of any programme involving communities.

2) Promote inter/ministerial policy dialogue. Ministries often work in silos and neglect to address the complexities of climate impacts that cut across sectors.

3) Identify research gaps to understand people’s behaviour, choice, vulnerability and consumption patterns.

4) Ensure safeguards to protect the vulnerable when fashioning climate solutions. For instance, when countries switch from dependence on energy produced by coal-based plants to renewable energy, they should ensure coal-miners have alternative sources of income.

5) Invest in human capital: To empower people both as agents of change and to make them resilient policies need to build skills.

6) Make money available to do this at the country level. There are countries that are already taking steps towards greening development. South Africa, one of the most carbon-intensive economies in the world, announced at this side event a plan for a green economy that could create jobs to address its high unemployment rate, in which at least 4.4 million people are extremely vulnerable.

Jorge Maia, head of research at South Africa’s Industrial Development Corporation, said up to 98,000 direct jobs could be created in the short term by 2012, and as many as 462,000 by 2025, through efforts to produce renewable energy, improve energy efficiency, reduce emissions and manage natural resources. But South Africa needed to get its educational institutions on board to build the skills required for the green jobs.
Shajedul Haque, an aid worker at Eminence, a local NGO based in Bangladesh, said each of the ministries in his country had a climate change cell so as to integrate it into all development sectors. “But there is lack of coordination on the climate change aspect between the ministries… often some areas remain under-serviced, while… [there are] many actors working on a sector in… [another] area.” He said countries should have an authority coordinating the development response.

Robin Mearns, the lead social development specialist at the World Bank, said they had been approached by countries like Mexico and Vietnam to fund development policies with climate change adaptation and mitigation elements. “The most remarkable thing is that the drafting of the policies involves a very strong participatory approach right down to the local government-level – there is a lot of consultation with the people.”

Money

It is when the lines between climate change and development policies get blurred that developing countries, who are demanding new and additional funding for climate change mitigation and adaptation under the proposed climate change deal, see red.

Developing countries have accused the developed countries for double counting development aid as climate change adaptation funds.

Countries and NGOs, who acknowledge the difficulty of distinguishing an adaptation project from a development project, are grappling with this prickly question.

jk/he/oa source http://www.irinnews.or
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KASSALA,  - Five years after a peace dealwas signed to end a rebellion in eastern Sudan, a perceived failure to address the marginalization that sparked the uprising could unleash a new wave of violence, according to several officials.
Although the region has been overshadowed by war in Darfur, the secession of the South and fighting between Sudanese forces and rebels on the border with South Sudan, the east is “a volcano waiting to erupt”, an official working with the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Kassala, who wished to remain anonymous, told IRIN.

“Beja soldiers are right now in the Hamid mountains, on the Eritrean side,” he said.

Bejas form the largest ethnic group in the east. The October 2006 peace accord was signed by the Sudanese government and the Eastern Front, an alliance of the Beja Congress and the smaller Rashaida Free Lions.

“Unofficial sources have already reported that they organized attacks in Sudanese territory three months ago,” said the UNDP source, predicting that conflict on the scale now taking place in South Kordofan and Blue Nile could erupt in Kassala state within a few months.

The prevalence of weapons in the region heightens this risk.

Yassin Abdallah, who manages the government disarmament office in Kassala, told IRIN that an operation conducted after the peace deal netted “guns and ammunition from 598 Beja fighters and 792 Free Lions fighters. This was only some of the fighters at that time, not the majority.

“And the Free Lions are nomads. They always use guns to protect the cattle,” he said.

Ahmed Tirik, a member of parliament, described the situation in Kassala, his home region, as “unpredictable”.

“But if relations between Sudan and Eritrea [which facilitated the peace talks] remain good, the border will stay safe and it will be very difficult for Beja fighters led by Cheikh Mohamed Taher to cross it,” he said.

The Beja Congress has joined the Sudan Revolutionary Front, an umbrella group set up in November with the aim of overthrowing the government of Omar el-Bashir

“Humiliation and tyranny” 

Beja community leader Mohamed Ali Adam said many in his community “think that the situation hasn’t improved for them even five years after the war. They have still no access to facilities such as schools as promised by the government. This is an important issue.

“But, since 2006, discussions with the authorities are better. For instance, they gave us the technical support to build water pumps,” said Adam, who chairs the Al-Gandoul network of 30 villages dotted around the town of Kassala, with about 36,000 residents.

This support was not enough for some in the Beja Congress, which on 15 November threw in its lot with the Sudan Revolutionary Front, an umbrella group set up a few days earlier with the aim of overthrowing the government of Omar el-Bashir.

Explaining why it joined the likes of Darfur’s Justice and Equality Movement and two wings of the Sudan Liberation Army, as well as the northern wing of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the Congress said the “misery and suffering of the [Beja] people is increasing due to poverty, starvation and other deadly diseases. The ruling regime in Sudan is subjecting its people to humiliation and tyranny. They are arrogant and killing the marginalized people. ”

According to a recent report by Japan’s International Cooperation Agency, “91 percent of households [in Kassala state] do not have enough food, only 39 percent have access to safe water and the maternal mortality rate has risen to 1,414 per 100,000 births compared with 500 pre-war.”

Humanitarian response is greatly impeded by landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) left over from the war, which is being removed.

Photo: Maryline Dumas/IRIN

Season of discontent – Kassala’s population feels increasingly marginalized

“We should manage to clear the area by 2014 as expected,” said Kelly McAulay, country director for the Mines Advisory Group, which says Kassala is the most mine- and UXO-contaminated state in Sudan. “We have good support from the government. And we have got deminers who used to work in Blue Nile and South Kordofan. Now, we have about 80 deminers to clear some 2 million square kilometres.”

Growing discontent

Drought has compounded these problems. This year, water flowed along the seasonal Gasch River only between August and September, rather than starting in July as usual. The just-completed harvest is expected to be poor and consequently the region is braced for higher food prices.

“Popular discontent is boiling,” warned Mohamed Dualeh, head of the UN Refugee Agency’s eastern Sudan sub-office. (There are thousands of Eritrean refugees in the area.)

“During the Eastern peace agreement, the authorities talked about development. It has not materialized as expected. The area is poorer than Darfur. If something has to happen, it will start from within the population, and not from abroad,” he said.

Discontent has already surfaced among students, hundreds of whom demonstrated in late October. There were several injuries and one death in these disturbances.

“The Arab Spring pushed people to act. In response, the authorities settled on very strict security plans,” said Ibrahim Omer Osman, local coordinator for Practical Action, an NGO.

“The atmosphere is like in 1964,” said Tirik, the Kassala parliamentarian, referring to the year when widespread strikes led to the fall of a military government.

“The difference is that the government can still ease the situation, if it helps the population to get food,” he said, suggesting failure to do so carried significant risks.

“Eastern Sudan is a strategic area for Khartoum. There is a big airport in Kassala, roads and the [oil] pipelines. You know, the region is big enough to hide in after attacking a pipeline.”

mg/am/mw source http://www.irinnews.org

by api

JOHANNESBURG,  - About 214 million people were living and working outside their home country in 2010, and international migration has continued to grow despite the global economic crisis, but in many countries negative attitudes towards migrants are also rising.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM), focusing on the importance of communicating more effectively about migration in itsWorld Migration Report 2011, released on 6 December, notes that such attitudes stem in part from misinformation and misperceptions about migration that have been fuelled by opportunistic politicians and poor media reporting.

“Few areas of public policy are subject to greater misrepresentation… yet more influenced by public opinion, than international migration,” write the report’s authors. “Accurately informing relevant stakeholders and the wider public about migration may be the single most important policy tool in all societies faced with increasing diversity.”

During periods of economic recession, national debates on migration issues are often politicized, and evidence of the economic benefits that migration can bring is ignored in favour of assumptions that migrants are fuelling unemployment and draining public resources.

People in migrant-receiving countries tend to significantly overestimate the size of their country’s migrant population, and often blame them for social ills ranging from crime to unemployment.

A 2010 public opinion poll, cited in the report, found that 57 percent of Americans felt immigration had a negative effect on the country. Another recent study of eight migrant-receiving countries found that an American perception of 39 percent of the US population being migrants differed significantly from the actual figure of 14 percent. Italians believed 25 percent of their population were migrants, more than three times the actual number.

With more and more migrants heading to rapidly developing nations in their own regions, such views are not limited to the developed world. A 2006 survey of South African citizens found that 84 percent felt “too many” foreign nationals were being allowed into the country and 37 percent wanted a total ban on immigration.

Bernardo Mariano-Joaquim, IOM’s regional representative for southern Africa, commented that not enough had been done in South Africa, the region’s largest recipient of migrants, to highlight the positive effects of migration on the country’s economic development.

“In the Mpumalanga region, strong development has been thanks to Mozambican visitors and migrants, who come and purchase good and services and work on the farms,” he told IRIN, adding that even in countries with high rates of unemployment like South Africa, certain jobs, particularly of a seasonal nature, are more attractive to migrants than to locals.

Few areas of public policy are subject to greater misrepresentation…yet more influenced by public opinion, than international migration

Southern Africa has a long tradition of intra-regional migration, with South Africa’s mining sector attracting workers from neighbouring Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique and Botswana. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, however, the country’s booming economy and progressive refugee legislation have attracted much larger numbers of economic migrants and asylum seekers from all over the continent.

The influx has led to rising tensions, especially in townships where migrants have started businesses and are perceived to be faring better than the locals. In May 2008, hostilities erupted in widespread xenophobic violence that left 60 people dead and displaced about 100,000 others. Commentators have since accused the government of not doing enough to prevent continuing sporadic attacks on foreigners.

The IOM report asserts that such episodes could be avoided by “a fundamental shift in the way we communicate about migration” so as to foster more informed debate and “prevent migration from being used as a platform for other political, social and economic issues”.

Mariano-Joaquim notes that in South Africa, as in many migrant-receiving countries, politicians tend to use anti-migrant rhetoric to gain votes and also to make migrants the scapegoats for much wider socio-economic problems.

With their focus on the sensational and the dramatic, local media portrayals of migrants have not helped. “We need more balance,” he said. “There are South African business people who are becoming richer thanks to migrant workers; there are migrant workers who have started from nothing employing South Africans.”

The IOM report makes the point that “distorted communication about migration can trigger a vicious cycle that leads to misinformation being perpetuated through government policy, the mass media, the public at large and… can, in turn, skew discourse at all levels.”

The way forward, according to Mariano-Joaquim, includes de-politicizing debates around migration. “If you looked at migration through the lens of economic development, policies would be completely different,” he said, citing the example of Canada and Switzerland, where annual quotas are set for migrant labour depending on the country’s needs.

He also called for discussions about migration to include migrants themselves, and for the perspectives of migrant-sending as well as receiving countries to be considered in formulating migration policies.

ks/he source http://www.irinnews.org