MALI: Looting halts aid work in chaotic north

Photo: Emilia Tjernstrom/Flickr

Conditions made all the harder by the fighting in the north (file photo)

BAMAKO/DAKAR,  – Malians in the northern towns of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu are hiding in their homes in fear following the weekend takeover by rebel groups, during which hospitals, health clinics, government buildings, and most NGO and UN offices and warehouses were looted, and in some cases destroyed, leaving the bulk of humanitarian operations suspended.

After decades of failed Tuareg secessionist rebellions, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) has suddenly taken over most of northern Mali – with significant help from the Islamist group Ansar Dine – a barrelling advance that culminated in the capture of Timbuktu on 1 April.

Issa Mahamar Touré, president of the youth association in Gao, said total chaos reigned after widespread looting of government offices, NGOs, banks and hospitals in his town. “People are hiding at their homes unable to leave… no trucks are arriving with further supplies… What will we do when our stocks run out? The hospital is closed and doctors have fled… It is complete desolation, despair… We can only turn to the international community for help.”

Ansar Dine has claimed control of Timbuktu where they say they will impose Islamic Sharia law, banning alcohol as well as Western clothes and music. Several residents told IRIN they wanted them out.

“We are against this takeover,” said Amouhani Touré, a teacher who had just fled the town. “These Islamists want to impose their rules on us… We’re in the 21st century, you can’t impose Sharia on peaceful citizens. The authorities, if we have any still, must fight these Islamists with all their might… Timbuktu is a holy site, a tourist town; UNESCO-protected, we will say no to all forms of separatism.”

An under-equipped and demoralized Malian military put up little resistance against the northern rebels, despite a promise by Captain Amadou Sanogo, who led a coup ousting President Amadou Toumani Touré on 22 March, that a reinvigorated army would fight back.

Humanitarian operations suspended

Julia McDade, head of the Malian office of Norwegian Church Aid (NCA), told IRIN: “Everyone [in Gao] is in hiding, everyone’s vehicles have been stolen… every single office has been ransacked.” The NGO works with partners on agriculture projects and women’s rights in Timbuktu and Gao.

All the aid agencies IRIN spoke to have had their equipment stolen and have been forced to suspend operations, in the middle of a food emergency. Offices of the World Food Programme (WFP), which provides the bulk of food aid in the north were looted, and the organization has halted its activities in Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu, as well as the central town of Mopti, according to its head, Nancy Walters.

Catholic Relief Services (CRS), Oxfam, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) all repeated the same story. “Our cars, aid materials, offices and staff residences were all looted [in Gao],” Jurg Eglin, head of ICRC for Niger and Mali told IRIN. “We are still trying to take stock of what we have lost.”

Ultimately by looting, the rebels have further punished the drought-hit region, said McDade. “Their relatives are dying in the field, and now we can’t do the paperwork required to distribute the food… the rebels have hurt themselves,” she said, adding they are trying to set up systems with WFP to re-start food distributions once security is clearer.

This puts an already slow emergency response – because of months of conflict, complications related to increasing numbers of displaced, and sluggish donor funding – in further jeopardy, warned the agency heads. “We were already late on the food insecurity response, and now things will be even slower,” said McDade.

Everyone [in Gao] is in hiding, everyone’s vehicles have been stolen…every single office has been ransacked

ICRC has been able to carry out only one major food distribution in Kidal over recent months. Some three million Malians are estimated by the UN to be at risk of hunger this year.

Aid workers need to create some sort of “humanitarian space” in order to operate, but negotiating this is near-impossible at the moment as the situation is changing by the hour, said ICRC’s Eglin. “You speak to one person and the next day someone else gives a different answer. It’s a mess.”

Reports of rape

While the rebel takeovers were for the most part free of widespread civilian killings, according to the ICRC, several sources – one of them a staff-member with NCA – reported that rapes have taken place in Timbuktu, while others reported incidents of rape in Gao.

An NGO trainer in Gao, Adama Konipo, told IRIN he had seen rebels taking women away from the health centre, “to who knows where”, in recent days. After seeing one young woman in tears in the street, family members told him she had been raped by five MNLA soldiers. Others reported two rebels raping a young woman in the market place, firing their guns when anyone dared to approach them.

“It is impossible for any young women to leave their houses for fear,” Konipo told IRIN.

“The MNLA is supposed to be liberating its people – not raping them. Ansar Dine are supposed to be religiously correct… some kind of moral law must be applied here,” said NCA’s McDade, adding more investigations are needed to confirm these reports.

Mopti

Many now fear that Mopti - the southernmost town in northern Mali – will be the next to be targeted by the rebel groups, with UN security statements reporting rebel movements in the northernmost parts of Mopti region, and reports of rebel activities in Hombori, Youwarou and Tenen Kou.

A number of agencies, including CRS, are already shutting down their offices in Mopti and sending staff to the capital, Bamako.

The degree of vandalism that took place has people worried about such opportunism spreading, said McDade. “There are opportunists here – not just rebels – and what if they said `look, we can do the same thing in the south’?”

Meanwhile, on 2 April, Mali’s neighbours agreed to shut their borders as part of tough sanctions imposed by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which has also imposed trade and financial embargoes, as part of a set of measures to persuade the military junta to restore constitutional law.

Coup leader Sanogo has confirmed the junta is ready to discuss a transition of power, but has not set any dates.

Some banks are already running out of cash. Government staff will not be paid from April once sanctions take hold, said Moumini Kamaté, an agent at the national Budget Office, who added that some of the tax offices in Bamako were pillaged in the coup. “If liquidity runs out, the economy will grind to a halt,” he told IRIN.

This could mean government services collapsing, as well as a complete lack of direction on the humanitarian response, said Stephen Cockburn, West Africa advocacy adviser at Oxfam.

The looting of some 16 ministries means administrative services have largely stopped already, according to Lamissa Bengaly, secretary-general of the Ministry of Energy and Water, who told IRIN most of their office equipment was looted within 62 hours of the coup. “We can’t do anything because we don’t have any of our work materials. In reality, administrative services have more or less stopped.”

Some aid agencies such as Oxfam are negotiating deals with their banks to set aside minimum cash flows.

Bamako-based hospitals are generally continuing to function, while schools were on break when the coup occurred so were not directly hit, said Adama Waigalo, adviser at the Education Ministry, though he is worried they will not be able to reopen following the Easter break.

The trade embargo and border closures are already causing shortages, and prices – high to begin with – are rising further still, say traders.

A kilo of rice in Bamako is US$1 versus 60 US cents last week; a litre of oil is $2.40 rather than $2 pre-coup, according to market-seller Ousmane Traoré, who says he has no choice but to up prices as his goods are stuck on the Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire borders and cannot be sold.

Long queues of cars cluster around most petrol stations, with pump prices shooting up over the past week to $5 a litre from the official price of $1.20.

Border closures will also affect the movement of people, and “another coping mechanism will be lost”, Cockburn told IRIN.

aj/sd/oa
source www.irinnews.org

KENYA: Better training needed for counsellors of HIV-discordant couples

Photo: Edgar Mwakaba/IRIN

Counsellors need training to deal with the special needs of HIV discordant couples (file photo)

NAKURU/NAIROBI,  – The Kenyan government has issued guidelines on counselling for HIV-discordant couples, but many counsellors in smaller, rural health centres remain untrained.

“HIV infection among discordant couples will increase without adequate counselling because… it is only through counselling that they learn to live with each other, and use preventive measures such as condoms consistently,” said Churchill Alumasa, the coordinator at the local NGO, Discordant Couples of Kenya (DISCOK).

According to the government, six out of every 10 HIV-positive couples are discordant, amounting to an estimated 350,000 couples.

When Rose Njeri, 31, a mother of one, tested HIV-positive two years ago during a routine antenatal visit, she was advised to bring her husband along for her next visit. When he tested negative, he became hostile towards her.

“Trouble started immediately. He insulted me as we headed home, saying I knew my status and wanted to infect him intentionally,” Njeri told IRIN/PlusNews.

Couples counselling

The couple was given a counselling session on safe sex, but Njeri said her husband sometimes insists on unprotected sex when he comes home drunk.

“It is also important to note that couples counselling cannot be done once. It needs to be continuous, especially if there is a case of discordance,” said Vivian Mwenesi, a counsellor at a health facility in the capital, Nairobi.

Studies show that couple counselling and testing not only lowers risky behaviour, but can also significantly decrease the risk of HIV infection.

“Challenges associated with discordance can be reduced if counsellors test couples together and they benefit from knowing each other’s status at the same time, and in the presence of a counsellor,” said DISCOK’s Alumasa.

“[Counsellors] should also dedicate more time to these couples because their cases are normally different,” he said, and mistrust and engaging in risky sexual behaviour can be diminished by ensuring that couples are tested together, rather than separately.

Trouble started immediately. He insulted me as we headed home, telling me I knew my [HIV] status and wanted to infect him intentionally

Yet Mwenesi noted that many couples preferred to test individually rather than together, thereby missing out on the opportunity for couples counselling. “If you insist on testing them together, some disappear forever,” she said.

Children

The unmet reproductive health needs of HIV-discordant couples are a key issue and needs to be addressed. “Discordant couples who are not counselled together are likely to engage in unprotected sex in search of a child, and [if] one partner doesn’t know the status of the other, they find it hard to discuss condom use,” Mwenesi said. “For discordant couples, condoms remain the most effective contraceptive, but their use can only improve in a situation where there is vibrant couples counselling.”

A number of reproductive options exist for HIV-discordant couples, including artificial insemination after ‘sperm washing’, and the infected partner starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) to decrease the chances of transmission to the HIV-negative partner. However, counsellors are often not equipped to provide couples with this information.

Health workers are awaiting guidelines on HIV-discordant couples from the UN World Health Organization. These were due to be released in 2011 but were delayed by findings on the impact of early treatment on reducing HIV infection within stable sexual relationships.

Experts say home-based counselling and testing and psychosocial support groups are also helpful tools in reaching out to discordant couples.

Nicholas Muraguri, head of Kenya’s National AIDS and Sexually transmitted infections Control Programme, noted that “Involvement of partners in prevention programmes, such as medical male circumcision and prevention of mother-to-child transmission programmes, provides for a greater opportunity to provide couple counselling.”

rk/ko/kr/he
source www.irinnews.org

CLIMATE CHANGE: Understanding Rio+20

Photo: Jason Gutierrez/IRIN

We have to take action now to sustain life in the coming years

JOHANNESBURG, – A Nobel laureate, a Swedish environmentalist’s idea, the “doughnut” concept, Scandinavia’s sense of social capital, measuring the quality of life, and valuing the oceans are just some of the things trending in the run-up to the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development due to be held on 20-22 June 2012.

Rio+20 will look at how economies have grown at the expense of natural resources and human capital since the last Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, when the concept of “sustainable development” gained currency.

The idea of growth meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” has not gained much traction since the 1992 conference – largely because countries continued to equate development with economic growth, and sustainable development languished as a fringe environmental concern, says a UN-commissioned study. 

Twenty years later, “sustainable development remains a generally agreed concept, rather than a day-to-day, on-the-ground, practical reality,” says a report by the UN High-level Panel on Global Sustainability. 

Since 1992, alarm bells on several interconnected factors with a far-reaching impact on growth, resources and the quality of life – accelerated man-made climate change, population growth, increasing numbers of hungry people, rapidly depleting and more expensive fossil fuels, and a decline in food production – have been ringing louder.

“Achieving sustainability requires us to transform the global economy. Tinkering on the margins will not do the job,” said the UN Panel’s report.

Optimists in the scientific and aid community hope Rio+20 will develop from an opportunity to reflect into a collective effort to plot the world’s future growth path.

IRIN aims to make the conference more relevant and accessible by examining some of the ideas circulating ahead of it.

1. Elinor Ostrom: Fast emerging as the moral and academic compass of the conference, Ostrom’s work, which won her the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009, shows that growth combined with the sustainable use of natural resources is achievable. Ostrom looked at certain rural communities in Asia, Africa and Europe which have for centuries successfully managed in a sustainable way their common resources – grazing land, water and forests.

When the Scandinavian countries had to set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they did not consider the markets… but went ahead because they value the well-being of humans and environment…

The communities developed while preventing problems such as overgrazing, misuse of forests or over-consumption of water. The fact that Ostrom took a multidisciplinary approach (rooted in economics, environment and social capital, successfully combining the three pillars of sustainable development), makes her the expert everyone wants to hear from. She was the chief scientific adviser to the recent Planet Under Pressure conference – an attempt by the scientific community to set the agenda for Rio+20.

2. Planetary Boundaries and Future Earth: The concept of Planetary Boundaries proposed in 2009 by Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and 28 scientists, posits that there are nine critical Earth-system processes and associated thresholds that we need to respect and keep within, in order to protect against the risk of irreversible or even catastrophic environmental change on a continental or global scale.

Doing so would create a safe operating space for humanity. According to the concept’s authors, three of the nine suggested thresholds have already been crossed (climate change, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle). The threshold for the phosphorus cycle (linked, within the concept, to the nitrogen cycle) has also been crossed, according to a scientific paper in 2011. 

The status of the concept grew after being mentioned in the UN Panel report. The Boundaries concept has inspired the “nexus approach” between food, water and energy, which was also noted by the UN panel. “All three [food, water and energy] need to be fully integrated, not treated separately if we are to deal with the global food security crisis,” said the report.

Rockstrom, last week announced the launch in Rio of Future Earth, a 10-year collaborative initiative which will provide the knowledge to help societies meet their sustainable development goals. The International Council for Science, the Belmont Forum (a high-level group of donors who fund climate research), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the UN University, and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are all part of the initiative.

Tom Mitchell, head of climate change at the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI), was a bit skeptical about how “10 years of science inquiry” would help. He said countries needed solutions now – embedded in governments and designed to cater for national requirements.

3. The doughnut: In February 2012, Kate Raworth, a senior researcher with Oxfam, pointed out that human growth was glaringly absent from Rockstrom’s concept. She combined social boundaries (such as access to water, health services, food, jobs, energy and education for all) within the planetary boundaries – highlighting the need for an environmentally safe space which needed to be compatible with poverty eradication and rights for all. Between the planetary ceiling and the social foundation lay an area – shaped like a doughnut – which is a “safe and just space for humanity to thrive in”, her paper said. 

Raworth said well-designed policies can promote both poverty eradication and environmental sustainability. She told IRIN the objective was to be able to take care of everyone’s minimum needs, while re-defining the meaning of prosperity, which is equated with material wealth and associated with over-consumption (e.g. food, vehicles). “Governments need to look beyond taking care of people’s material needs and focus on quality of life, qualities of social relationships.”

The concept has picked up a lot of momentum.

“The concept of Planetary Boundaries is almost pure science,” noted Andrew Scott, researcher with ODI, while the “doughnut” concept was grounded in human reality and the need to agree on a minimum standard of living, whilst guarding against over-consumption. This calls for the need to review UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were not very ambitious to begin with, he said. “Instead of calling for the eradication of poverty it [the MDGs] settled for the halving of poverty by 2015.”

Felix Dodds, eminent author and head of the Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future, also enthused about the “doughnut proposal” in the Planet Under Pressure conference, and suggested the world should strive to turn everyone into a member of the middle-class.

4. Sustainable agriculture: After years of lobbying for an agriculture system which would respect the biosystem and at the same time increase the production of quality food to keep the numbers of malnourished down, scientists feel they are making headway. The proposed draft outcome document of the Rio+20 conference makes note of their concerns. But is that good enough – will that force a change and make sustainable agriculture a part of mainstream policy in countries?

Kenyan scientist Judi Wakhungu, a member of the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, says attitudes are changing on the ground: Sustainable agriculture is now being taught in universities in developing countries; donors particularly in Scandinavian countries are more willing to fund such initiatives tailored by developing country governments; and at government levels, sectors such as water, energy and agriculture have begun to talk to each other. 

Christopher Barrett, who teaches economics and agriculture at Cornell University in the USA, said: “The central issue is high-level political commitment to enacting the necessary policies.” He said the “lofty rhetoric” of the L’Aquila G-8 summit, or earlier summits such as Gleneagles, have “not been matched by significant new investments or policy innovations by the world’s major economies”. Progress towards sustainable agriculture was “incremental and dwarfed by the fiscal and employment challenges faced by the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries,” he added, and we should “not hold our breath for any great breakthrough” at Rio+20.

5. Social capital versus market-based approaches: Academically, social capital is a concept which places value on social relations and the role of cooperation to get collective results. The concept is making waves among development experts and the scientific community in the Rio+20 context, particularly as it forces societies to reflect on their value systems.

“It [social capital] is too technical a word,” says Oxfam’s Raworth, but essentially the concept is about valuing quality of life and interpersonal relations more than material wealth. Brazilian scientist Carlos Nobre, a member of the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, explained: “It is a concept followed by Scandinavian countries – where human well-being is more important than the market value of a particular resource.

Photo: Shayne Robinson/Greenpeace

Multilateral processes to make life on earth sustainable such as the UN talks on climate change have been moving at a snail’s pace

“For instance when the Scandinavian countries had to set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they did not consider the markets and industries but went ahead because they value the well-being of humans and environment more than anything else.”

But the reality is that most countries value markets more than human and environmental well-being, say experts, so a value has to be attributed to a natural resources to make people take care of it. As UNEP head Achim Steiner says, “we have to place ecology in economics.”

“We need to create markets around natural resources such as provision of environmental services,” said ODI’s Mitchell. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change did that with trees and carbon, but the process has not got very far.

Both Raworth and Nobre said that to achieve real change, attitudes to wealth needed to be changed, but this could only happen from the bottom up. “Market-based mechanisms to control and exploit the use of our natural resources should be seen as a means to get to a state of well-being and not as the goal,” said Nobre.

Richard Norgaard, one of the founders of ecological economics, said at the Planet Under Pressure conference that instead of markets dictating and shaping our economies, “we need to ask what kind of economy we want to live in and then design incentives for the markets.”

6. Measuring wellness: Putting a value on the quantity of natural resources that had to be exploited to achieve certain outcomes could help in terms of sustainability, argued Pablo Muñoz, an economist working on the Inclusive Wealth Report (IWR) project, a joint initiative of UN Univeristy-International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Climate Change (IHDP) and UNEP, aiming to measure, among other forms of wealth, the Natural Capital of countries. The report will be released at Rio+20.

“A country can exhaust all its natural resources while posting positive GDP [Gross Domestic Product] growth,” said Muñoz. The world needs “an indicator that estimates the wealth of nations – natural, human and manufactured and ideally even the social and ecological constituents of human well-being,” he added.

Some findings of the reports were released at the Planet Under Pressure conference.

Between 1990 and 2008, the wealth of Brazil and India in terms of per capita GDP rose 34 percent and 120 percent respectively. Natural capital, the sum of a country’s assets, from forests to fossil fuels and minerals, declined by 46 percent in Brazil and 31percent in India, according the new indicator. Brazil’s “Inclusive Wealth” rose by 3 percent and India’s rose by 9 percent over that time. But do not expect countries to start using the new indicator any time soon. “It took years for countries to come round to using GDP – so it will be a few years yet,” said Muñoz.

7.Valuing the oceans: Attempts to put a value on the exploitation of natural resources are ongoing globally. A new book by the Stockholm Environment Institute calculates the impact of climate change on the economic value of the oceans. It says climate change (in the last 200 years the oceans have absorbed 25-30 percent of the global accumulated emissions of carbon dioxide) alone could reduce the economic value of the oceans by up to US$2 trillion a year by 2100. 

jk/cb
source www.irinnews.org