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Add to Preferred SourcesDrops in health spending jeopardize recovery from COVID-19 in developing countries, ‘palpable’ fear of ‘brutal and systemic repression of women grows in Afghanistan and call for ‘decisive action now’ to avoid climate catastrophe. Here is what you missed from last week’s headlines in the international development sector:
Drops in health spending jeopardize recovery from COVID-19 in developing countries
Despite what will likely be the fastest economic growth in the aftermath of any recession in the last 80 years, 52 countries are expected to reduce per capita government spending below pre-COVID levels over the next five years. Based on a new World Bank paper released, this will leave them unable to finance their share of a COVID-19 vaccine roll-out, invest in better preparedness to protect themselves from future crises, and make progress toward Universal Health Coverage.
According to “From Double Shock to Double Recovery: Widening Rifts,” governments will have to make bold choices to avoid falls in government health spending. In a group of 126 countries, per capita, government spending is projected to exceed pre-COVID levels by 2026. In 52 countries, by that time, overall government spending will however remain below 2019 levels. A return to pre-COVID-19 growth rates in per capita government health spending in the poorest of these countries would require the share of spending assigned to health to almost double, from 10 percent to 20 percent.
“The economic shock from Covid-19 is threatening the capacity of governments to spend sufficiently on health, threatening COVID-19 recovery and health security for all,” said Mamta Murthi, World Bank Vice President for Human Development.
“Cash-strapped countries will have to make tough choices in health investment to safeguard essential health services, stay on a path toward Universal Health Coverage, and build resilience for the future.”
While bringing the current pandemic to an end will require significant investments in vaccines and vaccination programs, countries must also build resilience by investing in preparedness and ensure affordable health services for their populations, especially poor people. Yet, according to the paper, this is becoming a near impossibility for some countries.
‘Palpable’ fear of ‘brutal and systemic repression’ of women grows in Afghanistan
Since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan last month, they have made some commitments to uphold human rights. However, their subsequent actions have “sadly contradicted” those promises, the UN rights chief told a side event of the General Assembly.
Michelle Bachelet informed a high-level event on safeguarding 20 years of international engagement in Afghanistan, that women have been “progressively excluded from the public sphere”, prohibited from appearing without a male guardian, and face increasing restrictions on their right to work.
“The Ministry that once promoted women’s rights has been disbanded, and its premises were taken over by a Ministry for the propagation of Virtue and the prevention of Vice – an all-male office that will apply guidelines on appropriate dress and behavior,” the human rights chief said.
Moreover, Taliban representatives have dismantled many other former government offices for women’s affairs, gaining access to sensitive files, threatening staff, and accusing women’s civil society groups of spreading “anti-Islamic” ideas.
Call for ‘decisive action now’ to avoid climate catastrophe
Speaking alongside the UK Prime Minister in New York the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, has called on world leaders for “decisive action now to avert climate catastrophe.”
Mr. Guterres joined an emergency summit convened and attended by United Kingdom premier Boris Johnson, to press for more action on climate finance and other measures ahead of the watershed UN COP26 climate conference, which begins next month in Scotland.
The Informal Climate Leaders Roundtable on Climate Action took place behind closed doors at UN Headquarters, as the high-level week of the General Assembly gets underway.
World leaders addressed the gaps that remain on the actions needed from national governments, especially the G20 industrialized powers, on mitigation, finance, and adaptation.
DevelopmentAid Editorials
Aid donors struggle to cover global goals. Here is why
Back in 2015, the United Nations (UN) introduced the Sustainable Goals (SDGs) program, also known as the Global Goals. The SDGs agenda encompasses 17 interlinked objectives to be achieved by 2030. A recent report by Brookings Institution analyzed how 20 of the largest governmental donor agencies have incorporated these goals into their strategy and operations for international development. Based on the findings, Japan, Netherlands and the United Kingdom are countries that have comprehensively incorporated the SDGs into their policy-making while the United States, Spain, and Italy have only focused on certain specific goals for sustainable development.
Poor progress towards water and sanitation recorded worldwide
Safe drinking water remains inaccessible for 2 billion people around the world, while 3.6 billion still live without safely managed sanitation, according to reports recently released by the UN-Water Integrated Monitoring Initiative. This proves that the world is not on course to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 – ensuring water and sanitation for all by 2030. Efforts should be doubled, in some cases quadrupled within the next nine years to meet the set goals, commented the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) with the organization concluding that data collection can support policymakers in accelerating progress towards SDG 6.
Efforts to increase crops threaten bee populations worldwide
A wide range of wildflower plants around the globe, along with food crops, rely on animal pollination including that of wild and domesticated bees. Every day, a single colony of bees can pollinate 300 million flowers. Although a decline in bee populations around the globe could lead to catastrophic consequences for humanity, people are the main cause of bee habitat destruction and bee poisoning. According to the United Nations, it is crucial to safeguard bees in order to tackle hunger and malnutrition.
Here’s what else has happened
South Sudan: South Sudan continues to be “plagued” by violence and corruption, the Human Rights Council heard, jeopardizing the young nation’s efforts to establish lasting peace and put it on the road towards sustainable development.
FAO: Among Afghanistan’s many challenges, it is urgent that the international community tackle the dramatic hunger risk conditions faced by a third of the population and the livelihood risks in rural region areas where 70 percent of the population live, QU Dongyu, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), told G20 Foreign Ministers.
USAID: The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Assistant to the Administrator Sarah Charles, in the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, announced nearly $291 million in additional humanitarian assistance from the American people for Yemen during a virtual high-level side event on the margins of the 76th UN General Assembly. This funding will provide lifesaving aid for Yemenis enduring one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, caused by nearly seven years of war and compounded by a deepening economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Islamic Relief: South Sudan is facing a major humanitarian crisis, with the UN warning that 60% of the population is “increasingly hungry”. Since the civil war in South Sudan broke out in 2013, communities have been struggling to recover. The conflict cost Almost 400,000 people their lives and forced over 3.5 million people to flee their homes. Despite a formal ceasefire, communities in South Sudan are still suffering.
Reports
Alarming new FAO report shows decades of development efforts undermined
The stark findings of a new report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) show that COVID-19 has set back progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) enshrined in the UN‘s Agenda 2030, undermining decades of development efforts.
“It’s an alarming picture, in which progress on many SDG targets has been reversed, with a significant impact on all aspects of sustainable development and making the achievement of the 2030 Agenda even more challenging,” said FAO Chief Statistician, Pietro Gennari.
The analysis, “Tracking progress on food and agriculture-related SDG indicators 2021” focuses on eight of the SDGs (1, 2, 5, 6, 10, 12, 14, and 15), which were adopted at a UN Summit in New York in 2015. It’s FAO’s third assessment of its kind, based on the latest data and estimates available.
Global food systems must be disrupted and changed- IFAD report
The report, Transforming food systems for rural prosperity, stresses the importance of focusing investments and policy changes on rural food value chains so that all people can access adequate nutritious food in a manner that does not harm the environment, and so that food producers can earn decent incomes.
Young children’s diets show no improvement in last decade, ‘could get much worse’ under COVID-19
Fed to Fail? The crisis of children’s diets in early life – released ahead of the UN Food Systems Summit this week – warns that rising poverty, inequality, conflict, climate-related disasters, and health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic, are contributing to an ongoing nutrition crisis among the world’s youngest that has shown little sign of improvement in the last ten years.
Events
GIZ procurement, recruitment practices | Invitation to a Webinar
📅 30 September 2021 🕒 4 PM (Brussels Time)/ 10 AM (Washington DC Time)
DevelopmentAid invites you to attend an exciting webinar on “Doing business with GIZ: procurement guidelines and recruitment practices”. During the webinar, attendees will learn about GIZ’s profile, operations portfolio, procurement policy, and recruitment strategy. Moreover, our speakers will provide several tips on how to prepare correctly for upcoming bids and how to be successful in landing individual assignments.
Speakers:
- Immanuel Gebhardt, Director of GIZ’s Procurement and Contracting Division
- Saskia Weisgerber, External Recruitment at GIZ
Host:
Ion Ilasco, External Relations and Events at DevelopmentAid.
*All participants who stay until the end of the event will receive a certificate of attendance.
Nature for Life Hub | Virtual
📅 22 September – 4/5/6 October 2021| Virtual
Humanity must urgently transform its relationship with nature if to avoid potentially catastrophic environmental, economic and social consequences for future generations, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) warned as it launches registration for its three-day virtual “Nature for Life Hub.”
The World BioEconomy Forum 2021
📅 18 – 20 October
Pará, Brazil
The World BioEconomy Forum is pleased to announce that its Forum 2021 will be held in Belém, in the State of Pará, Brazil from 18 – 20 October 2021. Belém is located in the Amazon region of Brazil and will give the Forum the opportunity to highlight the region as of fundamental importance to the global circular bioeconomy. The event will bring together high-level speakers and experts from around the world highlighting Belém and the Amazon region for essential debate on sustainable development.
This is the first time that the World BioEconomy Forum has left its usual location in Ruka, Finland. The Forum’s advisory board is clearly aware that there is no bioeconomy that fits all, but several bioeconomies built to operate within their own regional economic systems. Therefore, the decision was made to move the Forum periodically to various locations around the world, and particularly in regions where the bioeconomy is at the centre of attention. Belém, in the state of Pará, in Brazil, is a perfect example of this.
Founder and President of the Forum, Jukka Kantola, says: “The World BioEconomy Forum has solidified its position as a major annual event for the circular bioeconomy. The last Forum in 2020 proved to be a major success attracting participants from more than 50 countries around the world. The Forum 2021 will be another step in our evolution as the World BioEconomy Forum goes to Brazil – live from Belém! Belém in Brazil will be a fascinating place for the Forum to be held, and it will be our great pleasure to share their narrative to the world at the same time as bringing global stakeholders of the Circular BioEconomy to Brazil.”
The Forum will be co-hosted by the state of Pará.
Helder Barbalho, Governor of the State of Pará, says, “The World BioEconomy Forum will be held in the Pará State at a crucial time in our development as our efforts concentrate on the search for an economy based on biodiversity, with opportunities for all – especially the most needy. The Government of Pará has made a commitment to sustainable development since the beginning of its administration when it has based its planning on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and on a macro-strategy that prioritises from local realities to the commitment to the life of each citizen of our country.
“The axis of economic action prioritises solutions that enable development with the standing forest. An example of this is the Amazon Now Plan, which has among its goals to reach the level of zero net emissions. To this end, the plan has four lines of action that range from the repression of environmental crimes and support for production chains, to land and environmental regularisation.”
The Forum will be held with the support of Brazil’s leading agricultural and forestry associations with the bioeconomy at their heart, ABAG, and Ibá.
Marcello Brito, President of ABAG’s Board of Directors, says, “This is a great privilege for Brazil to receive the World BioEconomy Forum. Much larger than we think, the Amazon biome covers almost half of the country, and has 22 types of different forest formations including non-forest and mixed vegetation. A huge area has already been anthropized. The time to discuss the bioeconomy in the region is very opportune, as there are a number of industries already successfully operating in the forest bioeconomy, including agro, food processing and cosmetics. We are absolutely sure that the event will be a success.”
Paulo Hartung, President of Ibá (Brazilian Tree Industry), says, “The bioeconomy and the vision of sustainability guide production models that use natural resources consciously, so that they can provide clean energy sources, mitigate the effects of climate change, provide quality food and other renewable products, among other essential needs. The holding in Brazil of the World Bioeconomy Forum, with the support of Ibá, demonstrates the commitment and potential for the national cultivated tree sector and for Brazil of the green economy, showing that we are attentive to the new mentality of a conscious and concerned consumer with sustainability, with the sanity of what you consume and with your own health. In a word: concerned with the future of the world.”
Planning of the Forum is well underway and it will follow the agenda of the World BioEconomy Forum. The agenda consists of four thematic areas, which will be covered during the event:
- The Bioeconomy: People, Planet Policies
- Global Leaders and the Financial World
- Bioproducts around us
- Looking to the Future
Each Forum is concluded with a joint declaration.
6th International Climate Change Adaptation Conference
📅 5 – 8 October
Delhi, India
The sixth edition of this conference, Adaptation Futures 2020, will be co-hosted by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and the World Adaptation Science Program (WASP) in New Delhi from 4-8 October 2021. It will be hosted under the broad rubric of ‘accelerating adaptation action and knowledge to support action’. This will be an ideal opportunity to generate a significant dialogue around actionable solutions and move the international cooperation further to realizing the goals of the Paris Agreement.