UN & Humanitarain

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Michael Keating of the Geneva-based Africa Progress Panel comments on the illicit flow of capital from Africa, and what must be done to halt this hamorrhaging.

" Developing countries lose at least $10 through illegal fight capital for every $1 they receive in external assistance....."
Raymond Baker, Director of the Global Financial Integrity

 

Geneva -- ‘Fragile states’ are in the spotlight at the moment, in part because of the tragedy in Haiti. By most counts, over half the world’s fragile states are in Africa. 18 months ago, there was deep concern that the global financial crisis, coming on top of fuel and food price shocks, would result in widespread political instability and conflict. For tens perhaps hundreds of millions of people, particularly women and children, poverty has increased, lives and livelihoods been lost, and progress on the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) been undermined. However, the worst fears have not been realized.

The Geneva Health Forum will be holding its third symposium on global access to health 19-21 April, 2010 in Geneva. This year’s focus will be on Globalization, Crisis and Health Systems: Confronting Regional Perspectives. The symposium, which expects to draw – as before - over 1,000 participants will explore how, over the last decade, global health has undergone substantial transformations. For a long time politically neglected, global health issues have acquired prominence not only among concerned international organizations and civil society groups, but also, increasingly, governments. This momentum, however, is now being challenged. And not just by conservative anti-Obama forces in the United States.

Geneva -- As part of the Annual Meeting of the Africa Progress Panel (APP)  held in Geneva on the 3 and 4 of February, the APP organized a debate on Africa moderated by the BBC’s Zeinab Badawi. The debate aims to draw attention to the state of Africa in 2010: the year of the World Cup on African soil, the 10 year follow-up on the Millennium Declaration, and five-year  post Gleneagles G8 Summit commitments. Four African panellists address these issues in front of an informed audience consisting of experts on African governance, economics, social and political affairs, including distinguished African and international figures.

Geneva -- Recent data compiled by OECD-DAC reveals a story that may come as a surprise. Since 2002, development finance in Africa has more than tripled. Domestic revenues dwarf private flows, remittances, ODA and philanthropic giving, all of which have increased, but not as fast as domestic revenues. Private capital flows overtook ODA as the second largest source of development finance, though this slumped, as did Africa’s access to global capital markets, from 2008.

The World Climate Change 3 conference which is being held at Geneva's International Convention Center this week is focusing on adaptation, rather than trying to curb carbon emissions. The politically onerous task of trying to actually stop or at least slow down global warming is being left to the Copenhagen Conference in December, and that is being billed as the make or break event for the future of the planet--or atleast for the future of the human race on this particular planet. WCC3 is proof, if any were needed, that Climate Change is already a nasty reality that can no longer be ignored much less halted in the foreseeable future. Is Switzerland exempt? Not exactly. Speaking to a group of Media 21 journalists, the Global Humanitarian Forum's CEO-Director General, Walter Fust, noted that the Swiss government is already being forced to consider the effect that melting permafrost will have on the country's highway system. Cows are another issue. Swiss cattle reportedly give off more greenhouse gas in the form of methane than all the cars with less than three-litre motors in Switzerland. Scientists in Lausanne have been investigating dietary changes that may reduce the methane. Garlic looks like a winner.

GENEVA—The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue or HD Centre, as it likes to be known, is one of a hand full of places to go if you want to kick start a negotiating process with pirates in Somalia or a rebel army in Chad.  HD Centre, in fact, is part of a new trend: outsourcing the mediation of hot conflicts, which often involve unsavory characters.  “Others are into peace building,” says Martin Griffiths, a former UN assistant secretary general for humanitarian affairs, who has headed HD Centre since its founding two decades ago.  “We are into peace making.”

GENEVA -- Dr. Awa Marie Coll-Seck, who heads the Roll Back malaria Partnership, had her first epiphany about malaria  when she was a four-year old girl at home in Senegal.  Her father, a doctor, forced each of his children to swallow a spoonful of the anti-malarial drug chloroquine daily.  “The kids would run in all directions when we saw it coming,” she recalls.  Her brother, who was just under three years old at the time, mastered the art of holding the bitter–tasting medicine in his mouth, and then spitting it out when no one was looking.  That was until he developed cerebral malaria.  Coll-Seck watched in horror as his body went into convulsions.  He survived, but Coll-Seck says that after that everyone in her family became a believer.

Not everyone suffers equally during a financial downturn--even one that is beginning to look more and more like a nascent depression.  One of the gems hidden away in the International Telecommunication Union’s latest report, “Confronting the Crisis,” released in February, was the observation that economic recessions can provide a fertile environment for launching new companies that have come up with nifty solutions involving problem solving technologies. When the economy is booming, there is less  incentive to try something new just to cut costs and boost efficiency. When every cent counts, the picture begins to look different. The key term here is “disruptive technologies,” new ideas or innovations that change the way we think and the way the market operates.  Digital cameras would be a disruptive technology, particularly if, like Kodak, you had been in the photographic film business.  The impact that digital music sales over the net have had on the music industry is another, and it is beginning to look like web-based publishing  is threatening to put an end to the costly  formula that wags characterize  as "Yesterday's news in tomorrow's paper."

One of the trickiest foreign policy issues that Barack Obama will face after the inauguration is what to do about aid to the developing world. Many Americans are convinced that the US has been overly generous in carrying the lion’s share of the burden, but at least on a per capita basis the facts indicate otherwise.   The US does provide just over $22 billion dollars in official development aid—roughly  a fourth of the total amount of world development aid—but if you look at America’s contribution in proportion to America’s wealth, it ranks near the bottom of the heap. “In dollar terms, the US is  still the largest donor,” says Robert Glasser, Secretary General of CARE International, “but that is because it has the largest economy.”  Moreover, in the Center for Global Development’s latest index on actual commitment to development, the US ranked 17 out of 22 countries-- just behind France, and barely ahead of Switzerland.

With all the discussion about the sub-prime crisis triggering housing foreclosures in the US, and now what looks like a worldwide financial melt down, it is easy to overlook the fact that  millions of people around the world have lost their homes under far more dramatic circumstances.  At least 26 million people are now classified as internally displaced because of conflicts, and twice that number have been driven from their houses by natural disasters—many of them attributed to changes in the climate.

Last Friday, the Essential Edge ran a story on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) problems with the new ERP (General Management) System. (See WHO: An Account’s Disaster ). This was based on numerous complaints by both staffers and consultants who claimed that their contracts were being delayed by months or that various forms of payment, such as consultancy fees or school tuition support, were not coming through. We also published an open letter by the WHO Staff Association (See Staff Association Letter ), which had complained last month  about this ongoing situation. The Office of the Assistant to the Director General of WHO sent us these comments, which were received today:

The Geneva Health Forum, which has launched its second international health conference (May 25-28, 2008) – this time focusing on strengthening health and the global health workshop - with over 1,200 global experts. The Media21 Global Journalism Network (www.media21geneva.org) , a non-profit initiative to help promote better reporting of global issues, has brought in some 20 editors, journalists and producers from all over the world – India, Sri Lank, Brazil, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa… - to provide more critical and broader reporting of the issues at hand. The journalists will then travel to Uganda and Haiti as part of specially-tailored field trips to explore the impact on the ground. Over the next few days and weeks, The Essential Edge will post some of their articles offering a different view.

Is the current international system for food security really not up to the job? Figures don’t lie. Back in 1996, when 10,000 participants from 185 countries met at a five-day World Food Summit in Rome, the goal was to cut world chronic “undernourishment” in half by 2015. At the time, the FAO estimated that 841 million people fit that category. Today, the estimate is 854 million. Roughly 10 million people die from the effects of hunger every year, and the number of people facing undernourishment is growing by four to five million annually. If food security has not broken down completely, it is pretty clear that our current system is not moving things forward. At a recent three-day conference on rethinking food aid and food security in Rome, CARE and Oxfam issued a joint press release declaring the current system “not fit forservice.”

How will one small standard make a giant leap for humanitarianism? The Geneva-based Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP) is holding an open forum on Wednesday, 23 April 2008 to mark the launch of the HAP Guide to the Standard in Humanitarian Accountability & Management. The forum, which includes Mary B. Anderson (Collaborative for Development Action), Mary Kayitsei Blewitt (Survivor Fund), Antonio Donini (Feinstein International Center), Jemilah Mahmood (MERCY Malaysia) and Meinrad Studer (Global Humanitarian Forum), and is moderated by Edward Girardet (Media21), will explore the challenges – and need - of improving accountability by humanitarian aid agencies vis a vis people affected by disaster. Katharina Samara-Wickrama will close the forum with an address on sexual exploitation and abuse.

Greater accountability and the urgent need for reform represent crucial issues. International aid, which is worth billions of dollars every year if humanitarian relief, development aid and peacekeeping are included, remains one of the world’s least monitored and - by the media - least reported industries. The HAP Guide is designed as a practical manual for humanitarian aid agencies, practitioners, governments and international bodies. For further details on the Open Forum and the HAP Guide go to  www.hapinternational.org or email •This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it•

A new initiative, aids2031 has been launched to look critically at the world’s current response to HIV and anticipate the future of the pandemic. The project was kicked-off toward the end of January 2008 at the World Economic Forum by a partnership of research, philanthropy, business and government leaders. The year 2031 will mark 50 years since AIDS was first identified, and, as more countries struggle to cope with the impact of AIDS, hard questions need to be asked about how the world has responded thus far to a disease that has killed an estimated 25 million people, and currently affects another 32-35 million. More crucial, however, is to identify the course of action needed for the next phase of the epidemic. aids2031 is a unique forum that aims to ask those hard questions and provide much-needed recommendations for the future.

Since its launch last June 2007 by the Swiss government, the new Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF) headed by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has drawn considerable scepticism among international aid professionals as to whether such an initiative is really needed.