Women, poor hit hardest by Climate Change

Women working on a fish farm in Bangladesh / Paul Thompson

Interview with activists working in Bangladesh

As the world prepares for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP21 in Paris at the end of the year, where it is hoped that a legally binding agreement on Climate Change may be reached, it is important to remember that, while all of us will be affected by future change, some of the world’s poorest and marginalised communities are often already affected.

While some Pacific islands are looking at relocating their entire population and culture, some have fewer options, such as Bangladesh.

With 57 trans-boundary rivers flowing through their land to the sea, Bangladesh also has a large, low lying coastal region, susceptible to not only rising seas, but extreme events, such increasing storms and monsoons. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that 27 million Bangladeshis were at risk from a sea level rise by 2050 and a net 15% increase in poverty by 2030.

The report says that the country lost 5.9% of GDP due to storms between 1998 and 2009.

There hasn’t been much work on gender and climate change, but in Bangladesh it’s not an abstract concept for academia, but one of the ways of building capacity and resilience into their planning.

Dilruba Haider, the Co-ordinator on Gender and Climate Change for UN Women in Bangladesh spoke to New Europe about what they had learned.

“What we are doing basically has two outcomes,” Haider said, “One is policy advocacy through which we are trying to influence the government and other actors including the UN to integrate gender equality prospective into their climate change policies and strategies. The other is to provide direct support to the climate vulnerable women in the form of livelihood support.”

Haider explains that they wish to empower women by supporting economic independence – so they are not dependent on a husband or male relatives, political independence – the right to be involved in decision making at the hyper local to national level and mobility, the right to travel.

Stating that nobody knows how many people live on the coastal plains, at high risk of climate change, Haider says there’s more to the problem. “Flooding is one consequence – one of the impacts of climate change. Increased frequency of disaster is the result of climate change. But there are also other problems as a result of climate change like health hazards.

“When there is extreme cold especially up in the north of the country it is usually elderly and people with nutrition deficiency who suffer more. We all know that the nutrition level of women is much lower than their male counterparts. So the new mothers, pregnant women and young girls suffer the most together with the elderly.”

There are already problems from higher salinity, as women showed a group of visiting parliamentarians, “They had rashes because of extensive use of saline water because women are doing all the chores – washing, cleaning and cooking – so women are exposed, including productive tract infection and urinary tract infection because of using saline water to clean themselves.”

She gives an example, of migration from the over-salinated areas, “It’s usually the males who are going to the city for a couple of months to work in some nearby towns. During these 6-9 months or year, the women are left in the village and struggling to survive. The men are not always able to send the money back each month but the women somehow manage. We are thinking how to increase their capacity to earn more might be to increase their skill level.”

There’s also the problem of food production. “food production is hampered. When there is a problem with the availability of food, the men eat first. So climate change is affecting women in various ways. But in the climate change discourse women’s issues are not being addressed.”

Haider elaborates, “But because no one is conscious about it or aware of it, all the discussions are about drought-tolerant rice varieties – issues women have no control over.”

That’s half the affected population out of the debate and, more importantly, excluded from offering advice and potential solutions. Haider has a message for politicians everywhere, “Please address the gender equality concerns in the climate change discussions and negotiations.”

She continues, “If you think about it this sounds and looks and feels so obvious that you shouldn’t, and you can’t talk about, climate change adaptation without supporting a population that is suffering and will be suffering as a result of climate change – you can’t do that by keeping half the population outside of their purview. If we don’t take this into account, we will never be able to come up with a holistic approach to adaptation.”

Noting that “Bangladesh has hundreds and thousands of NGOs,” many are using credit programmes, UN Women are using grants instead. “If there is a women doing rice trading, we buy the paddy for her and she processes it and with the money she earns she again buys the paddy. These kinds of things like fishnet making or poultry or tailoring these have been going on for 20-30 years now.”

But Haider asks, “Is it empowering? Money doesn’t give you power. Money brings you some wellness. You have some money so you are not starving and you can send your kid to school, but is it empowering?” She adds that this is a question they are studying.

There is one resource available; the people. “Bangladeshi people are the epitome of resilience. Each time I go to the field I really feel humbled. I have never been in a disaster. I am from a middle-class family. I have enjoyed gender equality in my home and work. But when I go to the field and see these women who have nothing and they are oppressed and still they are fighting back and standing there and educating their child and trying to better their life. My words fail me. The poor people have tremendous power to move ahead and make their life better. They fight everyday to make their life better.”

Haider concludes, “If anything, it’s the people power that is moving the country forward.”

It’s time to end Africa’s celebrity Hell

The world, saved by one celebrity at a time

Drum up some PR and win a child of your choice

Is there no end to Africa’s suffering? Well, there is something we can do to improve the lives or Africans and to raise people’s understanding of the continent.

We can ban celebrities from travelling there.

 It seems to be the top destination for celebrities needing a touch of PR. Perhaps the tabloids have papped them in the bushes with the kids nanny, or their assistants are more personal in their assistance than stated in the job description. Others just want to go shopping for babies.

Either way, it’s time to step up and stop celebrity exploitation. The offenders are the professional good hearts, the messiahs of misery, the NGOs. They exist to Do Good. Now that is trickier than you may think, especially as all the big donors, governments, who have essentially privatised the aid industry but can ask a lot of awkward questions about how the money was spent.

So, the NGOs wanted large sums of cash from people who would not know much and ask fewer questions. Hello general public! And so the need for ‘raising awareness’ began. This is how it works, you find an issue, frame it in such a way as to extract the most cash from those who know the least and raise funds, sorry awareness.

But ‘raising awareness’ is an end of itself these days, but what is the value, beyond cash donations?

It is impossible, in a globalised world to be aware of more than a tiny fraction of what is happening on the planet. And if we know, say that X% of a defined age group in Country Y have illness Z, how are we to respond?

Is it worse than X-1% having illness B in country C?

You see the problem. 

It seems that some grim league table of suffering is the result of raising awareness.

Stop Kony. Remember that, where messianic youth suddenly became experts on a deeply complex and long running issue within mere seconds of watching a glossy video. In fact there was a good reason the video was glossy: almost all the funds were spent of flying the staff and cameras around the world.

Awareness raising always results in offering simplistic solutions to people who won’t ask awkward questions, about the organisation or how it spends the cash.

The trend really got silly when God told Christian Aid to send the winner of the first UK Big Brother bore-a-thon to Jamaica. Poor bloke ran away in tears, utterly horrified at being outside Sarf London.

There have been a string of such incidents since, most recently with someone who plays posh totty on TV, Elizabeth McGovan behaving stupidly, but she did get one thing right, she asked the charity’s pr minders, “I need to know what distinguishes World Vision from its competitors?” For she understands, vaguely admittedly, that this is about a competition for resources: people’s cash.

In the meantime, the white people can fuss over suitably photogenic black babies.

And nirvana can strike, as it did Madonna, “I thought, ‘I have to help. I have to save these people.’ And then I thought, ‘Wait a minute; I think it’s the other way around. I think they might be saving me.”

Now let’s save everyone from these people. Step one is to remove Bono’s passport.

Rabies is still a danger to development

Border control after outbreak in Ireland / Rossographer

Under control in much of the west, this deadly disease runs wild elsewhere, but it can be stopped

With HIV, Ebola and other terrifying diseases in the news it is easy to forget that an older virus like rabies is still around, despite being almost eliminated from mainland Europe.

The disease is usually transmitted to humans through an animal bite, usually a dog. Without treatment patients suffer and die.

Today, almost all rabies victims are in the developing world, especially Africa where traditional challenges and conflict is hampering the treatment of the disease and the harm it does to development ambitions.

New Europe discussed the issue with one of the world’s leading experts, Professor Louis Nel, Executive Director of the Global Alliance for Rabies Control. He is also on the steering committee of the Gates Foundation/World Health Organization rabies control panel.

Nel is a full Professor at the University of Pretoria where he specialises in molecular biology (lyssaviruses and rabies).

New Europe: Some people don’t really understand what rabies is, could you give us a little background on the disease?

Louis Nel: Rabies is one of the most fearful diseases on the planet. It’s deadly, and has the highest fatality rate of all diseases. It’s viral and very well-adapted to the mammalian brain. It really transforms the host individuals and creates aggressive behavior and evolves a mechanism to ensure its own transmission. The virus migrates from the brain into the salivary glands to allow for its transmitting to other animals.

Could you tell us a bit about the distribution and affects of the disease?

Rabies was very controlled and well eliminated in dogs throughout Europe, but this is not the case in other parts of the world. Africa and Asia, specifically, the major burden of rabies is on these two continents. Dog rabies is an epidemic in these developing countries and is the cause of 99% of human cases of rabies. To some extent, it is a disease that affects the poorest of the poor which is why it sometimes loses visibility

How many fatalities does it cause?

The latest estimate puts it between 60-75,000 human cases per year. You know, rabies is not only the most deadly disease on Earth, but it’s also one of the only diseases that has preventative measures both before and after transmitting the disease.

So each case represents a double failure, to prevent and to treat

Correct. Accessibility and affordability of the vaccines needed are the priorities to prevent human deaths by rabies.

If we could put in place systems to provide vaccines there would be spin-off benefits for healthcare

That’s very true, but you know we are looking at another paradigm—rabies is essentially an animal disease so the cases in humans are what we call spillover, or incidental. Even though, that number is unacceptably high, but the paradigm would be to eliminate or prevent the disease in the reservoir (or domestic dogs). The long-term solution is to eliminate rabies in dogs to prevent it in humans, and this can be done it’s been shown in Europe.

How realistic is it for that to be an achievable goal?

It is a large task I do not doubt that. But it can be done. It’s been done in Europe, America and isolated countries elsewhere. We have to have a target to have something to work toward. All the rabies preventative organizations have come together to generate a blueprint on how countries can prevent rabies with step-by-step procedures. That’s a plan that can be measured and get us toward the goal of eliminating it.

Is this something that has to be regional? The animal world does not recognize borders

That’s a good point. It’s a trans-boundary disease, for that reason regional approaches and good neighborliness comes into play. Hopefully countries can influence one another through the successes of the control programs.

It’s Europe’s year of development, and there has been a lot of talk of working with impoverished communities, are we conscious enough of the effects of rabies?

From our perspective at the Global Alliance for Rabies Control, we do not believe rabies gets the attention it needs. There are many reasons for that. A lot of times this disease is affecting people in large numbers in certain parts of the world but only one case of it is actually recorded or treated. So, the numbers are just not there, and that’s what we set out to do. We are creating awareness through things like World Rabies Day, and this has helped but we definitely need to do more.

How has Europe responded to your message?

People want to do good and make a difference. Of course, there are many causes in the world to care about. I believe the response to what we are trying to do has been very positive, and I am thankful for that.

You seem to be in a good position to move forward

Absolutely. We have the biologics, the methods, the support and global buy-in—it is just about putting all this together and staying the course.

Is money much of an issue with this?

Money is always an issue, but we need to be careful to understand that money won’t drive the success of this program. Investors will know where to put their money and where it will be of most importance, but we need people to support and believe in it first.

And in our lifetime we could see an end to rabies?

Absolutely, I think we could