K'Naan Wavin' Flag - World Cup 2010 from Natalie Sasser on Vimeo.
DDIS ABABA (Reuters) - African leaders will ask rich nations for $67 billion per year to mitigate the impact of global warming on the world's poorest continent, according to a draft resolution seen by Reuters on Monday.
Ten leaders are holding talks at African Union (AU) headquarters in the Ethiopian capital to try to agree a common stance ahead of a U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen in December.
Experts say Africa contributes little to the pollution blamed for warming, but is likely to be hit hardest by the droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels forecast if climate change is not checked.
The draft resolution, which must still be approved by the 10 leaders, called for rich countries to pay $67 billion annually to counter the impact of global warming in Africa.
It said there had been serious limitations on Africa's ability to negotiate in the past because of a lack of a coherent stance on global warming by African governments.
"The negotiating team need to be backed with the political weight at the highest level in the continent to ensure that the African voice on climate change negotiations is taken with the seriousness it deserves," the document said.
CALLS FOR COMPENSATION
Earlier this year, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi called on rich countries to compensate Africa for warming, arguing that pollution in the northern hemisphere may have caused his country's ruinous famines in the 1980s.
A study commissioned by the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum that was released in May said poor nations bear more than nine-tenths of the human and economic burden of climate change.
The 50 poorest countries, however, contribute less than 1 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions that scientists say are threatening the planet, the report said.
Africa is the region most at risk from warming and is home to 15 of the 20 most vulnerable countries, it said. Other areas also facing the highest level of threat include South Asia and small island developing states.
Developing nations accuse the rich of failing to take the lead in setting deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, and say they are trying to get the poor to shoulder more of the burden of emission curbs without providing aid and technology.
A new climate treaty is due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December. But a senior U.N. official has warned the discussions risk failure if they are accelerated.
Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said only "selective progress" had been made toward trimming a 200-page draft treaty text in Bonn earlier this month, one of a series of talks meant to end with a U.N. deal in Denmark.
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya said on Wednesday it would plant 7.6 billion trees over the next 20 years to redress decades of chopping down forest cover, the effect of which is now being felt in acute water and power shortages.
Just 3 percent of land in the agriculture-based east African economy is covered by forests that are protected by the authorities, compared with a government target of 10 percent.
"We will have to plant 4.1 million hectares in order to make a percentage that is internationally acceptable," Environment Minister John Michuki told reporters.
"You are talking about 7.6 billion trees," he said. "In my estimation, it is going to cost us $20 billion over 20 years."
That amount is nearly twice the government's annual spending, which will be about $11 billion in fiscal 2009/10.
By comparison, the authorities in Nairobi expect to spend just over $650 million this year on the country's crumbling roads, and around $400 million on energy projects.
The impact of forest destruction is being felt by Kenyans, with rivers drying up and hydro-electric power generation, farm production and tourism all suffering as a result.
Kenya's biggest forest, the Mau, has lost a quarter of its 400,000 hectares in recent years to unchecked human settlement, illegal logging and the burning of charcoal.
A report released by Prime Minister Raila Odinga last month showed that politicians had been allocated large parcels of Mau land by corrupt officials, mostly during the 1990s.
Michuki was speaking at the launch of a solar-charged mobile phone handset costing just 2,999 shilling ($39) by Safaricom, the nation's leading mobile operator.
There are some 18 million active SIM cards in Kenya. But only about 18 percent of its 36 million people have electricity in their homes. Mobile users in rural areas not linked to the national grid often have problems charging their phones.
(Reporting by Helen Nyambura-Mwaura; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
($1=76.65 Kenyan Shilling)
DATELINE: Imminent. About now, actually.
Soon, Air Force One will touch down in Accra, Ghana; Africans will be welcoming the first African-American president. Press coverage on the continent is placing equal weight on both sides of the hyphen.
And we thought it was big when President Kennedy visited Ireland in 1963. (It was big, though I was small. Where I come from, J.F.K. is remembered as a local boy made very, very good.)
But President Obama’s African-ness is only part (a thrilling part) of the story today. Cable news may think it’s all about him — but my guess is that he doesn’t. If he was in it for a sentimental journey he’d have gone to Kenya, chased down some of those dreams from his father.
He’s made a different choice, and he’s been quite straight about the reason. Despite Kenya’s unspeakable beauty and its recent victories against the anopheles mosquito, the country’s still-stinging corruption and political unrest confirms too many of the headlines we in the West read about Africa. Ghana confounds them.
Not defiantly or angrily, but in that cool, offhand Ghanaian way. This is a country whose music of choice is jazz; a country that long ago invented a genre called highlife that spread across Africa — and, more recently, hiplife, which is what happens when hip-hop meets reggaetón meets rhythm and blues meets Ghanaian melody, if you’re keeping track (and you really should be). On a visit there, I met the minister for tourism and pitched the idea of marketing the country as the “birthplace of cool.” (Just think, the music of Miles, the conversation of Kofi.) He demurred ... too cool, I guess.
Quietly, modestly — but also heroically — Ghana’s going about the business of rebranding a continent. New face of America, meet the new face of Africa.
Ghana is well governed. After a close election, power changed hands peacefully. Civil society is becoming stronger. The country’s economy was growing at a good clip even before oil was found off the coast a few years ago. Though it has been a little battered by the global economic meltdown, Ghana appears to be weathering the storm. I don’t normally give investment tips — sound the alarm at Times headquarters — but here is one: buy Ghanaian.
So it’s not a coincidence that Ghana’s making steady progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Right now it’s one of the few African nations that has a shot at getting there by 2015.
No one’s leaked me a copy of the president’s speech in Ghana, but it’s pretty clear he’s going to focus not on the problems that afflict the continent but on the opportunities of an Africa on the rise. If that’s what he does, the biggest cheers will come from members of the growing African middle class, who are fed up with being patronized and hearing the song of their majestic continent in a minor key.
I’ve played that tune. I’ve talked of tragedy, of emergency. And it is an emergency when almost 2,000 children in Africa a day die of a mosquito bite; this kind of hemorrhaging of human capital is not something we can accept as normal.
But as the example of Ghana makes clear, that’s only one chord. Amid poverty and disease are opportunities for investment and growth — investment and growth that won’t eliminate overnight the need for assistance, much as we and Africans yearn for it to end, but that in time can build roads, schools and power grids and propel commerce to the point where aid is replaced by trade pacts, business deals and home-grown income.
President Obama can hasten that day. He knows change won’t come easily. Corruption stalks Africa’s reformers. “If you fight corruption, it fights you back,” a former Nigerian anti-corruption official has said.
From his bully pulpit, the president can take aim at the bullies. Without accountability — no opportunity. If that’s not a maxim, it ought to be. It’s a truism, anyway. The work of the American government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation is founded on that principle, even if it doesn’t put it that bluntly. United States aid dollars increasingly go to countries that use them and don’t blow them. Ghana is one. There’s a growing number of others.
That’s thanks to Africans like John Githongo, the former anticorruption chief of Kenya — a hero of mine who is pioneering a new brand of bottom-up accountability. Efforts like his, which are taking place across the continent, deserve more support. The presidential kind. Then there’s Nigeria’s moral and financial fist — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a managing director of the World Bank and the country’s former finance minister — who is on a quest to help African countries recover stolen assets looted by corrupt officials. And the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which is helping countries like Ghana clean up the oil, gas and mining business, to make sure that profits don’t wind up in the hands of kleptocrats.
Presidential attention would be a shot in the arm for these efforts — an infusion of moral and political amino acids that, by the way, will make aid dollars go further. That should be welcome news to the Group of 8 leaders gathered in Italy to whom Mr. Obama bids a Hawaii-via-Chicago-inflected “arrivederci,” as he leaves for Africa.
This week’s summit meeting looks as if it will yield some welcome new G-8 promises on agriculture. (So far, new money: America. Old money: everyone else.) This is the good news that President Obama will bring from Europe to Ghana.
The not-so-good news — that countries like Italy and France are not meeting their Africa commitments — makes the president’s visit all the more essential. The United States is one of the countries on track to keep its promises, and Mr. Obama has already said he’ll more than build on the impressive Bush legacy.
President Obama plans to return to Africa for the World Cup in 2010. Between now and then he’s got the chance to lead others in building — from the bottom up — on the successes of recent efforts within Africa and to learn from the failures. There’s been plenty of both. We’ve witnessed the good, the bad and the ugly in our fraught relationship with this dynamic continent.
The president can facilitate the new, the fresh and the different. Many existing promises are expiring in 2010, some of old age and others of chronic neglect. New promises from usual and unusual partners, from the G-8 to the G-20, need to be made — and this time kept. If more African nations (not just Ghana) are going to meet the millennium goals, they are going to need smart partners in business and development. That’s Smart as in sustainable, measurable, accountable, responsive and transparent.
Africa is not just Barack Obama’s homeland. It’s ours, too. The birthplace of humanity. Wherever our journeys have taken us, they all began there. The word Desmond Tutu uses is “ubuntu”: I am because we are. As he says, until we accept and appreciate this we cannot be fully whole.
Could it be that all Americans are, in that sense, African-Americans?
Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE and (Product)RED, is a contributing columnist for The Times.
I invite you to imagine that you are standing with me in a banana field in Africa. It is October of 1998, my first visit to the continent, and I have come with hope; the precious product of HIV prevention education. I have been deposited here with a talented interpreter, and left to find my way through the drapes of leafy trees and across the carpets of fallen foliage. Soon enough, I find my destination: a tiny mud hut. The space is crowded beyond capacity. I suddenly realize that everyone here is familiar with death. They know that their families are dying.
And in so many cases, they sense that they themselves are dying.
I step to the front and begin my hopeful presentation. Once finished, I answer questions. Finally, the space clears. Through the rear opening of the hut steps a woman who looks to be quite aged. With her, a very young boy. He is covered with sores. Wounds. His body is weak. I reach down and pick him up. I feel that he is burning with fever.
And I look into his eyes. There, I see something I have seen many times since: the early maturity of a suffering soul. This is a dear person. Like your children. Your grandchildren.
Like you.
Like me.
The elder speaks. She says, “This is my grandson. His name is Simon. His father, my son, died when Simon was two months old. With AIDS. His mother died three months ago. With AIDS. It seems apparent to me that he also has AIDS.”
She pauses. She swallows. Then, “Today, you talked to us about AIDS, and you talked about hope. So I was just wondering, what can you do for my grandson?”
That day, in the middle of that banana field, my life changed as my thinking underwent a revolution. You see, I knew that there are more orphans in Uganda than in any other country of the world today: 2.1 to 2.3 million according to most observers.
But the revolution in my thinking took place only once I was able to individualize the daunting and disturbing statistics. As I held Simon in my arms, and as I looked into his eyes, I came face to face with the reality that our fight with HIV/AIDS is not about numbers and dollars, but about real people—with names and faces.
Further investigation, and now nineteen months of on-the-job experience in Uganda, have shown me that when more than ten percent of a population is orphaned, there is a need which transcends culture, society, government, church, and home. When the world loses massive numbers of people, there are survivors left to neglect and abandonment.
And disease.
Yes, in Uganda, the HIV infection rate has drastically reduced. You realize, of course, that this means that many of those who were infected have died. And that not as many new infections have occurred.
I have just told you that more than two million children are orphaned in Uganda. Just one country. A country we rightly tout as currently edging towards victory in our desperate war. Many of these children are already HIV positive. Many of them, thankfully, are not. I have a desperate worry; a plaguing concern about what happens as this group of children ages. Some of these little hearts and personalities are often left alone. Regularly ignored. Rarely cared for. What happens as their yearnings for intimacy and acceptance develop into a sexual activity and adulthood not reared with the benefits of kisses-on-the-forehead nor an elder’s wisdom?
My greater worry, though, is for the children who are already infected with HIV, an HIV that has rapidly destroyed their immune systems, and has given them AIDS. They are suffering—and are most often suffering unnecessarily. There is much that can be done for them. Like at Aidchild, the hospice and palliative care center I founded and currently direct in Masaka. When nutrition, proper hygiene and loving care replace abuse, neglect and desperately overtaxed extended families, this unnecessary suffering is transformed into a preciously simple condition of comfort, strength and hope. Surely this is a basic human right worthy of provision for children who have no one.
I walk around my home in Uganda everyday saying three words: “It’s so easy. The every-day-activities required to help these children are more ordinary than heroic.
Please allow me to close with the story of one of my children, Ivan. He was nine years old when he came to live with me. Little is known about his past. Before Ivan was referred to Aidchild, he was surviving in the ramshackled police barracks of my town. More than one policeman has told me that Ivan would awake early every morning to pray. In a loud voice he would say, “Oh God, please send someone to help me. I am hurting. I’m sad, and I’m alone.”
Once with us, Ivan became perfect joy. He became stronger. His blind eyes were treated. His malaria, TB, shingles, aches and pains were carefully tended. He was quicker to rejoice than to weep.
Months had gone by when he started to sleep a lot. In his own bed. A clean, comfortable space, free of mosquitoes and daunting heat. One day, he awoke from his slumber and looked at my staff members. He said, “I have seen that you love me so much.” And then, he did something I find quite extraordinary and special. He said, “Thank you.” He returned his head to his pillow, and listened to the soft music we play as a part of our hospice care. Again he spoke, “That music is so nice,” he said. And then went back to sleep.
My little Ivan died early the next morning.
But most of my children are still living with me—strong, happy and hopeful. With AIDS. Even months later.
And some have died. Others will also die.
But perhaps Ivan’s is the greatest hope. May we all one day be able to say, “I have seen that I am loved. I am grateful. I’m comfortable. And I’m going to go to sleep now.”
Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “So long as we are loved by others, we are indispensable, and no (one) is useless (when they) have a friend.”
From the frontlines, I report to you that this must become the reality for millions of children around the world. And it can be done. I know firsthand. Extended family networks are exhausted, even destroyed. Foster homes are often perfect and wonderful—but will always be too few. If we are to offer this basic right to as many children as we possibly can, we simply cannot afford to rule out any one type of care for this terrific number of dear hearts, sweet faces, and precious individuals.
Working together, we must make a difference.
We can make a difference.
And, moreover, I absolutely maintain: it really is so easy.
Thank you.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a source, albeit a small one, for conflict minerals that end up in our electronics. While some companies, such as Nokia, have shown their resolve in never using conflict minerals in their products, other companies have yet to be so transparent. Eve Ensler isn't sitting back about it. Not only are the minerals gathered through abusive means and slave labor, they're also gathered where rape is used as a weapon of war over the mines.
The minerals, such as columbite tantalite or coltan are essential to the function of our gadgets. It's bad enough we have major issues with recycling these devices without harming people. It's even worse when we really examine the harm that can go into making them. Ensler's talk is a wake up call that we have to be equally diligent about the sources of our gadgets as we are about their disposal.
Backyard recyclers of electronics waste in developing countries use open fires and chemicals to extract precious metals, then dump the hazardous byproducts. Using no safety precautions, they expose themselves, their neighbors and their local environment to lead, mercury, cadmium and brominated flame retardants that can damage almost every organ and system in the human body.
That may be about to change. In February, the electronic products manufacturer Hewlett-Packard announced preliminary findings of a study on responsible electronic waste processing in African countries, based in part on a pilot facility it helped build in Cape Town.
Inspired by the work in India of Empa, the Swiss federal laboratory for materials testing and research, which is a partner of H.P. in the Cape Town project, the study looked at e-waste management in South Africa, Morocco and Kenya, including local legislation, awareness and behavior, infrastructure needs, and the amount of waste generated. Another partner in the project is the Global Digital Solidarity Fund, a Swiss philanthropy that works to bridge the digital divide.
From February to November 2008, the Cape Town facility processed approximately 60 tons of electronic equipment, generated about $14,000, and employed 19 people. The plant treats computers, monitors, printers, and mobile phones from any manufacturer, not just H.P. Other products considered e-waste by activists, like televisions and DVD and MP3 players, are not accepted.
Workers refurbished and resold some products and dismantled others to sell the raw materials to businesses that recycle metals and plastics. “They also make nice jewelry out of some of the processors and boards,” said Klaus Hieronymi, environment manager for H.P. in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
A similar plant has since been set up in Durban, without subsidies from either H.P. or the government. “We hope this idea will spread around South Africa,” Mr. Hieronymi said.
As much as 50 million tons of electronic waste is generated worldwide annually. People in developing countries are using — and discarding — more electronics every year, a waste management challenge that is complicated by the vast quantities of electronics trash that developed countries also dump on them in a bid to externalize costs.
Efforts by one environmentalist organization, the Basel Action Network, or BAN, to curtail that practice led to the 1995 BAN Amendment to the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal — a treaty banning the export of hazardous waste from developed to developing countries. The European Union’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, meanwhile, makes E.U. manufacturers responsible for products at the end of their life span. But the United States is not a signatory to the BAN Amendment, and both the United States and Europe allow the export of materials categorized as reusable.
In theory, reuse is desirable because it extends product life and allows access to information technology for people who can not afford new products.
But a BAN study found that up to 75 percent of “reusable” electronic goods are obsolete, do not work or are destroyed in transit: and even products that can be repaired generate waste because technicians usually replace broken parts rather than fixing them.
West African countries like Nigeria have a larger problem with dumping than countries in southern Africa, Mr. Hieronymi said.
But even in South Africa, projects like the Cape Town facility trouble some activists, who fear that they will attract even more shipments from exporters who think their electronic trash will be processed using best practices.
The reality is that you can not just “plop down” a high-tech facility in a developing country and expect it to operate safely, said Jim Puckett, executive director of BAN. Safe operation requires worker training; laws regulating waste management, worker safety and whistle-blower protections; law enforcement and monitoring; downstream residue management; and additional infrastructure, including smelters and hazardous waste facilities.
“You do not get that in a developing country,” Mr. Puckett said. “If you had that, it wouldn’t be a developing country.”
H.P.’s study has borne that out, particularly in Morocco and Kenya, which have “almost nonexistent” safety regulations and no enforcement, said Mr. Hieronymi. South Africa has some worker safety laws but little enforcement.
“Even if you had laws and enforcement, those people need the dollar today,” he said, referring to the individuals and small businesses typically involved in waste processing. “They don’t care about long-term health and environmental effects.”
Disposing of electronic waste involves a series of processes, including shredding, grinding, smelting and burning — the last two being toxic processes that call for special pollution-containing plants.
There are several hazardous waste incinerators in Africa, but they are designed primarily for chemical industry waste. Because the amount of electronic waste is relatively small, H.P. has no plans to build its own incinerators, Mr. Hieronymi said.
In any event, “even the most well-intended effort is still going to have hazardous byproducts, whether it’s in the form of emissions or some kind of a slag after you’ve incinerated it,” said Barbara B. Kyle, national coordinator for the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, of which BAN is a member.
“These toxic residual wastes need to be managed,” she said, “and most developing countries don’t have safe facilities for where that can go.”
Infrastructure and social systems, moreover, vary greatly across Africa. “You cannot take a solution for South Africa and implant it in Morocco,” Mr. Hieronymi said. “The industrialization of that country is completely different, plus in Morocco you have a clan structure of families who are already treating waste.”
One aim of H.P.’s initiative is to provide safer jobs for people who are already working in the informal recycling business. But that can be challenging.
In many countries where informal recyclers are active, H.P.’s free take-back programs go unused. “If you put a perfect recycling facility in South Africa or Nigeria, it’s there, it’s not used, it’s rotting, because the people who are collecting the PCs on the road and can make a dollar on it by processing it in the backyard will not give that PC to the recycling industry,” Mr. Hieronymi said.
One answer is to pay informal collectors for waste — as Empa does in India. Still, it is unclear whether this model can provide as many jobs as the informal economy currently offers. With that in mind, H.P. is trying not to innovate too far. “In Cape Town, we didn’t put a fully automated recycling facility that needs just two engineers and a secretary to run it,” Mr. Hieronymi said. “We have instead 19 people.” Those 19 handle just the processing side at the facility, he added. Far more people can be engaged in waste collection.
Ms. Kyle lauded these efforts but said the number of jobs should not be the chief consideration; reducing pollution is paramount.
“You have to recognize that the people who are doing this work are poisoning themselves and others,” she said. “It’s not right to just put the economic filter of potential wages lost if there are fewer jobs available from a plant.”
Ultimately, the solution to the problem of electronic waste is to design better, cleaner products with fewer hazardous materials and less waste generally. H.P. has recognized that, Mr. Hieronymi said. “It’s quite easy for people like me to convince our design engineers that they should invest maybe a $1 or $2 into the manufacturing or design of the product because we can save $3 to $4 on the recycling side,” he said.
Designs are already cleaner than they once were. For example, cathode ray tubes in old computer monitors contained leaded glass, and even older laptops used fluorescent lighting, which contain mercury. New models are made with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, which are less hazardous to recycle.
E.U. regulations have restricted the amounts of hazardous material that can be incorporated in electronics for the European market — a development that has pushed manufacturers to clean up their products.
“We are also creating demand for recycled material,” Mr. Hieronymi said. “We have printers that contain up to 80 percent recycled plastics. Most of our ink cartridges have a recycling content of more than 75 percent.”
K'NAAN "T.I.A" music video directed by: NABIL from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.
