Located on the eastern coast of Central America, surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and the rainforest, Belize is a diverse and small nation of 366,000 people. The success of humanitarian aid to Belize has been evident.
Belize is subject to chronic instability, due to its vulnerability from climate shocks and a longstanding public debt burden. Policymakers have done much in undertaking adjustments to bring Belize back to a sustainable development trajectory. However, some are still at risk of getting left behind, like the country’s children, who are most vulnerable and affected by these challenges.
Despite these difficulties, Belize has made considerable advances in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for 2015, performing satisfactorily in health-related investments and progressing on a positive track for child and maternal mortality rates, HIV/AIDS and the environment.
Much of the humanitarian aid to Belize comes from UNICEF, who has been committed to Belize dating back to 1954. UNICEF established an office in the country after Belize gained its independence in 1981. It provided aid in the form of environment health, vector control, school feeding and the provision of school textbooks and supplies. Currently, UNICEF is focused primarily on young child survival, education and development, disparity reduction through policy investment, participatory governance and the protection of children against violence.
Another form of successful humanitarian aid to Belize by UNICEF is their response to the Zika Virus outbreak in the region, providing fieldwork support and training at the national and local levels, with the Sustainable and Child Friendly Municipalities Initiative. So far, UNICEF has allocated over BZ$116,000 to Zika relief efforts.
UNICEF also provided humanitarian aid to Belize during the aftermath of Hurricane Earl, which struck Belize on August 4, 2016. They provided aid totaling over BZ$153,000 to help the most vulnerable families. This was done in partnership with the Ministry of Human Development, Social Transformation and Poverty Alleviation, the Ministry of Labor, Local Government and Rural Development, city mayors, NEMO, Immigration and several non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The aid provided included the distribution of hygiene kits, the provision of support to shelters and the cleansing of debris and dissemination of emergency messages.
Similarly, Brazil donated provisions to Belize after it was hit by Hurricane Arthur in 2008, which was the worst tropical storm to affect the country in the past four decades. It provided 1,370 boxes of food, containing rice, beans, sugar, powdered milk, soy oil and ham in each box. Brazil also donated provisions valuing approximately $50,000 to assist the victims of Hurricane Dean in 2007.
With the success of humanitarian aid to Belize that has already been provided, the future of the country is looking brighter than ever. Still, there is a need for more aid that will improve the quality of life drastically in Belize.
– Drew Fox
Photo: Flickr
The Success of Humanitarian Aid to Belize
Belize is subject to chronic instability, due to its vulnerability from climate shocks and a longstanding public debt burden. Policymakers have done much in undertaking adjustments to bring Belize back to a sustainable development trajectory. However, some are still at risk of getting left behind, like the country’s children, who are most vulnerable and affected by these challenges.
Despite these difficulties, Belize has made considerable advances in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for 2015, performing satisfactorily in health-related investments and progressing on a positive track for child and maternal mortality rates, HIV/AIDS and the environment.
Much of the humanitarian aid to Belize comes from UNICEF, who has been committed to Belize dating back to 1954. UNICEF established an office in the country after Belize gained its independence in 1981. It provided aid in the form of environment health, vector control, school feeding and the provision of school textbooks and supplies. Currently, UNICEF is focused primarily on young child survival, education and development, disparity reduction through policy investment, participatory governance and the protection of children against violence.
Another form of successful humanitarian aid to Belize by UNICEF is their response to the Zika Virus outbreak in the region, providing fieldwork support and training at the national and local levels, with the Sustainable and Child Friendly Municipalities Initiative. So far, UNICEF has allocated over BZ$116,000 to Zika relief efforts.
UNICEF also provided humanitarian aid to Belize during the aftermath of Hurricane Earl, which struck Belize on August 4, 2016. They provided aid totaling over BZ$153,000 to help the most vulnerable families. This was done in partnership with the Ministry of Human Development, Social Transformation and Poverty Alleviation, the Ministry of Labor, Local Government and Rural Development, city mayors, NEMO, Immigration and several non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The aid provided included the distribution of hygiene kits, the provision of support to shelters and the cleansing of debris and dissemination of emergency messages.
Similarly, Brazil donated provisions to Belize after it was hit by Hurricane Arthur in 2008, which was the worst tropical storm to affect the country in the past four decades. It provided 1,370 boxes of food, containing rice, beans, sugar, powdered milk, soy oil and ham in each box. Brazil also donated provisions valuing approximately $50,000 to assist the victims of Hurricane Dean in 2007.
With the success of humanitarian aid to Belize that has already been provided, the future of the country is looking brighter than ever. Still, there is a need for more aid that will improve the quality of life drastically in Belize.
– Drew Fox
Photo: Flickr
Five Active Development Projects in Tunisia
1. Youth Economic Inclusion Project (2017-2024)
The Youth Economic Inclusion Project is an initiative to increase and improve the economic opportunities presented to young, disadvantaged, Tunisians. This project is connecting young Tunisians with job opportunities, and providing assistance in transitioning from being a student, or unemployed, to the working world. Another component of this project is to make an effort to increase job creation in Tunisia.
2. Road Transport Corridors Project (2015-2020)
This project aims to improve the condition of roads connecting the more developed regions of Tunisia with the lesser developed areas. This project will shorten travel times and substantially improve the safety of road travel across the country. The Road Transport Corridors Project has focused on widening and repaving roads, repairing bridges, and installing more road safety equipment.
3. Integrated Landscapes Management in Lagging Regions (2017-2024)
The goal of the Integrated Landscapes Management in Lagging Legions Project is to improve the use of natural resources in the lesser developed northwest and western regions of the country. With a focus on sustainability, this project will improve the efficiency of land and natural resource use, as well as improve existing agricultural practices and infrastructure.
4. Northern Tunis Wastewater Project (2010-2019)
In the northern reaches of the city of Tunis, there is currently a lack of proper wastewater management infrastructure. This project pays special consideration to the environmental impacts of wastewater management and seeks to increase the amount and quality of treated wastewater available for use to farmers in regards to their agricultural activities.
5. The National Network of Social Accountability (2014-2018)
This project aims to bring Tunisia closer to becoming a developed nation through three main objectives. The first is to increase the availability and reliability of public information on government activity and expenditures. Second, there is an initiative to increase competition between businesses to expand the Tunisian economy. The last aspect of this development project in Tunisia is to focus on improving the quality and availability of healthcare for low-income Tunisians.
It is evident that these active development projects in Tunisia are working to ensure the improved livelihoods of citizens in various ways.
– Tyler Troped
Photo: Flickr
Women’s Empowerment in Uganda
Although Uganda has worked extensively to empower women in the country, it still has progress to make, says Syda Bbumba, a very prominent female politician in Uganda. Bbumba is the first woman to serve as the Minister of Finance, Planning, and Economic Development in the country. Bbumba recognizes the important improvements that have been made for women’s empowerment in Uganda, but she also calls attention to the support that is still needed to aid women in entrepreneurship. Due to the fact that most property in Africa is owned by men, women lack sufficient access to capital, markets, and collateral, all of which are necessary in helping them grow their businesses. Bbumba recognizes this issue and highlights the need to fix it.
Another area in which the country can improve is through its education. Although the enrolment of girls that attend schools in Uganda is 60 percent (compared to 40 percent among boys), many girls still drop out to work at home due to issues regarding poverty. In other cases, girls drop out to enter into early marriages. The Universal Primary Education (UPE) is working to combat this issue, and has since seen a rise in enrolment rates in Uganda.
In regards to women in government in Uganda, the amount of women that made up the cabinet rose from 23 percent in 2006 to 28 percent in 2011. Similar progress was made among senior ministers, a group that experienced a four percent increase in the number of women who served in these positions. However, there is still progress to be made in the Executive branch, which as of 2011, had yet to reach its 30 percent quota of women serving in this department. An additional area that Bbumba calls attention to is the need for funding in order to help women grow their businesses.
Though there are still issues with women’s empowerment in Uganda, many people and organizations are striving to remedy these problems and have made considerable progress. Influential politicians and organizations alike, such at the Hunger Project, recognize that empowering women creates more resilient communities because when women are supported, health among families increases, as does incomes and the amount of children that attend school.
– Haley Rogers
Photo: Flickr
Exploring Women’s Empowerment in Paraguay
Paraguayan President Horacio Cartes said in a speech to the U.N., “I make a firm commitment to strengthening the actions needed to speed up the advancement of real and effective equality between men and women in my country.” He supported the Public Policy Law for Rural Women, which aims to help women who live in remote areas gain employment despite scarce resources and few job opportunities. The policy will help provide women with agricultural training. Not only will this help feed families, but it will encourage women to become entrepreneurs. By the end of 2015, this policy had already reached 1,000 women.
Violence against women is an injustice that has been occurring for too many centuries. The president approved the Law for Comprehensive Protection for Women Against Any Kind of Violence in 2016. This law, as well as a commitment to coordinating efforts to fight violence against women and sex trafficking, will help foster women’s empowerment in Paraguay. The law will also help to better punish perpetrators and make sure they actually serve jail time or some other adequate punishment.
Teen pregnancy is a growing issue for women’s empowerment in Paraguay. Due to a lack of sex education, nearly one in 20 Paraguayan women have given birth by the age of 20. Becoming pregnant at a young age can complicate completing school and entering the job market. The Mbaracayú Education Center was opened in 2009 to provide the education that young women deserve. The education center is about more than sex ed: it also teaches job skills, including IT skills, textiles, tourism and environmental management. Movements like these show that there are many people dedicated to women’s empowerment in Paraguay.
– Scott Kesselring
Photo: Flickr
Child Hunger in Greenland
A national report on the food policy of Greenland was published by the Greenland Home Rule Government in 2004. This brought awareness to the prevalence of food insecurity that existed among Greenlandic children. From this report, it was found that 11 percent of children in the ages 11 to 16 reported “often hungry” or “always hungry” when they were going to school or going to bed. This hunger in Greenland, which exists among children especially, sheds light on the performance deficiencies regards to health, developmental, and academic performance. These performance deficiencies may then be associated with behavioural and psychosocial problems that continue to manifest into adulthood.
In 2010, a study was organized based on the Health Behavior in School-Aged Children where 2,254 Greenlandic students were surveyed, of which 40 percent were students in grades five to ten. In the study, the survey analyzed the occurrences of high percentages of child hunger existing in their homes. The results showed that food insecurity was related with neglect as the parents dealt with economic discrepancies and were often correlated with single-families, those living on welfare, immigrants, low educational levels and so on.
It is a beneficial first step for Greenland’s government to bring this grand concern to light. Solutions must then be made to assist these young children to receive the adequate nutrition required at such a blooming age. Children who live in poverty with low-income families, however they may be structured, need more intensive guidance from government policies and programs. Perhaps a solution to the hunger in Greenland would be to propose food drives, free school lunches, and adequate shelters as secondary arrangements to supplement the issues at home.
– Nicole Suárez
Photo: Flickr
Women’s Empowerment in Niger
Women and girls in Niger are some of the least educated in the world. Less than a quarter are literate and less than a tenth ever attend secondary school. This is a big deal considering that attending secondary school for a year can mean as much as a 25 percent increase in a woman’s earnings later in life.
Niger has the highest rate of child marriages in the world. Three in four girls under the age of 18 are married. The legal age for marriage in Niger is 15, but various women’s organizations and groups are hoping for the passage of a proposed law that would change the legal age to 18 years.
Aminata Gba Kamara, aged 19, said “Girls in our country need so many things. They need psychological support, they need counseling. Their esteem is very low.” Many women think husbands are needed for protection, and life outside the home is not given much thought, said Kamara.
Protection is a real concern for many, as conflict is a daily fact of life. In the past three years, over 100,000 women and girls have been forced to leave their homes in order to flee from violence perpetrated by the Boko Haram. There are shelters and places of refuge, but women forced into seeking these often fall victim to a cycle of poverty. Most women fleeing from Boko Haram have been traumatized by physical and sexual violence. There is a normalization of discrimination and violence against women and girls on a daily basis.
Even with all these challenges, there are feasible solutions and women’s empowerment in Niger is a large part of it. Change is being implemented from the ground up, and youth are driving it forward. Campaigns have been formed to raise awareness about the issue and boost the self-esteem of women and girls. Tackling the problem of child marriage is important for Niger, as it will increase the number of citizens attending school rather than staying at home.
There are rays of hope for women’s financial empowerment in Niger as well. For instance, a recent push by CARE to help Nigerien women become financially independent via combined insurance policies and female financial groups has been fruitful. The savings groups, called Village Savings and Loan Associations have been a major factor behind women’s financial empowerment, and serves as a base for improving inclusion, health, nutrition, and agricultural productivity.
– Sam Bramlett
Photo: Flickr
Women’s Empowerment in Jordan
The government, aware of this inequality, has taken steps to improve women’s political status in the past years by appointing women to government ministries and high-level posts. In 2003, King Abdullah II appointed 7 women to the 55-seat upper house of the National Assembly.
A large number of non-governmental organizations have also worked to promote the protection of women’s rights in Jordan. They have had success in ending the silence on the issue of domestic violence by lobbying high political offices to denounce domestic violence and raising the debate of the issue in the media. The parliament’s rejection of several decrees and draft legislation has also focused on providing women greater equality. Advocates have made great strides in setting women’s rights at the forefront of political debates.
Unfortunately, although the constitution states that all Jordanian’s are equal, it fails to prohibit gender discrimination. Women’s advocates often cite the constitution which guarantees full equality between men and women. Yet, women are treated unequally concerning divorce, custody, and inheritance. There are also no laws that define or criminalizes domestic violence, and no enforcement mechanisms that ensure they will be implemented to promote and protect gender equality.
Currently, the USAID has partnered with the Government of Jordan and civil society organizations to support women’s empowerment in Jordan. There is now an education system in place that ensures equal access to both genders, with a highly educated female population. Jordan has low scores when it comes to women in the workforce and a lot of women are well-educated and many are university graduates but are unable to find proper employment.
Looking at the changing social practices, enhancement of support for policy reforms, and expanding access to female-centered services, changes have been and are being made for the women in Jordan. There have been 50 grants to community-based organizations to promote women’s political and economic participation as well as support for discussion of gender roles and stereotypes on social media platforms, such as Facebook.
Women’s empowerment in Jordan has drastically improved from eleven years ago. Instead of being overlooked, there are substantial efforts being made to include women in Jordan in the political and economic spheres and conversations concerning gender roles are becoming more prominent. Women’s empowerment is on the rise in Jordan.
– Chavez Spicer
Photo: Flickr
5 Development Projects in Haiti
Here are five development projects in Haiti that aim to reestablish security for the population affected by natural disasters and secure sustainable goals for Haiti’s economy.
Before 2010, nearly 80 percent of Haiti’s population lived below the poverty line. Haiti is still the poorest country in the western hemisphere but their poverty has decreased to 58.5 percent. Haiti is strongly dependent on international funding, with over 20 percent of its annual budget coming from foreign aid or direct budget support. These development projects in Haiti illustrate the variety of international investments in Haiti that are working to support poverty reduction and establish sustainable goals within the country.
– Eliza Gresh
Photo: Flickr
The Success of Humanitarian Aid to Kosovo
In February 1998, the armed conflict between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) came to a head when Slobodan Milošević, the President of the FRY in the late 90s, responded to KLA guerilla operations with an increased intensity.
Following the FRY’s elimination of Kosovo’s semi-autonomous status, after they gained independence from the Soviet Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the KLA instigated a guerilla movement against the Serbs in the hopes that doing so would call international attention to their plight. Unfortunately, despite a clear degradation of political relations between Serbia and Kosovo, the international community failed to intervene with the speed and authority necessitated by the impending disaster.
Eventually, it became obvious that the time for diplomatic action had passed unheeded. The result was catastrophic. On the heels of an already displaced 400 thousand Kosovar Albanians and an estimated killing of 1,000 civilians by FRY forces, NATO opted to instigate a campaign in Kosovo that was at once, illegal and legitimate. Illegal in the sense of it never being approved by the U.N. and legitimate in that it was the only option available for the prevention of further human rights abuses in Kosovo.
The result of the infamous NATO Air Campaign in Kosovo, lasting between March 24 and June 10, 1999, and effectively ousting Serbian forces from the region, was the abrupt displacement of nearly 1.5 million individuals within Kosovo and into neighboring Albania and Macedonia.
The issue then became how so many innocent civilians were going to survive. The solution is the question of this article: What was the success of humanitarian aid to Kosovo? The answer concerning aid during the immediate crisis is that despite the unprecedented amount of relief aid thrown at the conflict, its implementation was haphazardly managed and ultimately far less effective than it should have been.
Humanitarian aid to Kosovo during and following the NATO Campaign was marred by a lack of collaboration between aid organizations – of which there were over 250 operating in Kosovo and Albania alone. As well as a seeming lack of professionalism among even the most seasoned aid agencies (UNHCR). One report evaluating the failures of their response, sights appointment of inexperienced staff to positions of leadership as one of the many problems that plagued the humanitarian response.
Today, more than 18 years after the beginning of the crisis, Kosovo has yet to rid its borders of the aid organizations that came during the war. The greatest problem facing Kosovars is unemployment which had reached 35 percent in 2016.
One of the ways the issue of unemployment is being addressed is through social enterprises. In Kosovo, these take the form of small businesses established by locals to provide basic necessities to the community. These types of programs are what many aid workers are turning to as they search for alternatives to the continued presence of large aid organizations in Kosovo.
The success of humanitarian aid to Kosovo can, more or less, be regarded as a failure given the continued need for aid nearly 20 years after the end of the war.
– Katarina Schrag
Photo: Flickr
Improved Infrastructure in Ethiopia On the Horizon
Road infrastructure in Ethiopia is of particular importance, as the country is five times as large as the United Kingdom. There has been a massive increase in the allocation of funds for road construction, with the state spending on roads accounting for a quarter of each year’s infrastructure budget.
Unlike their surface infrastructure, Ethiopia features new and upgraded airports which facilitate the transport of goods and encourage greater investment. There are two international airports, Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa, both of which have seen an increase in passenger and freight transport over the last several years. To encourage tourism, five major airports were selected to be upgraded, with the opening of the Arba Minch airport leading to a wide range of economic opportunities for the south of Ethiopia.
Ethiopia has continued to focus its economic policies on the development of new and improved infrastructure by planning to allocate $89 million on infrastructure spending. This has continued the trend of upgrading the national road network, following previous commitments to improve road connections to Kenya and South Sudan.
Improving the road network in Ethiopia is essential, as it will make it easier for farmers to transport their produce to bigger markets, and it supports the growth of the sugar industry in south Ethiopia. The government has hopes that with improvement to the road network, Ethiopia will be able to develop coal mines in the region, allowing the nation to supply cement producers and bolstering the economy.
-Drew Fox
Photo: Flickr