News headlines in March 2019, page 8

GENEVA, Mar 13 (IPS) - Herve Verhoosel is Senior Spokesperson UN World Food Programme*

The bell rings and the halls erupt with the sounds of chatter and excitement as hundreds of children run to the dusty courtyard for recess. I joined them to play football but the game instead turned into a round of questions.

ACCRA, Mar 13 (IPS) - On Saturday 9th March, a small group of activists from Ghana, concerned by the continued incarceration of Ugandan feminist activist Dr Stella Nyanzi, rallied by the symbolic national independence Square to raise awareness on the dangers of remaining quiet to injustice.

RÍO DE JANEIRO, Mar 13 (IPS) - The First Latin American and Caribbean Meeting of Organisations of People Affected by Hansen's Disease, more widely known as leprosy, seeks to exorcise stigma and discrimination. The meeting has brought together around a hundred activists in Brazil.

GENEVA and ROME, Mar 12 (IPS) - For over 70 years, the UN system has been perceived as the guardian of peace and development in the world. However, multilateralism today is undeniably under strain. The effectiveness of global institutions and of global policymaking is questioned, and alliances are fraying.

NAIROBI, Mar 12 (IPS) - In the East African region, communities around the continent's largest water body, Lake Victoria, regard the water hyacinth as a great menace that clogs the lake and hampers their fishing activities. But in Lagos, Nigeria, some groups of women have learned how to convert the invasive weed into a resource, providing them with the raw material needed to make handicrafts.

MUMBAI, India, Mar 12 (IPS) - Social barriers have historically been blamed for the lack of gender parity in the workplace. But there are other dimensions to this age-old discourse.

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 (IPS) - When the Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU), based in Switzerland, released its annual report on the representation of women legislators worldwide, four of the top five countries were from the developing world.

Rwanda led the way with 61.3 percent of the seats held by women in its lower or single house of parliament followed by Cuba (53.2 percent), Bolivia (53.1 percent) and Mexico (48.2 percent).

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Mar 12 (IPS) - After discrediting state-owned enterprises, privatization advocates successfully pushed a broad reform agenda under the rubric of privatization from the 1980s, with the support of the Washington-based international financial institutions.Privatization has been central to the ‘neo-liberal' counter-revolution from the 1970s against government economic interventions associated with Roosevelt and Keynes as well as post-colonial state-led economic development.

Many developing countries were forced to accept privatization policies as a condition for credit or loan support from the World Bank and other international financial institutions, especially after the fiscal and debt crises of the early 1980s. Other countries voluntarily embraced privatization, often on the pretext of fiscal and debt constraints, in their efforts to mimic new Anglo-American criteria of economic progress.

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 (IPS) - The United Nations headquarters is in mourning – and the UN flag is at half mast.

The deaths of 21 UN staffers March 10, on board an Ethiopian Airlines flight in Addis Ababa, is one of the biggest tragedies in the extended UN family—with a flashback to the deaths of 22 people, mostly UN staffers, who lost their lives in the Canal Hotel bombing in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in August 2003.

GENEVA, Mar 12 (IPS) - My mission to Venezuela in November/December 2017 was the first by a UN rapporteur in 21 years. It was intended to open the door to the visit of other rapporteurs and to explore ways how to help the Venezuelan people overcome the protracted economic and institutional crisis.