Global development

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      What is Ivanka Trump's legacy? Enabling her father's odious actions | Arwa Mahdawi

      by

      Ivanka Trump has wound up her time in the White House in the most fitting way possible: with a scandal about a $3,000-a-month toilet. Members of the Secret Service, it was recently reported, were banned from using any of the bathrooms in Jared Kushner and Ivanka’s Washington DC mansion and, instead, had to rent an apartment to relieve themselves in (although Jared and Ivanka have denied this). Talk about flushing taxpayers’ money down the drain.One imagines Ivanka did not plan to spend her final days in DC dealing with the fallout from a violent insurrection and battling embarrassing leaks about her loos. When she appointed herself special adviser to the president, Ivanka was a handbag and shoe saleswoman bursting with ambition. She was going to empower women everywhere! Little girls around the world would read about Saint Ivanka for decades to come. She would be a role mogul: her branded bags would fly off the shelves.Four years later, Ivanka’s clothing line has shut down and her personal brand has been damaged enough for a university to cancel her as a speaker. It seems she is persona non grata in New York and her dad has been banned from parts of the internet for inciting violence. By rights, Ivanka should be sobbing into her sheets wondering how everything has gone so wrong.But Ivanka is a Trump: narcissism and self-delusion are in her DNA. As DC braces for pre-inauguration chaos Ivanka has been blithely tweeting her “achievements” and retweeting praise in an attempt to convince us she has left an important legacy.According to her Twitter feed, one thing Americans should all be thanking Ivanka for is paid family leave, which has been one of her marquee issues. And, to be fair, if Ivanka is to be praised for anything, it’s for pushing Donald Trump to pass a bill giving federal employees 12 weeks of paid parental time off. Would that have happened without Ivanka? I don’t know. But she facilitated it. Does it make up for the many odious things Ivanka also facilitated? No.Another of Ivanka’s big projects was the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) initiative, which aims to reach 50 million women in the developing world by 2025 and … well, I’m not sure exactly what’s supposed to happen then. The initiative is so buzzword-laden that it’s somewhat hard to understand. You get the impression Ivanka launched it via vague instructions to “empower women in powerful ways via strategic pillars of empowerment”.Ivanka has been very keen to turn the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity initiative into part of her political legacy … But she got greedy and insisted on using her version of the billAnyway, all that empowering has paid off, according to a report W-GDP released last week: almost 12.6 million women worldwide have been equipped with the skills they need for economic advancement, thanks to Ivanka. Let’s be charitable and say W-GDP has done some good. The problem is, that good is massively outweighed by the Trump administration’s worldwide war on abortion: the administration imposed an harmful expansion of “the global gag rule”, which bans US federal funding international NGOs that provide abortion services or advocacy. Trump also did his best to try to destroy the budget for foreign aid.Still, Ivanka has been very keen to turn the W-GDP into part of her political legacy. Last year, she was behind the bipartisan launch of a bill formally authorising the programme so that it would live on after her dad left office. That could well have happened: Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator, initially lent Ivanka her support. But Ivanka got greedy and insisted on using her version of the bill. Shaheen abandoned her support, explaining that Ivanka’s version of the legislation focused too narrowly on women’s economic advancement, minimising issues such as education, healthcare and gender-based violence. Not so much “let them eat cake”, as “let them start cake-making businesses”. Last month, the bill was dropped and now the future of Ivanka’s biggest project is unclear.I don’t want to be unfair to her. She may not have empowered women the way she promised she would, but she did empower herself. Ivanka and Kushner have made a fortune while “serving” in the White House. And you know what they say about charity: it begins at home. More

    • 213 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Obama didn’t deliver for Africa – can Biden prove that black lives matter everywhere? | Vava Tampa

      by

      How different is the Biden-Harris administration’s Africa policy going to be from Donald Trump’s, or even Barack Obama’s? Many African people, as well as the continent’s strongman leaders, are now gingerly asking – is Biden going to be Obama 2.0, or Trump-lite?For the sake of black lives mattering everywhere in these turbulent times, I hope Biden will chart a bold new course, diametrically away from not only Trump but also Obama’s Africa policy.I welcomed the Biden presidency with a deep sigh of relief. Yet I am still worried about his Africa strategy. Relations between president-elect Biden and African people will kick off with tensions and apprehensions – understandably so.For the past 60 years, Democrat and Republican presidents have approached Africa primarily for access to, and control of, our extractive industries and, at certain points, for counter-terrorism operations. This approach, under the influence of the cold war, translated into the US supporting Africa’s strongmen, leaving vulnerable people struggling to survive their ruthlessness, while China cheered from the sidelines.The most prominent of these strongmen, including but not limited to Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema, in power since 1979; Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, head of state since 1986; Djibouti’s Ismail Omar Guelleh, in post since 1999; Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, ruling since 1994, and Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki, in power since 1993. The human cost of US support for these men has been jarring for even the most cynical observers.By my calculation Africa’s strongmen have been responsible for more than 22 million deaths on the continent since independence in 1960. That is almost twice as many people as historians say were forcibly transported from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade. Yet it seems no US president has found this troubling.The bloodiestkilling field has been the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where brutal US-backed strongmen killed more than 5.4 million Congolese people over access and control of minerals between 1998 and 2008, and sparked outbreaks of disease, famine and the use of rape as a weapon of war. With Trump out of the picture, our biggest fear is a repeat of Obama’s Africa doctrine – and for many black people this is the single biggest concern about the Biden-Harris administration.As we all know, President Obama promised Africa one thing in Ghana in 2009: to support strong institutions instead of strongmen. That simple pledge – repeated, in one form or another – felt very personal to many of us fighting for peace and change.During the Obama presidency, 11 African strongmen clung to power, killing thousands of their citizensBut Obama delivered almost nothing meaningful; not because of a Russian or Chinese veto at the UN security council but because in the first few years of his presidency some in his team sought to protect people such as Joseph Kabila, former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose security forces were linked to killings and torture, and Paul Kagame, whose tight grip on the Rwanda presidency has earned him the tag of “benevolent dictator”.The result? Tragic. During the Obama presidency, 11 African strongmen clung to power, killing thousands of their citizens and displacing millions more. Yet almost not a single one of them faced a serious tit-for-tat consequences from the US – and this has been a colossal disaster for democratic forces across the continent.Trump, too, turned a blind eye to atrocities in Africa. During his presidency, President Biya’s troops in Cameroon have killed 4,000 civilians. In Ivory Coast, Allassane Ouattara “won” a third unconstitutional term with 94% of the vote. Many civilians were killed in election-linked violence. The list may very well go on.For the sake of black lives mattering everywhere, will the Biden-Harris administration end the US’s longstanding but shortsighted and destructive support for Africa’s strongmen? How may President Biden respond to #EndSars, a movement against police brutality in Nigeria, or #CongoIsBleeding, a campaign against exploitation in the mines of the DRC? What will he do to de-escalate growing tensions inside Ethiopia or in Eritrea?Many of us are wondering, too, whether or not Biden will refocus US policy and push for peace in Somalia, Libya, Cameroon or Mozambique? Will he support the creation of an international criminal tribunal for Congo to end the continuing killings and use of rape as a weapon of war and, simultaneously, jump-start development in Africa’s great lakes – a region that seems pitifully prone to strongmen and mass killing?Answers to these questions are unclear. But I am hopeful about Biden. His career and some of his pitch-perfect public statements – think of his 1986 statement against apartheid South Africa or his commitment to black lives mattering during the campaign trail – reveal instincts, even a moral commitment, to supporting Africa and black people. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      WHO's Covid-19 inquiry is a shrewd move in a sea of disinformation

      by

      In the world of epidemiology it’s sometimes said that pandemics are lived forwards and understood backwards.We encounter them head-on, chaotically, trying to fathom the disease in real time even while trying to mitigate its impact. Lessons generally come later as the evidence accumulates.What’s also true is public health, especially on a global scale, is rarely separable from politics. One of the complicating factors of the recently ended outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was the country’s long history of conflict and the toxic relationship between central government in Kinshasa and the affected population in the country’s east, which led to deep and sometimes violent distrust.One of the most depressing subtexts of the coronavirus pandemic is how these kinds of conflicts are now being writ large as a range of actors, including western ones, have used the crisis to spread disinformation.The past months have been marked by dodgy dossiers leaked to the media and conspiracy theories, pushed by US officials engaged in a struggle for global influence with Beijing, suggesting that the virus was deliberately cooked up in a Chinese lab. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump puts Cuban doctors in firing line as heat turned up on island economy

      by

      After US allies expel foreign health missions, Havana warns that patients will pay the highest price for campaign against its scheme A Cuban medical programme that has helped some of the world’s poorest communities has become the latest target of the Trump administration’s escalating attempts to pressure Havana’s faltering economy. Dubbed “Cuban doctors”, the celebrated […] More