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Reporting the underreported about the plan of action for People, Planet and Prosperity, and efforts to make the promise of the SDGs a reality.
A project of the Non-profit International Press Syndicate Group with IDN as the Flagship Agency in partnership with Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.


SGI Soka Gakkai International

 

Project Articles

Image credit: UNCCDC

By Rita Joshi

BONN (IDN) – The Great Green Wall (GGW) initiative has over the past 13 years restored close to 20 million hectares of land, according to a report released on September 7 at a virtual meeting of environmental ministers from Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Djibouti together with regional partners, international organizations and development agencies.

The GGW Initiative was launched in 2007 under the leadership of the African Union Commission and Pan-African Agency, and with the financial support from the government of Ireland. (P17) JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF | SWAHILI

Project Articles

Collage of the mass grave at the Killing Field of Choeung Ek with the leader of the Killing Fields on the left. Source: Wikimedia.

Will there be more genocides that the world will ignore until it is too late?

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power*

LUND, Sweden (IDN) – One of the cruellest men ever to have lived died on September 2 in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Kaing Guek Eav, popularly known as “Duch”, was 77 and had been convicted of mass torture by the UN/Cambodian war crimes court. He was the only one of the five defendants to admit his crimes. In July 2010 in a trial I witnessed first-hand he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

According to Seth Mydans, the New York Times’s correspondent in Cambodia at the time of the rule of Pol Pot who founded the guerrilla movement, the Khmer Rouge, “he was a schoolteacher before the Khmer Rouge came to power. He took his revolutionary name from a children’s book about an obedient schoolboy named Duch. ‘I wanted to be a well-disciplined boy who respected the teachers and did good deeds’, he told the court.  (P16) JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF | THAI

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Photo: Bhikkhuh Sanghasena, a leading Buddhist monk based in the state capital Leh, led a procession of local spiritual leaders across the town centre. The spiritual leaders included not only Buddhists, but also Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Sikhs.

 By Kalinga Seneviratne
 
SINGAPORE (IDN) – When India's Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation foreign ministers' meeting in Moscow on September 10, Wang noted that it was "normal for India and China to have differences as two neighbouring major countries".

According to India's NDTV network, he added, as Asia's emerging powers, India and China need to cooperate and not confront each other, and promote mutual trust, not suspicion. (P15) JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF | HINDI

Goal 16

Photo: A child being given polio oral vaccination. Credit: WHO Regional Office for Africa

By Ronald Joshua

GENEVA | BRAZZAVILLE (IDN) – While COVID-19 pandemic is playing havoc with the global economy and a frantic search continues for a vaccine, thanks to a concerted campaign of immunization, Africa is free of a highly infectious disease which mainly affects children under 5 years of age. It is a significant development marking the eradication of the second virus from the face of the continent since smallpox 40 years ago.

"Today is a historic day for Africa," said Professor Rose Gana Fomban Leke, Chairperson of the African Regional Certification Commission for Polio eradication (ARCC), which has declared the region free of polio. (P14) JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF | SPANISH

Project Articles

Photo: With the lockdown to fend off the spread of COVID-19, many Southern Africans, have lost their jobs and switched to vending on the streets where they engage in cat and mouse games with police enforcing lockdown rules. Consequently, the game to survive still remains tough for most Africans as they battle to support their children amid schools closure. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo | INPS-IDN

By Jeffrey Moyo

MUSINA, South Africa (IDN) – His three teenage children play home-made paper ball on the dusty streets of Musina, exercise books scattered on the veranda of their rented home in the South African border town with Zimbabwe. Yet Gerald Gava, the children's 47-year old father, lies on a reed mat spread on the veranda, apparently with nothing to do after he stopped working three months ago as the lockdown took toll on the construction company that employed him.

Gava, who is a migrant from Zimbabwe, said even his children have had to remain home as schools also shut down, thanks to the coronavirus that has pounded the entire globe. (P13) JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF | SWAHILI

Project Articles

Photo: UN Secretary-General António Guterres delivers the annual Nelson Mandela Lecture. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

The Rich and Poor are Not Sailing in the Same Boat

By Jaya Ramachandran

NEW YORK (IDN) – UN Secretary-General António Guterres has in a surprise dramatic move, castigated a series of "fallacies and falsehoods" perpetrated particularly on the deprived of the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed all lies such as  the lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all; the fiction that unpaid care work is not work; the delusion that we live in a post-racist world; the myth that we are all in the same boat".

Exposing this misleading myth, he says: "While we are all floating on the same sea, it's clear that some are in superyachts while others are clinging to the floating debris." (P12) ARABIC ] HINDI | JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF

Project Articles

Image credit: UN

UN Academic Impact Talks to Students from Several Countries

By Santo D. Banerjee

NEW YORK (IDN) – COVID-19 pandemic has forced more than 1.5 billion students in 165 countries out of school, enforcing the global academic community to explore new ways of teaching and learning, including distance and online education, according to UNESCO estimates.

This has proven challenging for both students and educators, who have to deal with the emotional, physical and economic difficulties posed by the illness while doing their part to help curb the spread of the virus, notes United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI). (P11) CHINESE | JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF | PORTUGUESE

Project Articles

Photo: Women tend a community nursery created as part of a completed ITTO project to assist forest landscape restoration in Togo. Credit: ODEF

By Ramesh Jaura

BERLIN | TOKYO (IDN) – Togo in West Africa is the venue of a milestone project between Soka Gakkai, a global community-based Buddhist organization and the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO). The two have signed a memorandum to launch a reforestation project offering income opportunities for women's groups in two rural areas of Togo.

The memorandum involving a donation of 10 million yen (US$93,300) for the initial one-year phase of the project was signed on July 1 at the Soka Gakkai (SG) headquarters in Tokyo. The project will kick off on September 1. (P10) GERMAN | JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF | SWAHILI

Project Articles

Photo: United Nations Secretary-General Mr António Guterres and Deputy Secretary-General Ms Amina Mohammed have been emphasizing the role of media in achieving SDGs. Credit: UN Photo

Viewpoint by Siddharth Chatterjee

The writer is the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Kenya. Follow Siddharth Chatterjee on twitter- @sidchat1.

NAIROBI (IDN) – When 17-year-old high school student Darnella Fraizer filmed the last minutes of George Floyd’s life under the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin, she could not have imagined that her footage would reignite the explosive global question of racial inequality and the subsequent clamour for reforms in policing. (P09) JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF | SWAHILI | TAGALOG

Project Articles

Photo: Margaret with one of her granddaughters. Credit: Brian Hodges for African Women Rising.

 Viewpoint by Linda Eckerbom Cole

The writer is Director/Founder, African Women Rising, shuttles between Santa Barbara, California and Gulu, Uganda.

SANTA BARBARA, California (IDN) – African Women Rising (AWR) has created a campaign to build 2,000 new Permagardens, which will help feed 15,000 at-risk people who are experiencing food scarcity due to COVID-19. Permagardens empower communities to meet their own food needs and are a long-term solution to hunger. (P08) JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF | PORTUGUESE

Project Articles

  1. Racism and Exceptionalism Are Backbones of Trump Doctrine
  2. COVID-19: Fake, Shocking & Good News Stalks Africa
  3. COVID-19: Should Economy Have Priority Over Migrant Workers' Health?
  4. Kenyans Are Innovative in Finding Ways to Fight COVID-19
  5. The Impact of COVID-19 Stalks Africa – Animated Video Tells Children About It

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