By Kalinga Seneviratne
BANGKOK (IDN) - The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) Global Summit, held for the first time in Southeast Asia, pivoted on how Asia-fuelled tourism would impact the industry worldwide. The discussions also centred around whether tourism could be an enabler of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) if it were heritage-focused offering community experiences – rather than “exotic” sites – so that significant leakages of tourism revenue could be tapped.
Financial leakages in tourism occur when revenues arising from tourism-related economic activities in destination countries are not available for re-investment or consumption of goods and services in the same countries. Financial resources 'leak away' from the destination country to another country, particularly when a tourism company is based abroad and when tourism-related goods and services are being imported to the destination country.
By Shanta Rao
NEW YORK (IDN) – The UN’s 16 peacekeeping operations (PKOs), funded by a hefty $7.9 billion budget for the current 2016-2017 biennium, are in jeopardy facing threats of drastic cuts – and in some cases, even extinction.
The United States, the largest single contributor accounting for about 28% of that budget, has not only threatened to reduce funding, possibly down to 25%, but is also calling for a downgrading – or even the total elimination-- of some of the ongoing missions.
Addressing the Council on Foreign Relations in March, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley gave an advance warning when she challenged the current state of peacekeeping operations. (P05) ITALIAN ｜JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF
By Shamshad Akhtar
Dr. Shamshad Akhtar is an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) and the Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). – The Editor
BANGKOK (IDN) - Two years after the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by world leaders in New York, the ongoing practical question is how to finance the needs of such an ambitious and universal agenda.
It has been estimated that if the world’s developing countries are to achieve the targets set out in the global development blueprint, an additional public investment of at least $1.4 trillion per year will be needed.
By Neena Bhandari
Ha Noi/Hoi An, Viet Nam (IDN) – Pham Thi Kim Viet is up before the rooster heralds the crack of dawn.The rice on the cooker is beginning to boil as she tosses freshly chopped vegetables and fish in a wok. She then hurries to wake her two daughters, 12 and four-years-old. At 7 a.m., dressed in laundered uniforms, she takes them to school on her trusted old scooter and proceeds to Hoi An, 30 km from her home in the mountains of Dai Loc district in central Vietnam, to report for work as a freelance tour guide.
By Desmond Brown
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (ACP-IDN) – The tiny Caribbean island of Barbados has taken a major step towards ensuring gender equality in its judicial system with the development of a draft gender equality protocol for magistrates and judges.
The document, being hailed as the first of its kind within the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), will support the judiciary in using gender analysis to ensure that both women and men have equal access to justice.
“If gender stereotypes are unconsciously held, if they are not the product of a deliberate intention to discriminate, how can we as judges avoid falling prey to them? This is where the establishment of this protocol is so important,” said Justice Adrian Saunders, a judge at the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ).
By Charlotte Petri Gornitzka
Charlotte Petri Gornitzka, a former Director General of the Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency (Sida), is chair of the Development Assistance Committee of the 35-nation Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) since July 2016..- The Editor
PARIS (IDN) - New analysis of foreign aid flows from members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), which I chair, reveals a worrying trend. The share of Official Development Assistance (ODA) that is tied to companies in donor countries is on the rise again.
The latest OECD report on aid untying, released this month (April 2017), shows that the share of aid that is “untied” – in other words where the legal and regulatory barriers to open competition for aid-funded procurement have been removed – has declined for two years in a row.
By J Nastranis
NEW YORK (IDN) - Less than 30 dollars spent per person per year can work wonders for adolescent health and education, finds a new study commissioned by UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.
The report has been published in The Lancet on the eve of the World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington D.C. from April 21 to April 23, 2017, where finance and development leaders from 188 countries were slated to discuss the critical need to invest in adolescents.
The Lancet is an independent, international general medical journal purported to make science widely available so that medicine can serve, and transform society, and positively impact the lives of people. (P04) ARABIC | HINDI | SPANISH | SWAHILI | TURKISH ｜JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF
By Desmond Brown
GEORGETOWN, Guyana (IDN) – Investing in sport can help reduce spiralling health costs and promote education, social cohesion and gender equality, says a new guidebook published by The Commonwealth.
The recommendations of the guidebook, titled ‘Enhancing the Contribution of Sport to the Sustainable Development Goals’, are important to the Caribbean, where chronic and communicable diseases are devastating to individuals and community, threatening the quality of life and becoming an increasingly negative factor in the region’s development.
Guyana, for example, spends on average 4.6 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on healthcare every year, equivalent to 200 dollars per capita. (P03) JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF
By Stella Paul
RATNAPURA, Sri Lanka (IDN) – The deafening sound of half a dozen rolling machines in the Rilhena tea factory feels like a hard punch on the head, but for factory workers Bihita Madura and Rajakaxmi Chandrakumar this is sweet music.
Their noise-belching, black dust-spewing machine symbolises what matters most: another day at work. “It’s a normal day for us," says Madura, watching Chandrakumar feed a shovel of black tea leaves into the giant rolling machine. Both in their forties, Madura and Chandrakumar have good reason to be relieved: the Rilhena factory, owned by Khawatte Plantations of tea major Dilmah, is one of the country’s best performing tea producers. (P02) JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF | KOREAN VERSION TEXT PDF
By J Nastranis
NEW YORK (IDN) – Voicing "deep regret" at the United States decision to cut financial support to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has appealed to donors to increase their support for the UN Population Agency to allow it to continue its critical work.
Strongly criticising the U.S. decision, Catholics for Choice said the announcement of the decision in the same week as the 50th session of the Commission on Population and Development (Aprll 3-7) is "a deliberate slap in the face of women as the UN considers the importance of family planning for sustainable development." (P01) GERMAN | JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF | SPANISH
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