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By Kwame Buist
LUSAKA, Zambia (IDN) – Billions of uninsured individuals, families and small businesses are exposed to risks which can result in catastrophic losses, delegates to the 14th International Microinsurance Conference (IMC) on ‘Inclusive Insurance for Emerging Markets’ in Lusaka were told.
Despite encouraging signs of increased insurance cover uptake in some markets, climate change and extreme weather events are exposing the poorest and most vulnerable to risk as never before.
By Katharine Pulvermacher*
The author is Executive Director of Microinsurance Network.
LUXEMBOURG (IDN) – Life is hard enough for small-scale farmers, businesses, families and communities who live with the daily threat of losing everything to natural disasters, extreme weather or other catastrophes. Even if you are insured, it can be tough to start again after drought has taken your cattle, pests have destroyed your crop or the main breadwinner has died in an accident. But for the four billion people around the world who have no access to financial services, insurance remains a distant dream.
By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK | WINDHOEK (IDN) – The Namibian government has leased four farms for 99 years to a company, Comsar Properties SA, owned by a Russian billionaire, Rashid Sardarov. Valued at USD$3 million and measuring a total 42,000 acres, the farms were registered as state property by the land reform ministry.
Land reform minister Utoni Nujoma has been flip-flopping on whether or not he was involved in the transaction, according to The Namibian.
By Justus Wanzala
NAIROBI (IDN) – Incessant humming noise emanating from air conditioners welcomes one into an in expansive warehouse at Twiga Foods pack house in Syokimau area of Kenya's capital. It is mid-morning and workers are busy sorting, cleaning and packing fresh produce ready for the market.
Established in 2014, Twiga sources produce from Kenyan farmers for sale to vendors in urban areas. It handles 14 products among them onions, bananas, capsicums, carrots, tomatoes, pineapples, pawpaws, passion fruits and mangoes. It buys produce from 8,370 farmers and sells to an estimated 5,226 vendors.
By Kwame Buist
ROME (IDN) – Over the last three decades, the countries of Latin American and the Caribbean have experienced a profound transformation which has extended to rural areas. All countries in the region, except for Haiti, are now considered middle-income.
This economic and rural transformation has resulted in many benefits, especially between 2004 and 2013, when millions of people left poverty behind. However, despite this success, over one-quarter of the region’s population continues to live in poverty. Now, the economic downturn of most of Latin America’s economies over the last few years threatens to send millions more back under the poverty line.
By Jayasri Priyalal
The writer is the Regional Director responsible for Finance Sector of UNI Global Union, Asia & Pacific Organization - Singapore.
SINGAPORE (IDN) – Regulatory capture and the influence of powerful Transnational Corporations in lobbying the policy makers towards their own advantage is no secret. Putting profits before people and planet is their ordinary course of business.
Now that the first draft of a legally binding treaty in International Human Rights Law has been submitted to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) will they have the courage to stand up for the people against powerful transnational corporations [TNC]?
By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) – The day of reckoning is arriving in Southern Africa for the hundreds of thousands of blacks whose lands were taken forcibly by white settlers – a crime that goes unpunished despite promises for land reform year after year.
Pressure is growing on governments to take action and return ancestral lands to their original owners. But government leaders have been cautiously backing away from some of their early militant calls for justice.
"It's true whites stole the land, but they also have Namibian blood," said Namibian President Hage Geingob. "Whites are also Namibian," he said diplomatically at a Heroes Day commemoration in northern Namibia on August 26.
By Jaya Ramachandran
GENEVA (IDN) – A new United Nations report warns that "in a wide variety of countries," both physical violence and legal prosecution are used against Indigenous Peoples defending their rights and lands. They are "criminalized".
The report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, to the UN Human Rights Council describes how private sector interests collude with governments in coveting the lands of Indigenous Peoples for economic development projects.
She was Chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues from 2005 to 2010, and actively engaged in drafting and adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007.
By Justus Wanzala
NAIROBI (ACP-IDN) – Space science and earth observation are some of the key pillars in the attainment of most of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), according to experts participating in an international conference, organized by the Regional Centre for Mapping Resources for Development (RCMRD) in Kenya's capital city.
The central theme of the RCMRD International Conference (RIC 2018) was 'Space Science for Sustainable Development' with particular focus on agriculture and food security, weather and climate, water and hydro-climatic disasters, land use land cover and ecosystems, land management and surveying, and cross cutting themes.
By Kizito Makoye
DAR ES SALAAM (IDN) – Helena Magafu smiled as she held a piece of paper that recognizes her as the sole owner of a disputed farmland in her village was handed over to her, thus resolving a raging dispute with her neighbours.
"I am very happy, I don’t think anyone with ever again claim this is their land," she said
For the past eight years the 53 year-old widow, who lives in Sanje village in the rural district of Kilombero – in Morogoro Region, south-western Tanzania – has been embroiled in a dispute with her neighbours who attempted to take 30 hectares of her family land when her husband died.
