Dr. Ulysses Dorotheo is Executive Director of the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA)*

BANGKOK, Thailand, Apr 11 2019 (IPS) – The image of a smoking toddler from Indonesia horrified the world but did little to motivate local policy makers to enact measures to protect children and youth from the harms of tobacco use. Indonesia has one of the world’s highest smoking rates where two out of three men and about 40 percent of adolescent boys smoke.

Cigarette prices in Indonesia are among the cheapest in the region, where a pack of Marlboros is sold for as little as US$ 1.70, while local brands or loose sticks are dirt cheap ($ 0.05 per stick), easily affordable to the nation’s 65 million smokers.

Indonesia has a complex tobacco taxation structure of 12-tiers, dividing between machine-made white cigarettes, machine-made Kretek cigarettes, hand-rolled ci…

Jennifer Quimno of the Coalition of Leprosy Advocates of the Philippines (CLAP) (centre) is joined by Sri Lanka’s Shagana Thiygalingam (L) and Amarasinghe Manjula (R) after Quimno delivered the recommendations presented by the Global Forum of People’s Organisations on Hansen’s Disease to the International Leprosy Congress in Manila on September 11. Credit: Ben Kritz/IPS

MANILA, Sep 11 2019 (IPS) – Stronger government action to fight stigma and discrimination, more government funding for health and non-health support programmes, and a larger role for people’s organisations in developing policy towards Hansen s disease treatment and eradication are still needed for eliminating the disease.

This was some of the recommendations made by participants of the first ever Global Forum of People’s Organisations on Hansen’s Disease today, Sept. 11 during a presenta…

Jeffrey Jordan/ President of the Population Reference Bureau with ICPD25 participants. Credit: Joyce Chimbi / IPS

NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov 13 2019 (IPS) – One in five women globally lives with a disability even as they have same needs and interests as women without disabilities, their access to sexual and reproductive health services and rights remains severely limited.

Delegates representing people living with disabilities at the ICPD25 Conference painted a grim picture of barriers and challenges they face.

“We are perceived to be asexual and therefore offering us reproductive health information is considered wasteful,” says Josephta Mukobe, principal secretary of the Kenya’s Ministry of Culture and Sports.

Motherhood remains taboo for differently abled women

Mukobe says motherhood for them is taboo, and that a pregnant w…

Credit: UN Women

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 17 2020 (IPS) – The United States and 18 other UN member states have come under fire for denying a woman’s legitimate right to “bodily autonomy”—the right to self-governance over one’s own body without coercion or external pressure.

The Executive Director of Women’s March Global, Uma Mishra-Newbery, told IPS the United Nations has worked towards progress in fighting for women s rights.

But many countries on the Human Rights Council continue to negotiate women s human rights off the table, she pointed out.

In Sept 2019, she said, the world watched as the US, in partnership with 18 other member states, put forth a statement saying there is no international right to abortion.

She said UN member states have also witnessed “the continued and grave human rights violations in Saudi Arabia”, inclu…

SYDNEY, Mar 18 2020 (IPS) – The coronavirus pandemic seems to have finally forced governments around the world to ditch their obsession (at least for the moment) with delivering budget surplus. As stock markets tumble, stimulus measures, worth billions of dollars, are announced to boost investor confidence and consumer spending to keep economies running.

Anis Chowdhury

The shift in fiscal strategy is welcome; hopefully the measures will provide some relief to the struggling individuals, families and businesses. But they are short-sighted in so far as most proposed measures do not address the underlying economic malaise even before Covid-19 pandemic.

Fraught with risk
Even though some individuals and businesses may face cash-flow problem, this is not a liquidity crisis. It is primarily a supply shock to the global production or ‘value’ chains due …

President Uhuru Kenyatta leads the charge against Covid-19. He speaks to the nation fromHarambee House, Nairobi, March 14, 2020. Photo-State House

NAIROBI, Kenya, Apr 6 2020 (IPS) – Covid-19 infections continue to rise, bringing normal life to a virtualstandstill and causing countries to shut themselves off from the rest of the world.

Increasingly, governments are turning to ever more stringent measures including curfews and lockdowns, with police and military being used to enforce those measures.

Perhaps necessary as the velocity of the virus has already infected nearly 1.2 million people and killed nearly 65,000 people worldwide, wreaking havoc to the health systems of the most advanced countries of the world.

Frontline health workers, are succumbing to the virus as they selflessly treat those under their care, upholding the Hippo…

Apr 3 2020 – The Education Cannot Wait Global Fund (ECW) allocates a total of US$15 million in an initial series of emergency grants for the rapid delivery of holistic education services to protect and support vulnerable children and youth hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in 16 countries/emergency contexts. These girls and boys are already impacted by armed conflicts, forced displacement, natural disasters and protracted crises. An additional series of grants to support the response in other crisis-affected countries will be released shortly and reach partners in-country in the coming days.

“1.5 billion children are out of school. The majority of the 31 million children uprooted from their homes today including over 17 million internally displaced, 12.7 million refugees and 1.1 million asylum seekers are at great risk,” said Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown, Chair of Education Ca…

Mandeep Tiwana is chief programmes officer at CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance. He’s based at CIVICUS’ New York office.

NEW YORK, Apr 21 2020 – In her , ‘A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,’ Mary Ann Glendon tells the beautiful story of how out of the ashes of the Second World War emerged the world’s pre-eminent rights framework. The recognises the inherent dignity of every human being and was born out of the shared horror felt by the international community with war crimes and genocide on an unprecedented scale. It acknowledged that fundamental change was needed to make the world fit for future generations.

Mandeep Tiwana

Today, the COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting our lives and livelihoods in wholly unanticipated ways, testing the resilience of our social, economic and political structures. Fun…

Africa is grappling with managing diseases like malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis as health systems that are unable to cope with both this and the coronavirus pandemic. Sleeping under a net and taking antimalarial pills helps prevent malaria. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, May 11 2020 (IPS) – Experts across Africa are warning that as hospitals and health facilities focus on COVID-19, less attention is being given to the management of other deadly diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, which affect millions more people.

“Today if you have malaria…