Inter Press Service | News and Views from the Global South

Inter Press Service | News and Views from the Global South

Why Covid-19 Choices Are Critical for Children Jo Becker Children may escape the worst symptoms of Covid-19 and suffer lower mortality rates, but for millions, the pandemic will have devastating effects. The choices that governments make now are crucial for children. Governments can both lessen the worst effects of the crisis on children in the months ... MORE > >

COVID-19: India's Harvests also Locked Down Neeta Lal Heartbreaking images of Indian farmers standing amidst swathes of rotting vegetables, fruits and grain have been flooding newspapers and TV screens lately. Crashing prices and transport bottlenecks due to the 40-day coronavirus lockdown in India, on till May 3, have driven some to set their unsold ... MORE > >

Why the International Day of Multilateralism Must Start a New World Order Savio Carvalho In our current COVID 19 context of suffering and fear, that may sound like a strange and spooky quote. But let’s be clear: what we have achieved so far in the present is not - and shouldn’t be - indicative of what we can achieve in the future. And, as Arundhati Roy reminds us, crisis moments ... MORE > >

Children under Lockdown get a ‘Learning Passport’ Samira Sadeque Soon schools in Timor-Leste, Ukraine, and Kosovo, where some 6.5 million children are currently at home, will hopefully start teaching their children once again -- albeit online. A learning platform, originally designed to assist refugee and displaced children, was launched this week to address ... MORE > >

Autonomous Resourcing: the Engine Room of Feminist Work Amid a Global Pandemic Rochelle Jones Feminist responses to COVID-19 have been swift, insightful, and numerous. There have been webinars (so.many.webinars), twitter threads, illustrations, press releases and policy recommendations, and online house parties. Analysis pieces cover everything from the gendered impacts of COVID-19 to ... MORE > >

UN’s Development Goals Threatened by a World Economy Facing Recession Thalif Deen The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), described as an integral part of its highly-ambitious development agenda, may be in deep trouble. Aimed at addressing some of the global challenges the world faces-- including extreme poverty and hunger, inequalities in incomes and gender, ... MORE > >

Citizen Action is Central to the Global Response to COVID-19 Isabel Ortiz and Walden Bello The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has created an unprecedented human and economic crisis. Governments are taking strong actions, enforcing quarantines to reduce contagion, testing populations, building emergency intensive care units. Governments have also launched large fiscal stimulus plans to ... MORE > >

Q&A: Continued Social Distancing and Hundreds of Millions More in Poverty - A New Normal for the World? Samira Sadeque With much of the global economy stalled amid an unprecedented lockdown of nations grappling to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, the author of a new United Nations report on the disease’s impact on poverty told IPS that hundreds of millions more could be pushed into poverty and we can expect to see ... MORE > >

Coronavirus, New Threat for Mexican Migrant Workers in the U.S. Emilio Godoy As the high season for agricultural labour in the United States approaches, tens of thousands of migrant workers from Mexico are getting ready to head to the fields in their northern neighbour to carry out the work that ensures that food makes it to people's tables. But the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) ... MORE > >

Coronavirus: Six Key Factors Poor Countries Should Focus on Since the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic late last year in Wuhan, China, the global community has witnessed unprecedented policy responses to curtail, contain and control the disease. Many have proven to be successful. But others required critical context consideration. For instance, the ... MORE > >

The Theology of Pandemics Sam Ben-Meir Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal is set in medieval Sweden, as the bubonic plague ravages the countryside. In one famous scene, a procession of zombie-like flagellants enters a village and interrupts a comic stage-show. The townspeople are present to hear the procession’s leader, a ... MORE > >

Covid-19: Brazil’s Bolsonaro trumps Trump Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro appointed medical entrepreneur Nelson Teich his new health minister on 17 April. The businessman quickly echoed his boss’ desire to resume business as usual regardless of its potentially lethal consequences. Bolsonaro had fired his previous health minister, ... MORE > >

Dying for a Better Life - How Rohingya Refugees Risk their Lives to Cross into Malaysia Rafiqul Islam Last week more than 396 starving Rohingyas were rescued off the coast of Bangladesh after being at sea for two months. At least 32 had died on the boat after it failed to reached Malaysia. While it was unclear at the time of the breaking news whether the refugees were from Myanmar, where they are ... MORE > >

Haunting Forest Spirits – is Mother Nature Striking Back? Jan Lundius Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning, on the contrary, every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities. To study them is to understand the importance of a society's structure, its standard of living, and its political priorities. ... MORE > >

How Some Pacific Women are Responding to Climate Change and Natural Disasters Neena Bhandari Sitting atop a banyan tree branch, Fiona Robyn had a cell phone tightly clasped in her fist raised high to get a signal. She was impatiently waiting for the SMS weather alert from the Women's Wetem Weta (Women’s Weather Watch (WWW)) hub in Port Vila as cyclone TC Harold raged towards the Republic ... MORE > >

BCG Vaccine Fighting Coronavirus in South Asia Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake Numerous studies in many parts of the world have linked the BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guerin) vaccination, widely used in the developing world with fewer Coronavirus cases. This is good news for countries that have universal BCG vaccination in tropical Asia and Africa. Many of these countries ... MORE > >