SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Apr 21 2020 (IPS) – Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro appointed medical entrepreneur Nelson Teich his new health minister on 17 April. The businessman quickly his boss’ desire to resume business as usual regardless of its potentially lethal consequences.

Bolsonaro had his previous health minister, displeased by Luiz Henrique Mandetta’s public remarks on the need for lockdowns and physical distancing. Mandetta’s firing was met with outrage across Brazil. Locked-down citizens “Bolsonaro Murder”.

Anis Chowdhury

In his final briefing as minister, Mandetta staff to challenge “denialism” and mount an “unyielding defen…

A Rohingya woman crosses the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh near the village of Anzuman Para in Palong Khali. Credit: UNHCR/Roger Arnold

NEW YORK, May 11 2020 (IPS) – As the COVID-19 mayhem carries on in most countries, the role of mothers, daughters, and female caregivers have been affected the most. Besides looking after the household and home schooling children, they are also working on the front lines, actively or passively caring for their respective communities.

Globally, women make up of workers in the health and social welfare sectors. Nearly women work in agriculture and women do as much unpaid care-work at home as men. Two such women share…

Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori Panin Okyenhene is King of Akyem Abuakwa, Ghana

Credit: UNDP, Ghana

ACCRA Ghana, Jun 1 2020 (IPS) – The tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic and its associated challenges have thrown our world into chaos, with the virus destroying lives and livelihoods in its path.

The whole world is presently seized by the effects of the pandemic, but there is a silent crisis of equal measure that has long been ravaging lives, devastating livelihoods, destroying property and threatening the fate of our entire planet.

This is the global climate crisis.

Unlike COVID-19, climate change and its impacts are not novel processes. …

STOCKHOLM / ROME, Jun 15 2020 (IPS) – The #MeToo movement triggered worldwide protests that hopefully was instrumental in making people better aware of a continuous and often hidden mistreatment of women. Maybe can the current I can’t breathe movement make people realize that institutional racism is far from extinct.

It was in 1967 the term Institutional Racism was coined by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Charles V. Hamilton. They wrote that even if individual racism can be quite easy to detect, institutional racism is less perceptible. Such racism makes a difference between people through more subtle means than outright discrimination. It is expressed through …

Ramu Damodaran is Chief, United Nations Academic Impact*

Engineering students gave a new purpose to a 3D printer by producing personal protective equipment (PPE) for local health professionals. Credit: Andrés Bello Catholic University/UN Academic Impact

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 10 2020 (IPS) – Among the many compelling points made by Dr. Anthony Fauci in our “Rethinking Health” webinar this week was the absolute essentiality of global collaboration and transparency to contain the pandemic with which we are faced.

It’s an imperative between, but beyond, States and governments, which Secretary-General Guterres has affirmed, most recently when he…

Aug 15 2020 (IPS) – In 1918, the Spanish Flu, a deadly influenza caused by the H1N1 virus, decimated the world. Over the course of four successive waves, it infected 500 million people, about a third of the world’s population at the time, …

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.

BANGKOK, Thailand, Oct 6 2020 (IPS) – Participation in global and regional supply chains has been one of the most reliable economic growth strategies, especially for developing countries in Asia and the Pacific. Smooth and efficient connectivity in both trade and transport has been indispensable to the region’s pursuit of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana

Yet, containment measures for the COVID-19 pandemic have significantly interrupted production, t…

Technical experts measure the salinity of groundwater wells on Vaitupu Island, Tuvalu. This month work will begin on building the network of tanks and pipes which will eventually convey clean water from the north of Vaitupu Island to the 1,500 people who live in the villages of Tumaseu and Asau in the south. Courtesy: Pacific Communit…

UN Secretary-General António Guterres briefs the media on the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

ROME, Dec 23 2020 (IPS) – Despite its grim record of multiple natural disasters and a deepening climate crisis, one could be forgiven for looking back on 2019 with a degree of nostalgia. There is no disguising the extent of the calamity wrought this year by COVID-19, yet as we approach the end of 2020 we may also draw strength from positive developments emerging.

No review of 2020, as seen through the eyes of IPS reporters and contributors around the world, could begin without paying our respects to the nearly 1.5 million people w…

A mother and her child from West Point, a low-income neighbourhood of Monrovia, Liberia (file photo). It is estimated that 20,000 girls under the age of 18 give birth everyday in developing countries — amounting to 7.3 million births a year. Research shows…