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Guinea, Vanuatu Have UN Vote Restored After Paying Dues

Guinea and Vanuatu had their ability to vote at the United Nations restored on Monday, having been denied the right at the beginning of the month over their failure to pay their dues to the world body, a UN spokeswoman said.
“The General Assembly took note that Guinea, Iran and Vanuatu have made the payments necessary to reduce their arrears below the amounts specified in Article 19 of the Charter,” U.N. spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said.
“This means that they can resume voting in the General Assembly,” she said.
Under Article 19, any country can have their voting rights in the General Assembly suspended if their payment arrears are equal to or greater than the contribution due for the past two full years.
The payment Friday of more than $18 million by Iran, via an account in Seoul and most likely with the approval of the United States, which has imposed heavy financial sanctions on Tehran, had been announced at the end of last week by UN sources and confirmed by South Korea.
For their part, Guinea had to pay at least $40,000 and Vanuatu at least $194 to recover their right to vote.
Kubiak later added three other countries that lost their U.N. voting rights in early January had also recovered them after paying the minimum arrears required last week.
Those countries were Sudan, which had to pay about $300,000, Antigua and Barbuda, which owed some $37,000 and Congo-Brazzaville, with around $73,000 in arrears, said the spokeswoman.
On the other hand, Venezuela, which is facing a minimum payment of nearly $40 million, and Papua New Guinea, which must pay just over $13,000, remain deprived of the right to vote, according to the U.N.
They are the only two countries out of the 193 members of the United Nations that will not be able to participate in votes this year.

Source: Voice of America

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UNESCO: World Failing to Provide Quality Education for Children

A United Nations report released Monday said the world is failing to insure that by 2030 all children are receiving an “inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities.”
The indicators used to determine a participating country’s success included: early childhood education attendance; drop-out rates; completion rates; gender gaps in completion rates; minimum proficiency rates in reading and mathematics; trained teachers; and public education expenditure.
The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, said countries were already failing their children “even before taking into account the potential consequences of COVID-19 on education development.”
This failure “is a wakeup call for the world’s leaders,” UNESCO’s report said, “as millions of children will continue to miss out on school and high-quality learning.”
The education benchmarks are included in Sustainable Development Goal 4 – one of 17 goals set up in 2015 by the U.N. General Assembly. The goals are intended to be achieved by 2030.

Source: Voice of America

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At Least 6 Reported Dead in Crush at Africa Cup Soccer Game

At least six people died in a crush outside a stadium hosting a game at Africa’s top soccer tournament in Cameroon on Monday, a local government official said, realizing fears about the capacity of the Central African country to stage the continent’s biggest sports event.
Naseri Paul Biya, the governor of the central region of Cameroon, said there could be more deaths.
“We are not in position to give you the total number of casualties,” he said.
The crush happened as crowds struggled to get access to Olembe Stadium in the capital city of Yaounde to watch the host country play Comoros in a last 16 knockout game in the Africa Cup of Nations.
Officials at the nearby Messassi hospital said they received at least 40 injured people, whom police and civilians had rushed to the hospital. The officials said the hospital couldn’t treat all of them.
“Some of the injured are in desperate condition,” said Olinga Prudence, a nurse. “We will have to evacuate them to a specialized hospital.”
Witnesses at the stadium said children were among those caught up in the crush, which, they said, occurred when stadium stewards closed the gates and stopped allowing people in.
Soccer officials said around 50,000 people had tried to attend the match. The stadium has a capacity of 60,000, but it was not meant to be more than 80% full for the game because of restrictions on crowd size due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Confederation of African Football, which runs the Africa Cup, said in a statement it was aware of the incident.
“CAF is currently investigating the situation and trying to get more details on what transpired,” it said. “We are in constant communication with Cameroon government and the Local Organizing Committee.”
One of the federation’s top officials, General Secretary Veron Mosengo-Omba, went to visit injured fans in the hospital, the statement said.
Cameroon is hosting the Africa Cup for the first time in 50 years. It was meant to host the tournament in 2019, but the event was taken away that year and awarded to Egypt because of concerns about Cameroon’s preparations, particularly the readiness of its stadiums.
Olembe Stadium was one of the venues under scrutiny.
Monday’s incident was the second serious blow to the country in the space of a day, after at least 17 people died in a fire set by a series of explosions at a nightclub in Yaounde on Sunday.
Following that incident, Cameroon President Paul Biya urged the country to be on guard while it hosts its biggest national sports event in a half century.
Cameroon won Monday’s game 2-1 to move on to the quarterfinals.

Source: Voice of America

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Covid-19: Covax opens new front in pandemic arms race

GENEVA— Covax aims to break the Covid-19 pandemic in 2022 by ensuring a steady supply of vaccines at last for the world’s poorest countries — and swiftly getting them into arms.

The global scheme, aimed at procuring donor-funded jabs for the 91 weakest economies, delivered its one billionth dose last weekend — a major milestone that came far later than anticipated after a year of setbacks.

The battle for Covax in 2021 was getting hold of doses — besides rich countries cornering most of the vaccine supply, it faced export bans from producer countries, regulatory red tape and manufacturing delays.

Rather than bulk-bought jabs, the scheme ended up relying on doses donated by wealthy nations, which too often were about to expire and couldn’t be used in time.

Covax sees the new front in 2022 as smoothing the supply chain — from a reliable stream off the production lines to efficient distribution set-ups in recipient countries.

The facility is co-led by the World Health Organization (WHO); the Gavi vaccine alliance, which handles procurement; and CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which invests in prospective vaccines.

Covax this week called for $5.2 billion over the next three months to steady the ship this year.

“We can break the cycle of transmission and the pain and suffering,” Gavi chief Seth Berkley told the funding drive launch.

However, “what we do not have today are the resources to help countries adapt to the new challenges that we know Covid-19 will create in 2022”.

Covax therefore wants to build a pool of 600 million doses to ensure a reliable supply, and to cover eventual variables such as boosters or new variant-specific vaccines.

It also needs to support readiness and delivery in poorer nations, and cover the costs of syringes and transportation.

“I think we’ll still have rocky supply for the next six months or so and I’m a little worried, frankly, if there are new variant vaccines, that we might have an inequity 2.0,” said Berkley.

Covax reckons it has enough confirmed vaccine supplies to jab 45 percent of the population in the poorest 91 economies.

But the WHO wants 70 percent fully jabbed in every country by July to end the acute phase of the pandemic — a much bigger stretch, given how far behind many countries are, especially in Africa, where more than 85 percent of people are yet to receive a single dose.

At the current pace of vaccine roll-out, 109 countries will miss the mid-2022 target, the WHO has said.

Covax was launched in June 2020, when few would have imagined that several highly effective vaccines would emerge within nine months. Historically, the vast majority of potential vaccines fail.

The first Covax doses were administered in March 2021, “but then we hit barrier after barrier”, said Berkley.

“We were able to get this back on track — and now you’re seeing an accelerated drive towards getting vaccines out.”

The next billion doses is expected to take four to five months to deliver.

Of the billion doses delivered so far, around 285 million were AstraZeneca, 260 million Pfizer, 150 million Moderna, 125 million Janssen, 95 million Sinopharm and 85 million Sinovac.

Only WHO-approved vaccines can be used, of which there are eight so far. The latest is a major CEPI-funded vaccine, Novavax, which could do much of the heavy lifting in 2022.

CEPI chief executive Richard Hatchett said the target was now building capacity in poorer countries to roll out mass vaccination at speed.

“The last mile is going to be the major challenge for 2022,” he told a World Economic Forum session.

Up to 25 countries need particular help getting their vaccination programme in shape.

Overall, some 9.8 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered around the world. Covax jabs account for 82 percent of injections in the 91 poorest economies.

The top Covax donor-funded dose recipients so far are Bangladesh with 130 million, Indonesia 87 million, Pakistan 77 million and the Philippines 66 million.

Hatchett said that with the manufacturing capacity now available, helping poorer countries turn those doses into vaccinations could transform the course of the pandemic.

Whether primary vaccination or a booster, getting a jab to everyone who wants one “is an achievable goal in 2022”, he insisted.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

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COVID 19: Scale of education loss ‘nearly insurmountable’, warns UNICEF

NEW YORK, 24 January 2022 – More than 635 million students remain affected by full or partial school closures. On the International Day of Education and as the COVID-19 pandemic nears its two-year mark, UNICEF shares the latest available data on the impact of the pandemic on children’s learning.

“In March, we will mark two years of COVID-19-related disruptions to global education. Quite simply, we are looking at a nearly insurmountable scale of loss to children’s schooling,” said Robert Jenkins, UNICEF Chief of Education. “While the disruptions to learning must end, just reopening schools is not enough. Students need intensive support to recover lost education. Schools must also go beyond places of learning to rebuild children’s mental and physical health, social development and nutrition.”

Children have lost basic numeracy and literacy skills. Globally, disruption to education has meant millions of children have significantly missed out on the academic learning they would have acquired if they had been in the classroom, with younger and more marginalized children facing the greatest loss.

In low- and middle-income countries, learning losses to school closures have left up to 70 per cent of 10-year-olds unable to read or understand a simple text, up from 53 per cent pre-pandemic.

In Ethiopia, primary school children are estimated to have learned between 30 to 40 per cent of the math they would have learned if it had been a normal school year.

In the US, learning losses have been observed in many states including Texas, California, Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Maryland. In Texas, for example, two thirds of children in grade 3 tested below their grade level in math in 2021, compared to half of children in 2019.

In several Brazilian states, around 3 in 4 children in grade 2 are off-track in reading, up from 1 in 2 children pre-pandemic. Across Brazil, 1 in 10 students aged 10-15 reported they are not planning to return to school once their schools reopen.

In South Africa, schoolchildren are between 75 per cent and a full school year behind where they should be. Some 400,000 to 500,000 students reportedly dropped out of school altogether between March 2020 and July 2021.

Follow-on consequences of school closures are on the rise. In addition to learning loss, school closures have impacted children’s mental health, reduced their access to a regular source of nutrition, and increased their risk of abuse.

A growing body of evidence shows that COVID-19 has caused high rates of anxiety and depression among children and young people, with some studies finding that girls, adolescents and those living in rural areas are most likely to experience these problems.

More than 370 million children globally missed out on school meals during school closures, losing what is for some children the only reliable source of food and daily nutrition.

Source: UN Children’s Fund