COVID-19 bans hit women’s access to water in Pacific Islands

04/05/2022 0 Comments read Climate Change, Environment & Development, Health & Science

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 03.05.2022 (SciDev.Net): COVID-19-related restrictions have further exposed inequalities in people’s access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in the Pacific Island countries, especially among women, experts say.

Women and girls have a larger role relative to men in WASH activities, including in agriculture and domestic labour. Ninety per cent of the total population in the Pacific have access to an improved drinking water source, but this rate is significantly lower in rural areas. Kiribati, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu host 81 per cent of the population without access to improved sanitation, according to the CARE Rapid Gender Analysis COVID-19 Pacific Region 2020 report.

“Women and girls feel the impacts first when it comes to lack of access to clean water and hygiene facilities. The impact of climate change, ongoing disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic will increasingly test the resilience of sanitation systems and the availability of safe water owing to floods, droughts and extreme weather patterns, impacting vulnerable communities in our Pacific communities,” says Shirleen Ali, Pacific senior gender and inclusion adviser for CARE International.

Continue reading →

Students’ yearn return to school

13/10/2021 0 Comments read Education

Altamash and his brother being taught by their elder brother at their home in Delhi, India.

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 13.10.2021 (SciDev.Net): A “generational catastrophe” looms as government’s prioritise opening of malls overs schools, resulting in huge learning losses. As many as 117 million children globally are still affected by full school closures due to COVID-19 lockdowns, according to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

“You can’t open shopping malls and keep the schools closed,” UNESCO’s director of division for policies and lifelong learning systems Borhene Chakroun, tells SciDev.Net. “Governments have to take policy measures now to prevent a generational catastrophe in the future. They should reopen schools as soon as the sanitary situation allows and use closing them as the last resort.”

As of mid-September 2021, nine countries — Brunei Darussalam, Fiji, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka — in the Asia Pacific region have fully closed their schools due to COVID-19, accounting for 105 million or 10 percent of total students. As many as 51 million are primary school students, according to UNESCO.

Continue reading →

Child labour rampant in Bangladesh’s leather industry, study

23/07/2021 0 Comments read Business and Trade, Health & Science

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 22.07.2021 (SciDev.Net): Children as young as seven years are working with hazardous chemicals, heavy machinery or carrying heavy loads, endangering their health and lives in Bangladesh’s lucrative leather industry, according to a study.

Globally, about 160 million children were subjected to child labour at the beginning of 2020, with nine million additional children at risk due to the impact of COVID-19, according to UNICEF. Almost half of them were in hazardous work that directly imperils their health and moral development, the UN children’s agency said.

The study, published this month and led by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), a UK-based international development policy think tank, comes as the world marks 2021 as the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour.

Continue reading →