Social Watch E-Newsletter - Issue 150 - October 18, 2013

Huduma is an initiative of INFONET previously incubated at SODNET (Social Watch in Kenya), the United Nations Millennium Campaign and the African Institute for Health and Development (AIHD) that seeks to improve public service delivery through the strategic use of Technology.

The strategy is coined within a logic of improving the capability of the state and that of an informed citizen to collectively improve service. While the state remains the largest provider or guarantor of services, the citizenry have a right and responsibility to engage in the improvement of such services. Huduma places in the hands of citizens, simple technology and media based tools and platforms to amplify their voices, while at the same time, improves the capacity for better responsiveness.

Read more

In the Philippines, Social Watch Philippines monitors the MDG programs as implemented by the government. Its main advocacy is more government spending for health, education, agriculture, the environment, and for social protection for all. It has organized the Alternative Budget Initiative (ABI) which proposes alternative budgets for these MDG-related expenditures.

Now, 65 years later, abuses have become more shameless and open, even as the public repeats its annual denunciations of pork during the budget season. Both the Executive and the Legislature have sung paeans and hosannas to the noble intentions of the pork barrel. 

Read more

The decade-long economic expansion in Africa has not translated into improved conditions of living for ordinary Africans. Indeed, many Africans remained trapped in the circle of joblessness, material deprivation, poverty, insecurity, loss of livelihood and mining related environmental disasters. African governments challenged to reinforce ongoing fiscal reforms and mining contract renegotiations with other measures to improve the equity between state and investor in the booming extractive sector and also to finance the AMV in full.

It is to improve the equity between state and investor in the extractive sector that many African governments have embarked on fiscal reforms and contract renegotiation in the last few years of the current commodity price boom. Needless to say, these reforms fall far short of the radical shift away from the prevailing dominant mining regime that the AMV advocates.

Read more

With the richest one percent of the population now owning 40 percent of global assets, and the bottom half sharing just one percent, inequality is fast being recognised as a stubborn underlying obstacle to development.

In recent decades, despite steady economic growth, inequality has risen in most countries and in nearly every region of the world. It takes various forms, from income gaps to unequal political access. And it originates in a variety of factors, such as gender, ethnicity, disability, legal status, caste, skin colour, language and economic status.

Read more

On October 17 2013, the International Movement ATD Fourth World hosted the commemoration of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty at United Nations Headquarters. The first celebration was in 1992, when the United Nations declared October 17th the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. For the last two decades, this day has promoted understanding between people living in poverty and the society at large.

The theme for this year was “Working together towards a world without discrimination: Building on the knowledge of people living in extreme poverty.” One of the most painful aspects of a life in poverty is the discrimination faced by people on a daily basis; their marginalization in the political, economic, and social spheres of their societies, and their lack of voice and representation in the conceptualisation, implementation and evaluation of policies and programmes that affect them directly and indirectly.

Read more