Reports and presenters:

LL Lucy Lamble

JV John Vidal

SB Sarah Boseley

LF Liz Ford

BQ Ben Quinn

Interviewees:



ST Shiferaw Teklemariam

PP Professor Peter Piot

AY Anele Yawa

CT Charlize Theron

MH Mark Heywood

LL Hello, I’m Lucy Lamble, Global development editor for the Guardian. Welcome to our last podcast of 2016, a year that’s seen some huge changes in developing countries. Joining me in the studio to take a look at some of the main stories affecting millions around the planet, and also casting their eye over the year ahead are environment editor John Vidal; Liz Ford, deputy editor for Global development; Ben Quinn, who’s just back from reporting in South Sudan; and Sarah Boseley, health editor. Thanks for joining me. First, El Niño.



JV In Ethiopia they’re also experiencing the effects of climate change.

ST I’m Shiferaw Teklemariam, a minister in the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Climate Change in Ethiopia. In some parts of the nation we are already experiencing flooding, drought. The El Niño is causing a number of challenges, so the united globe has to act commonly on the problem, of course differentiated in the way we respond. So here justice, equity and also addressing your own genuine share towards climate change is what we are requiring.

LL So first to you, John. The minister was speaking there at COP21 in Paris back in 2015. The Paris climate agreement has now been ratified. There’s no doubt that climate change and the effects of El Niño have been felt widely around the world, not least in southern Africa where we’ve got seven countries at the most severe form of food crisis. You’re just back from reporting in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, how bad has it got?

JV Well the climate change situation is probably no worse or no better, emissions have been roughly the same, as you say the accord has been ratified, won’t come into force for some time, developing countries have committed to doing a huge amount of work in changing their economies – absolutely marvellous. We’ve now got the spectre of Mr Trump, who may withdraw America from the climate change agreement, in which case the world will be set back quite a long way for quite a number of years and that’s a very, very serious thing, but what we have got is we’ve got El Niño coming on top of existing climate change, and so in southern Africa especially, we have got 50 million people who are in need of food or help in some way.

I’ve just been in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, and the situation, in the cities you probably wouldn’t even notice it very much but in the rural areas it is very serious, and in pockets, especially in places like parts of Mozambique and Madagascar, it is very, very serious indeed. Happily, the aid people have got food in pretty quickly so there’s not many people expected to die, but this is going to set back development yet again for years and years and years. So this is two years since they’ve had a proper meal and it’s hardly funded, and it’s going to be very serious. It will peak in January and February. The first crops will come through hopefully in about March or April so things should get better after that.

LL But a long wait for those affected.

JV It’s a long wait for those affected, and expect some horror stories in the next two months.

LL Sarah, obviously one of the longer-term impacts of this crop failure and the hunger is malnutrition. What does that mean for countries?

SB There are two sides to this. There are the countries that are actually facing emergencies such as Yemen, such as the Borno area of Nigeria where those communities are just being liberated now and some of the aid agencies are finding that there are children who are very severely malnourished and they’re having to have emergency feeding, and the situation’s really severe and terrible. So you have that, on the one hand, and underlying all of that is the constant problem in a lot of countries where children are stunted from birth, and that is because they have not got the right sort of nourishment and very often the families either haven’t got the food or they don’t know how to feed them.

So there’s a combination of relief, actually money is really the bottom line and education to the families to know how to feed their children well. Interestingly, actually, the World Bank is taking this on as a big issue and Jim Yong Kim, the president, will be talking at Davos, saying that he is prepared to name and shame countries that do not do anything about the stunting rate in their children on the basis that, in the long term, these are going to turn into adults who haven’t actually got really the brain capacity because they are malnourished, because they haven’t grown properly, to turn into the savvy workforce that these countries are going to need in the future. So he’s using that as a tactic to try to get them to do something.

PP I don’t believe that the slogan of the end of Aids by 2030 is actually realistic.

AY We have moved two steps forward but we are not yet there, we are halfway to the end of Aids.

CT At some point we have to kind of start looking and say, “Look, we’ve had 21 of these conferences. Why haven’t we stopped this?”

MH We’re here because we’re worried, because we think that global commitment to HIV is waning. We think that there is a myth out there that Aids is being beaten.

LL This year, of course, we saw the 16th anniversary of the historic HIV and Aids conference in Durban – the first one obviously happened in 2000. Sarah, you were at both events, so Sarah, many of the people you spoke to in Durban seemed dubious that the target of ending HIV and Aids by 2030 could in fact be reached. Are we making any progress?

SB There clearly has been a lot of progress, and it’s fantastic that there’s so many people now on antiretroviral drugs, which keeps them alive and well, not only alive but actually they’re well enough to work, to live their lives, support their children and all those sorts of things. At the same you cannot just, we cannot have a situation where people are just kept alive. As a lot of people have said to me, we cannot treat our way out of this epidemic, it’s just not possible – you have to stop people getting infected. And that is what isn’t happening, we’re having a real problem here because the cultural change, the behaviour change, if you like, hasn’t been happening.

And I was really quite stunned to find, one study certainly that came out of Durban, that showed that when men, this is middle-aged and older men, are actually tested for HIV, they’re willing to have a test and then they don’t go to the clinic for the drugs, they’re not interested. And people used to go when they were ill, they were prepared to go because they knew that their own lives were at risk, if they don’t feel unwell they don’t actually want to be on the drugs and there’s a stigma attached to it and all of those sorts of things. That means they carry on infecting other people. So until you can stop that happening, you’re not going to decrease the numbers getting infected, and so we therefore have to put more and more people on drugs, those drugs, the resistance is going to develop, the virus becomes resistant to these drugs as we know because it’s happened in the USA and in Europe. So we will have an ever-increasing bill for drugs and you actually have to check this epidemic at some point. We cannot have it continuing the way it is.

LL We are now seeing west Africa gradually and painfully recovering from the horrible effects of Ebola. This year we’ve now seen the Zika virus obviously particularly affecting Brazil, but spreading more widely, and obviously most worrying to pregnant women and their unborn children. Has the response to Zika been any more effective than how we initially responded to Ebola?

SB I think the Zika response has been very good, it’s been very swift, and I’m quite certain that that’s a result of the disaster over Ebola. So yes, the World Health Organisation knew that it was in trouble over Ebola, they’ve really been on the receiving end of an awful lot of flack so they certainly mobilise people, and actually credit has to be given to the Brazilian government because they’ve been fantastic. They’ve also got very good scientists and good scientific institutes so they have detected the Zika virus and they know a lot about the microcephaly cases that they have. And that may be one of the reasons actually why we have so many cases of microcephaly as a result of Zika actually linked in Brazil, and in northern Brazil there’s something like 2,200 confirmed cases when the highest number you’ve got anywhere else is about 50 or 60 in Colombia. And that may be down to how good the Brazilians are at this. So yes, it’s been a great deal better, that response.

LL What has been particular about the Brazilian response?

SB The Brazilians have been very good at keeping the data, apart from anything else, so all the doctors who have seen microcephaly cases, that’s cases of babies with small heads, actually deformed shaped heads, have reported them. That’s actually something that the developing world hasn’t learned to do yet, it’s difficult, it takes people who have been taught to recognise symptoms of any disease, so in Ebola for instance that all went under the radar for a long time because you had cases but they were in far distant rural places and nobody recognised what it was. So until you can identify that, you can’t look for it. With Zika, actually, it has to be said that malformed babies’ heads are pretty obvious but nonetheless they have been missed before. Africa has had Zika in the past and they must have had microcephaly cases but we certainly don’t know an awful lot about that.

LL Thank you. Now Ben, you’ve just returned from South Sudan. Five years ago the world’s newest country enthusiastically celebrated its creation but it’s had these persistent challenges of governance, people suffering horrible effects of ethnic cleansing, conflict, enormous numbers of cases of rape reported and all kinds of other abuses. The UNHCR confirmed in September that the number of refugees has now passed the 1 million mark and UN investigators have said that South Sudan is on the brink of genocide and facing a humanitarian catastrophe on all fronts. It does sound really grim. What did you find there?

BQ Well, it’s a tense situation there. I spent a week there and in that time there were at least two quite high-profile deportations of an Associated Press journalist and also the in-country director of the Norwegian Refugee Council. So it’s a difficult country for journalists and humanitarians to operate in and, unfortunately, it happens to be a state in which humanitarian workers and the UN characterise as facing a perfect storm. That comes from a plethora of different factors, above all thecivil war which broke out three years ago this week, and that is the underlying exacerbating factor behind the other problems, one of which is an economic crisis – inflation is running at 830%. There is, as you’ve noted, an exodus of refugees within the country and to neighbouring countries, and above all there is also the malnutrition crisis. In one northern region of Bahr el Ghazal, Unicef told me that the situation is so dire people were fleeing to Darfur, which – as you will remember – faced warnings of a famine itself some years ago. So it’s a country which faces challenges on numerous fronts and it also happens to be coming at a time when competition for funds from donors is facing competition from various parts of the world: Haiti, Yemen, northern Nigeria and Syria.

LL Are there any reasons for hope?

BQ Yes, I think there are reasons for hope. It’s difficult to find them on the ground there but if you speak to, for example, children in some of the camps which we visited, their response to education itself is extremely heartening. Perhaps at a political level it’s particularly difficult to see a way forward but we’re talking about two leaders who fought together against the Sudanese in the independence war. They know each other, there potentially could be a solution to the conflict if there’s a will on the part of the leadership, and that would provide a way forward in terms of tackling the humanitarian crisis.

LL Thank you Ben.

LF The Lancet showed in a report that unsafe sex is the highest risk factor for death and disease for young women and the second highest for young men globally. It means that many of us globally have a collective responsibility, and that goes all the way from the World Health Organisation to UNAids to national health systems and also to schools.

LL So our podcast this year on sex education focused on the lack of really good sex education in many countries. However, a recent Family Planning 2020 report has found that there’s been a 30% uptake in access to modern methods of contraception, so one good indicator. Liz, does this mark major progress?

LF It’s pretty significant progress, yes. Earlier in the year, the UN published some figures which showed that since 1970 the number of, it’s mainly women with a partner or married between the ages of 15 and 49, using some form of modern or traditional forms of family planning, that’s almost doubled. So that is good progress, and the FP2020 report which focuses on the 69 countries with the lowest uptake of family planning, that has had, like you say, a 30% increase and significantly this has seen an increase in sub-Saharan Africa, both the UN figures and the FP2020 figures and the UN are predicting that over the next 15 years we’re likely to see a bigger uptake across Africa, which has the highest unmet need and the lowest prevalence rate at the moment. So there’s definitely some good things happening.

LL And what’s been making the difference here? Has it been attitude and behaviour change, is it increased donor funding?

LF It’s definitely been increased donor funding or more of a concerted effort. The 2012 family planning summit in London really did galvanise interest, attention and money but that money is starting to drop a little bit, mainly organisers saying it’s because of the significant appreciation of the US dollar and currency fluctuations, but there is also a concern that donors are actually again looking inward with the refugee crisis and maybe cutting some of their funding. There are many different routes now to put funding into family planning so it’s coming in all different ways, so trying to monitor how much money donors are actually giving is quite difficult. There are moves ahead but it’s still a controversial issue; family planning is definitely one of those issues that is constantly under attack so maybe sometimes you can’t talk loudly about it, but I do think having Melinda Gates talking about it, it has galvanised attention to it definitely.

LL This year, unfortunately, has also been marked by violence and abuse aimed at women’s rights defenders in many parts of the world. Ban Ki-moon, as part of his legacy, has mentioned that he’d like to see governments step up their support of women’s movements and civil society groups. Human rights violations are a major block to development, aren’t they?

LF A huge block to development and especially for women who are advocating for women’s rights, again there’s still a lot of work to do to put women on an equal footing. And, interestingly, a 2012 study which is repeatedly referenced found that, they looked at 40 years of data, specifically on violence against women in 70 countries, and they found that the mobilisation of strong feminist groups were the key factor in driving policy change. So that’s much more than having a woman leader or more female MPs. So you really need those grassroots organisations that are going to push things, but again it will also come down to funding, and they get hardly any funding at all when it comes to gender equality programmes. So I think that, as well as a declining space and the threat that they receive and the protection that they need, they also need donors to be driving funding that actually gets to the grassroots of organisations to actually make change happen.

LL We repeatedly come back to this issue of competition over funding, and it’s obviously one of the big challenges for the year ahead. At the moment of our recording we’re seeing terrible things happening in Aleppo, we’ve seen Yemen in a really difficult situation and the ongoing issues in northern Nigeria in particular and neighbouring countries. A final question for us all, what do we think are going to be the major trends and challenges in development in the coming year? John?

JV Well, I think that the attention’s going to turn more and more to cities as opposed to rural areas, which has just traditionally been where development groups have looked at. I think what we’re seeing in cities is this fantastic burgeoning size and numbers of people but also of the health problems which are emerging. And one of the greatest has to be air pollution, which is kind of taking over from climate change as a sort of global issue now we’ve now got some kind of agreement, it’s not a brilliant one for climate change, but suddenly countries are waking up to the fact that tens of thousands of people in every city, every major city, especially developing countries, are dying or are having death linked to air pollution. And the scale of what’s been happening in China and India now – India is now more polluted than China was and that is because China has put in vast amounts of money because it makes the link very, very clearly that civil unrest and air pollution are linked. So if you want to keep your populations happy, you give them clean air, number one, and I think we’re seeing that now working its way through India and through other developing countries.

What worries me enormously is what’s happening in Africa, and already cities like Nairobi and Lagos and Abidjan and almost anywhere are on a level of pollution which was as bad as anything we saw in Beijing in 2010-11 or what we’re seeing now in Delhi and elsewhere. So I think air pollution is going to keep coming up the agenda and the thing is, and actually it’s terribly important, I hadn’t realised it before, but as northern cities become much more aware of it, people flog their old diesel cars – diesel is the worst for air pollution – and where do those diesel cars end up? They all end up in Nairobi and Abidjan and Lagos and wherever, so it’s kind of environmental dumping which is going to take place much, much more as the world wakes up to this enormous plague, so I think we’ll see ramifications right the way through the developing world.

LL Thank you. Sarah, what do you anticipate happening in health in 2017? We’ve got a new director general coming.

SB We’re into a post-Ebola world, I think, in 2017. Really, that disaster was such a shock to the system, to the global health governance system, if you like, there was a lot of discussion about where things should go next. There’s a reform programme that’s been going through the World Health Organisation and the new director general who will take over next year, we don’t know who that’s going to be yet, will presumably take that forward. Margaret Chan’s done a certain amount, the present GD, but it was always known that because she wasn’t going to stay beyond 2017 that there was a limit to what she could or would want to do. It’s going to be quite important who this leader is, and one assumes that the WHO will be in a better shape than before and we won’t get the sort of epidemic disaster response that we had in the past.

LL Thank you. Ben, Aids has been under particular scrutiny this year hasn’t it, especially in the UK press, and obviously with the political changes going on globally you can imagine that that’s going to extend beyond a narrow look here in the UK.

BQ It’s true, it is at a crossroads in the UK actually and I think in a global sense as well, but in the UK we’ve just come to the point where DfID and the UK government, it’s actually setting out a new vision of the way forward and we and others have been focusing on some of the issues around that. In some quarters people have accused the government of wasteful spending of UK aid, we focused around issues of transparency. For example, there’s been a move by the government towards channelling more money in the future potentially into the private equity arm of the Department for International Trade, and that comes with some questions around transparency and the spending of that money; obviously, its defenders say that it’s actually a force multiplier for good in terms of the way that aid can be spent. Even beyond Britain as well, that type of financialisaton of aid is an issue, but on top of it we’ve seen some people talking about a securitisation of aid and that is where the boundaries have been blurred perhaps to some extent between the spending of aid overseas and humanitarian work and where military is in some way a component of that spending as well. And, above all, this we have the shadow of the US president-elect, Donald Trump, and what he may do with US aid in future. He’s talked a lot about cutting back and perhaps bringing a lot of that spending home, so we wait to see what happens next year, particularly in relation to the US focus.

LL Thank you Ben. And Liz, we obviously had the sustainable development goals framework in place leading up to 2030. Where does gender fit into that?

LF Well, it’s slap bang in the middle, really, and it’s one of those goals that without this one being met you’re not going to meet all the other ones – I think everyone’s pretty much agreed on that one. I think we’ve had a year now, they were sort of adopted in 2015, we’ve had year of bedding down and thinking about funding, and panicking about funding, and I think it would be interesting to see how things start to move in 2017, whether we’re going to get more sort of proper plans in place from countries actually spelling out how they’re going to try and address and meet these goals. I think, crucially, I know for women’s rights organisations they’re going to be making a big push next year for more funding, there’s been more discussions around that this year, and next year they’re going to be really pushing to say we need funding, as I said before, for the smaller women’s rights organisations to really kind of drive things home. I think the big issue and the worry is what’s going to happen with the new president coming into the US next year. There have been concerns about cuts for funding when it comes to sexual and reproductive health, so I think everyone’s a little bit on edge about that and I think the Commission on the Status of Women in March could be an interesting one to see how things are starting to line up.

LL Thank you Liz. And on that note we come to the end of the Global development podcast for 2016. Thank you everyone for taking part and for travelling and helping us try to understand the world a little better this year. You can listen to all our podcasts on theguardian.com/global-development or you can subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud or your favourite podcasting app. I’m Lucy Lamble, our producer was Kary Stewart. From all of us, goodbye.