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Workshop at a Glance: Education and self-determination keys to climate justice

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Integrating a Global Process of Learning Human Rights into the Post-2015 Agenda

Upon beginning her presentation, Shulamith Koenig stated, "Most people in the world do not understand the term human rights.” Koenig repeatedly clarified for the audience that they are “human rights,” not “rights.” She elaborated, stating that the difference is that “rights are given to you” and human rights are inherent.  

Lobi RedHawk of the Gray Panthers suggests the elderly and indigenous groups should lead the cause to ensure learning of human rights into the post-2015 development agenda. According to her, it is the indigenous groups that have historical knowledge of human rights violations and can lead the way towards sharing their experiences at a community level and then to gradually larger communities. In order to achieve this learning, it’s important for the nations that displaced these indigenous people to acknowledge the past and state “objective facts to move past subjective truths”.

Finally, Winston DeSilva of the Saviya Development Foundation suggested the only way towards ensuring human rights learning is through a “wants-based system” with persons with disabilities leading the way. He stated we tend to treat people with disabilities without a measure of procedural justice, by giving them plans we think they need, as opposed to asking them what they want.

All of the mentioned solutions for incorporating human rights learning into the post-2015 development agenda are completely different and each offer a unique perspective. It was amazing to be surrounded by panelists and attendees that genuinely cared about advocating for human rights learning within the agenda. When the time came to end this workshop, Shulamith Koenig suggested there was still more we needed to discuss as a group. Work should not stop with one workshop, and the passionate spirit present in the room will benefit the cause. 

-- John W. Sinden, Jr. (@Sindenjw)

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Moving Towards Integrative and Sustainable Policy through the Resource Nexus

Before we begin to solve problems, we must first identify them. In the case of the Resource Nexus, this means that we must begin by focusing on raising awareness about the issues surrounding sustainable water, energy, and agriculture development. Only then will be able to address solutions to the resource nexus such as integration and desegregation of its various components.

Around the halfway point of Thursday’s roundtable discussion, The Resource Nexus: Food, Water, Sanitation, and Energy, Felix Dodds, Senior Fellow of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina stated one of the key issues to sustainable water, energy, and agriculture development is that the field is split into experts from individual sectors. An energy expert would suggest energy is the key issue to ensuring sustainability and so on for each respective field. The food, water, and energy nexus is designed to reverse individualistic approaches to resource security by identifying opportunities for integration and identifying existing trade-offs that will result in policy recommendations. Within this roundtable, the audience learned though specific examples and recommendations presented by each of the panelists.

Desegregation was a common theme expressed by many panelists. Maruxa Cardama from the Coalitions for Sustainable Cities and Regions in the New UN Development Agenda suggested segregation of data across industries was one of the major obstacles to the resource nexus. Additionally, Olimar Maisonet from IREX suggested that much of the development targets and discussion that are central to water development do not adequately speak to agriculture and electricity.

Perhaps one of the largest obstacles to resource nexus awareness is the large divide between the private sector and civil society as mentioned by Vadim Belikov from the Next Generation Energy Leaders Council. He suggested consumers and manufacturers are living on the same planet; society has far surpassed the time when manufacturers could only think about profit. The various insights by the speakers helped highlight the multifaceted approach we must take to raise awareness about, and eventually solve, the issues surrounding the resource nexus.   

In their own unique way, each panelist stressed that in order to solve the myriad problems surrounding the resource nexus, we must first raise awareness about the issues we wish to combat, a key to a more sustainable global development agenda. Two years ago at the African Development Bank’s 2013 Annual Meeting, a report generated that summed up the key issues to sustainable development in Africa were “…climate change, rapid population growth, and the combined influence that these factors have on energy transformation and agricultural markets.”

Fast-forward a year to the 2014 African Development Bank’s Annual Meeting in which panelists emphasized the “…urgent need for coherent policies to drive the continent's recovery.” Through this example I am not trying to put Africa into the spotlight, but rather illustrate how awareness is the key to driving dialogue, which then results in policy recommendations. Development conferences across the globe are mirroring much of the dialogue from this roundtable, and we are slowly learning that integration is a must.

The main takeaways from this roundtable and the oft-referenced Resource Nexus Declaration, is that only through awareness, integration, and desegregation will sustainability be ensured in our development goals.  It is only a matter of time before further integrated dialogue on each sectors’ development needs eliminates the separation of water development from agricultural development, etc., and this workshop provided a great start to incorporating the resource nexus into our post-2015 development agenda.

-- John W. Sinden, Jr. (@Sindenjw)

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Workshop at a Glance: Ensuring Sustainability for Education Development

Zero exclusion, zero discrimination against girls, zero child labor and zero child marriage are the four zeros that add up to positives for global education.

At Wednesday’s similarly named workshop, representatives from diverse backgrounds in the child rights field presented case studies that provided real-life examples of how to reverse the statistics that show 57 million children are still not enrolled in school. This workshop was eye opening as to how organizations across four different continents are working to solve this issue.

Neighbors Link Stamford is an NGO with a three-tiered approach to educate, empower and employ immigrants in the Stamford, CT region. This straightforward model for education creates sustainability through teaching English to immigrants, empowering them through connections to important tools such as schools and health services, and then through employment. This model has proven to be an effective integration tool and presents much opportunity for ensuring sustainability.

Another eye opening presentation was from Zara Rapoport of PLAN International, an NGO that works to promote child rights across developing countries. PLAN International's approach, which is similar to Neighbors Link Stanford's model, helps families meet their essential needs while helping them to build relationships with and understandings of other cultures. There is also an element of empowering individuals to become agents of change within their own communities. This bottom-up approach to creating awareness and removing obstacles to education, such as child marriages, ensures sustainability and works to fight against difficult situations that statistically affect the chances of children completing their education.

Although sustainability is inherent in the missions of many NGOs, it is extremely difficult to ensure or predict sustainability. All of the education NGOs and organizations discussed in this workshop provide invaluable advice for the post-2015 development framework, as they all have created sustainable models for ensuring childhood education and rights. It’s troubling to live in a world in which children are unable to attend school because of the threat of rape or violence, and in order to fully eliminate these horrible crimes to humanity, we need to keep the dialogue direct and open.

-- John W. Sinden, Jr. (@Sindenjw)