Partnerships for the Goals

The world has been confronted by illegal wildlife trade for decades, but the recent spike in the scale and change in the nature of this illicit activity have markedly exacerbated the severity of its impacts. These far-reaching consequences are particularly evident for the illegal ivory trade—a crime that has not only had a devastating impact on African elephants, but also threatens people and their livelihoods, economies and, in some cases, national and regional security. Fortunately, the international community is awakening to the serious nature of wildlife crime and is determined to work together to end this illicit trade.

We would like to share an experience that opened our eyes to some issues that most of us take very lightly. Our teacher, Florence Lutale, introduced us to a global programme in collaboration with the Genius Group of Schools in Rajkot, India, and schools in the United States to share our experience on global infectious diseases. The programme is the brainchild of Green Contributor, a non-governmental organization. We identified tuberculosis (TB), which is often overshadowed by HIV/AIDS in terms of publicity. While conducting research, we found out that not many students at the International School in Lusaka had been in contact with anyone suffering from TB. Many in Zambia believe that it is a disease infecting poor people, or those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In March 2000, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan published his report, ‘We the Peoples’: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century, listing the major challenges in the world. The report presented an action plan that included halving the relative amount of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, guaranteeing basic education to all children and reducing HIV-infection rates by 25 per cent by 2010. The key message of the Secretary-General’s Millennium Report was that the welfare of the world’s people is our shared responsibility. In an interdependent world, no nation is an island and people’s fortunes are interlinked. The current situation, in which the majority of the global population lives in poverty while the minority lives in abundance, is not only wrong; in the long run, it is unsustainable.

The idea of return migration, with the aim of assisting voluntary returnees to settle back in their home countries, can seem an attractive way forward for governments that seek to manage migration humanely. In recent years, nevertheless, as return migration has become a preferred strategy for governments and one of the very few options open to migrants, the problems emerging from this practice and the policies that support it have increasingly come into view. Between the priorities of governance and the very complex, multiple and historically determined circumstances in which migration, as a global phenomenon, takes place, the consequences of implementing strategies that can be seen as unifocal become clear. This is evident in the disruption wrought by numerous government interventions that result in measures that counter, contain and displace the needs, aspirations and rights of migrants. Never is this more so than in the case of migration from the Global South to the Global North.

Despite the international community’s efforts to stop terrorism and stem the flow of foreign fighters joining the terrorist organization that calls itself the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the number of fighters has more than doubled in a year and a half. It is estimated that over 30,000 individuals from over 100 countries—more than half of all of the United Nations Member States—have joined the ranks of ISIL as foreign terrorist fighters.

On 29 November 2007, Norway and the United Republic of Tanzania signed a bilateral agreement to support Tanzania’s efforts to reduce child mortality and maternal mortality. The modality for support is to channel funds through a common financing basket for the health sector, together with a number of bilateral and multilateral partners, with no earmarking of the Norwegian funds. This marks the end of a one-year planning process, whereby we have attempted to bridge one of the major divides in the current development practices—namely, between global initiatives mobilizing additional finances for specific themes (in this case, the reduction of child and maternal mortality) and country- led processes of harmonizing and streamlining donor financing— by incorporating assistance into the development budgets, preferably in the form of general, alternatively sectorial, budget support.

Pandemics are for the most part disease outbreaks that become widespread as a result of the spread of human-to-human infection. 1 Beyond the debilitating, sometimes fatal, consequences for those directly affected, pandemics have a range of negative social, economic and political consequences. These tend to be greater where the pandemic is a novel pathogen, has a high mortality and/or hospitalization rate and is easily spread. According to Lee Jong-wook, former Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), pandemics do not respect international borders.2 Therefore, they have the potential to weaken many societies, political systems and economies simultaneously.

The Times They Are A-Changin’ ”. Or are they? I believe times have already changed. More than we could have imagined. Our ability to communicate has changed dramatically in the last twenty years, from the advent of the mobile phone to the proliferation of laptop computers, and then the marriage of both into smartphones. As technology continues to advance into more versatile and effective ways to communicate, the way we use these methods are almost as complex as the devices themselves. This increases our scope and reach as individuals and, subsequently, as groups of individuals in search of a common goal or ideal. That’s why, with the arrival of social media services across new technology sources, activist groups and social institutions alike are finding a changing way to spread their messages and organize their activities.