Ethiopia says it will prioritize nutrition and food security this year but it is unclear how successful that effort will be if the country can’t first deal with famine-like conditions in the country’s Tigray region.
My colleague Sara Jerving reports that Ethiopia echoed the African Union’s call to make 2022 the “Year of Nutrition and Food Security.” Ethiopia, which hosted the annual AU summit over the weekend, said in a statement Sunday that addressing food and nutrition insecurity would be “one of the priority development areas for the country.”
However, more than 9 million people are in need of food aid in the northern part of the country, where the 15-month-long conflict with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front has left more people facing famine-like conditions than the rest of the world combined. Fighting in the region continues and the government has implemented a de-facto blockade.
This is a preview of Newswire
Sign up to this newsletter for an inside look at the biggest stories in global development, in your inbox daily.
“In his address on Saturday, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed pointed to COVID-19, floods, drought, desert locusts, and other climate-related natural disasters as the root causes of food insecurity, but failed to name conflict,” Sara writes.
Ethiopia: Food security a priority, despite Tigray famine conditions
More on Tigray: The deliberate destruction of a health system
Follow the money
My colleague Miguel Antonio Tamonan has a new analysis of how the World Bank allocated money for new projects in 2021.
Some key findings:
• In 2021, the bank added 554 new projects into its monthly operational summaries — a series of reports that compile all the programs that enter the bank’s pipeline.
• Overall, the World Bank allocated $73.39 billion to new projects in 2021 — an increase of $13.9 billion, or 23.4%, from the previous year.
• Almost half of the funding for new projects went to just three regions: South Asia with $13.39 billion, West Africa with $11.61 billion, and Latin America and the Caribbean with $8.85 billion.
Devex Pro on the World Bank: Where the $73B for new projects is going
+ Stay on top of the World Bank’s funding pipeline with a Pro subscription. Not yet a Pro subscriber? Sign up now and start your 15-day free trial.
They RNA jam
It could take up to three years for a messenger RNA hub in South Africa to reproduce vaccines if manufacturers don’t share the technology around their vaccines, says Martin Friede, coordinator at the World Health Organization’s Initiative for Vaccine Research. With companies’ support, he estimates the time could be cut down to 12 to 18 months.
WHO set up the hub in South Africa last year to help lower-income countries build up the capacity to produce mRNA vaccines. Last week, South Africa's Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, a partner in the hub, announced it had successfully replicated Moderna’s vaccine by using publicly available information, without the company’s support. The hub chose to copy that vaccine because Moderna has committed to not enforce its patents during the pandemic. But without Moderna’s participation, the new vaccine will have to go through clinical trials, lengthening the approval time.
COVID-19: Without shared tech, South Africa's mRNA vaccine faces 2-year lag
+ Get exclusive global health news and insider insights by signing up for Devex CheckUp — our free, must-read Thursday newsletter.
Regional risk
“I think that Latin America and the Caribbean is held to an unfair metric of political risk … We’ve really worked hard to help break stereotypes from governments in the region.”
— IDB President Mauricio Claver-CaroneThe Inter-American Development Bank set a record in its financing for 2021, with $23.4 billion in new financing approvals, commitments, and private sector mobilizations. In an interview with my colleague Teresa Welsh, Claver-Carone says he hopes to leverage that progress to meet the challenges facing the region, such as inflation and debt, while advancing his Vision 2025 agenda that prioritizes green investments and “nearshoring” jobs.
Devex Pro on IDB: $20B in financing should be ‘new normal’ for LatAm, says head
Dirty water
2 billion
—That’s the number of people thought to be drinking from a water source contaminated with feces, according to WHO. That puts about 1 in 4 humans on the planet at risk for a number of diseases including diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and polio, Rebecca Root reports. Contaminated water is thought to cause more than 485,000 diarrheal deaths every year. With waste dumped into water sources, the ocean and its ecosystem — as well as inland wildlife — can also be casualties of poor sanitation.
The only way to tackle sanitation within conservation is by connecting the WASH and climate sectors “and to continue … bringing it to the forefront of conversations in both industries,” says Erica Perez, the Coral Reef Alliance’s senior program manager in Hawaii.
Feces and forests: Why poor WASH is a threat to the environment
In other news
Cyclone Batsirai hit Madagascar Monday, killing 21 people, displacing 70,000, and damaging infrastructure, leaving some heavily affected areas inaccessible to humanitarian aid. [France 24]
Countries in the Middle East and North Africa lose around 2% of their GDP — about $141 billion a year — to air pollution, according to a new World Bank report. [Bloomberg]
On the sidelines of the ongoing Beijing Winter Olympics, U.N. chief António Guterres has told Chinese President Xi Jinping that he expects the United Nations’ human rights high commissioner to be allowed to inspect the country, including Xinjiang, where human rights abuses have long been alleged. [Al Jazeera]
Sign up to Newswire for an inside look at the biggest stories in global development.
About the author
Stephanie Beasley@Steph_Beasley
Stephanie Beasley is a Senior Reporter at Devex, where she covers global philanthropy with a focus on regulations and policy. She is an alumna of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Oberlin College and has a background in Latin American studies. She previously covered transportation security at POLITICO.
