Following the recent passing by both main political parties in Parliament of a bill that cruelly criminalizes Ghanaians who identify as LGBTQ+ persons and anyone promoting gender diverse lifestyles, the country’s President has asked Ghana’s Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of the bill. The Minister of Finance has warned that the country could…(Read more)
Category: News
Combatting Gender-Based Violence through Investment
“Corporate leaders and investors have been slow to treat violence against women as a major risk and mitigate accordingly,” argues Singapore-based SWEEF Capital in the latest webinar in its Gender ROI Insight series. GBV in the workplace can range from aggressive language and financial coercion to physical injury and sexual assault. Focusing on survivor-centred approaches,…(Read more)
Florida farmworkers set heat-safety standards in the US
Farmworkers in the Fair Food Program, the award-winning initiative of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers based in southwest Florida, have negotiated heat-safety rules on FFP farms that are judged to be the best in American agriculture. Under this scheme, “every worker takes a 10-minute break every two hours during the hottest part of the year.…(Read more)
CAIDP Conference 2024 A Success
The 2024 conference of the Canadian Association of International Development Professionals in partnership with the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University was held from February 20 to 22 in Ottawa and online. The theme of the conference was Development Cooperation in a Time of Geopolitical Instability. The event featured excellent keynote addresses…(Read more)
Financial Solutions to the Marine Plastics Crisis in East Asia and the Pacific
A recent post by the International Finance Corporation highlighted an investment by Circulate Capital, a Singapore-based climate fund, in Union J Plus in Thailand, “a women-owned and led company that collects and recycles large volumes of domestic plastic waste in Thailand and converts it primarily into premium, food-grade polyolefin plastic”. The injection of capital “will…(Read more)
International Women’s Day 2024
UN Women’s theme for International Women’s Day 2024, on March 8, 2024, is Invest in Women, Accelerate Progress. Key areas of action, the agency says, include investing in gender equality as “the greatest human right challenge”; ending poverty; implementing gender-responsive financing; shifting to a green economy and care society; and supporting feminist changemakers. For more…(Read more)
Disrupting Trust Fund Madness
In this opinion piece, Ted Jackson argues that multilateral development banks incentivize their staff for continuous and relentless fundraising to fill the coffers of their ever-increasing number of trust funds. Instead, MDB staff should be rewarded for reducing poverty and making communities fairer, cleaner, and safer on the ground in the Global South. Access the…(Read more)
US Department of Agriculture Prioritizes Worker-Driven Social Responsibility
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced its new Farm Labor Stabilization and Protections (FLSP) Pilot Program to address human rights violations against migrant farmworkers and to maintain a stable agricultural workforce. Under this pilot, employers that improve conditions in their supply chain through the protections of a worker-driven social responsibility program—like the Fair Food…(Read more)
Plastics Circularity Investment Tracker Identifies $160B in Private Investments
In early November 2023, The Circulate Initiative, a US non-profit, published the key global findings of its Plastics Circularity Investment Tracker, an online tool for investors. For the period 2018-2023, the tracker identified 3,700 investment deals around the world and USD 160 B worth of investments in upstream and downstream products and services, including materials,…(Read more)
COP 28: Where are the Workers?
Writing on the McLeod Group blog site, Edward Jackson, President of E.T. Jackson and Associates, notes that workers and their organizations are on the sidelines of COP 28 deliberations. However, he argues that net zero and a just energy transition are unachievable without the expert knowledge of workers and the participation of trade unions in…(Read more)