AFR Business

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) says a funding crisis has left no fewer than 5.4 million people stranded without aid in West Africa.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) says a funding crisis has left no fewer than 5.4 million people stranded without aid in West Africa.

According to the UN food agency, funding constraints have been forced to limit emergency aid to only 6.2 million of the most vulnerable people in need across West Africa, scaling back from an initial target of assisting 11.6 million people.

The agency’s emergency food and nutrition assistance operation in the Sahel started in June, focusing on refugees, newly displaced people, malnourished children under five, pregnant women and breastfeeding women.

Food insecurity reached a 10-year high in West and Central Africa, affecting 47.2 million people during the June-August lean season.

Mali and Chad will be hit the hardest, said WFP, with 800,000 people at risk of resorting to desperate measures to cope, including engaging in survival sex, early marriage, or joining armed groups.

“We’re in a tragic situation,” Margot Vandervelden, regional director for Western Africa, said in a statement on Wednesday.

During this year’s lean season, millions of families will lack sufficient food reserves to sustain them until the next harvests in September, and many will receive little to no assistance to tide them through the gruelling months ahead.

“We must take immediate action to prevent a massive slide into catastrophic hunger,” Mr Vandervelden said.

Conflict remains a key driver of hunger in the region, leading to forced population displacements that have emptied out entire villages and limited communities’ access to land for farming.

WFP’s lean season response aims to provide life-saving food and nutrition assistance to families facing acute hunger at a time when food stocks dwindle.

However, proactive investments in prevention and smart longer-term solutions can significantly reduce reliance on such emergency actions. These solutions include resilience-building activities, social protection programmes and future innovations or investments, such as climate insurance pay-outs.

WFP’s integrated resilience programme in the Sahel focuses on collective watershed planning, land recovery and rehabilitation, and support for smallholder farmers, linking to support such as school meals and other nutrition services.

In Niger, for example, 80 per cent of villages that received WFP resilience support did not require humanitarian assistance in 2022, unlike other villages outside the scheme, in the same areas.

This success meant that about half a million people did not need humanitarian food aid thanks to WFP’s long-term investments in resilience strengthening.

Expanding these activities will be crucial in preventing emergency needs from escalating.

The programme also contributes to strengthening the national capacity to anticipate and respond to climatic and other shocks that are drivers of humanitarian need.

The United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and Responsibility on Wednesday launched a new policy paper aimed at countering and addressing hate speech online.

During Nigeria’s 2023 general election, ethnic groups were pitted against one another online, with a sore point in Lagos.

The policy paper, ‘Countering and Addressing Online Hate Speech: A Guide for Policy Makers and Practitioners’, was developed jointly by the UN Office with the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project at the UK’s University of Essex.

“We have seen across the world, and time, how social media has become a major vehicle in spreading hate speech at an unprecedented speed, threatening freedom of expression and a thriving public debate,” stated Alice Nderitu, Special Adviser to the UN secretary general on the Prevention of Genocide.

Ms Nderitu further stated, “We saw how the perpetrators in the incidents of identity-based violence used online hate to target, dehumanise and attack others, many of whom are already the most marginalised in society.”

She added that the most marginalised in society include ethnic, religious, national or racial minorities, refugees and migrants, women and people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics.

The policy paper builds upon earlier initiatives, including the UN Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech, which seeks to enhance the UN’s response to the global spread and impact of hate speech.

The strategy makes a firm commitment to step up coordinated action to tackle hate speech, both at global and national levels, including using new technologies and engaging with social media to address online hate speech and promote positive narratives.

“Digital technologies and social media play a crucial role in tackling hate speech through outreach, awareness-raising, providing access to information, and education,” noted the Special Adviser.

“The transformation of our lives into a hybrid format, with the share of our life spent online ever-increasing, ensuring that we all enjoy the same rights online as we do offline has become ever more important,” stated Ahmed Shaheed, deputy director of the Essex Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project and former UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion of Belief.

He warned of “the acts of violence that follow from online incitement to violence, including mass atrocities,” beyond the digital divides created by online hate.

The forum will be held in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the Expo Forum Convention and Exhibition Centre from July 27 to 28.

The convener of the Second Russia–Africa Economic and Humanitarian Summit will bolster ties between Russia and Africa in security, sustainable economic and humanitarian development.

Anton Kobyakov, an adviser to President Vladimir Putin and executive secretary of the organising committee for the Russia–Africa events, said this on Wednesday.

Mr Kobyakov, in its programme schedules, said the summit would create the basis for establishing powerful, prosperous and safe regions in new realities.

The forum will be held in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the Expo Forum Convention and Exhibition Centre from July 27 to 28.

He said, “The summit programme includes more than 30 panel sessions and thematic events on the most important issues involving cooperation between Russia and African states. African countries will obviously play an increasingly important role in the emerging architecture of a multipolar world.”

Mr Kobyakov added that the summit’s business programme consists of four major thematic pillars encompassing all cooperation areas between Russia and Africa.

“During the panel discussions of the ‘Cooperation in Science and Technology’ pillar, experts will discuss collaboration between Russia and Africa in advanced technologies,” stated Mr Kobyakov. “The key themes of the pillar are how industrial cooperation leads to technological sovereignty and advanced technologies for Africa’s sustainable development.”

He said events on the sidelines of the Russia–Africa Economic and Humanitarian Forum would include the Media Forum, the Congress of University Rectors and a roundtable.

According to a new UNCTAD report, developing countries like Nigeria face a staggering four trillion-dollar gap in sustainable development investments.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has warned that a green future would remain out of reach if the world does not help developing countries close a two trillion-dollar gap in investment toward an energy transition.

According to a new UNCTAD report, developing countries like Nigeria face a staggering four trillion-dollar gap in sustainable development investments.

The UNCTAD secretary general, Rebeca Grynspan, said a significant increase in material support for renewable energy in developing countries was crucial for the world to reach its climate goals by 2030.

While investment in renewables has nearly tripled since adopting the Paris Agreement almost eight years ago, poorer nations have been largely left out.

Ms Grynspan said more than 30 developing countries had not registered a single international investment in utility-size renewable energy generation since the landmark climate change treaty was adopted in 2015.

According to UNCTAD, the amount of foreign direct investment in clean energy attracted by developing countries in 2022 stood at $544 billion — well below needs.

Some good news from the report is that energy companies among the top 100 multinationals have been increasingly turning toward renewables and divesting fossil fuel assets at about 15 billion dollars per year.

However, the report shows an overall slower pace of investment in renewable energy in 2022 “as international project finance deals declined.”

In developing countries, the largest gaps in Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs)-related investments were in energy, water and transport infrastructure, UNCTAD said.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is also on the decline, according to UNCTAD, as global flows fell by 22 per cent in 2022 to $1.3 trillion, while in Least Developed Countries, the vast majority of which are in Africa, FDI inflows dropped by as much as 16 per cent.

UNCTAD’s report says that the slowdown was driven by “overlapping crises”: the war in Ukraine, high food and energy prices and debt pressures.

With these factors still in play during 2023, the agency expects “downward pressure on global FDI” to continue this year.

The report calls for a series of policies and financing mechanisms to be put in place to help developing countries attract necessary investments. UNCTAD stressed the importance of debt relief for developing economies to provide them with the fiscal space needed for clean energy spending and to help lower country risk ratings, a prerequisite for attracting private investment.

The agency also recommended reducing the cost of capital for clean energy investment through partnerships between international investors, the public sector and multilateral financial institutions – a measure that can reduce the spread on borrowing costs for energy investment projects in developing countries by up to 40 per cent.

Ms Grynspan insisted that investment played a “huge part” in achieving the SDGs.

She said they were simply “too big to fail,” calling them “the only game in town,” which requires collective action and global solidarity.

Time and again, foreign politicians and businesspeople allegedly involved in or convicted of financial crimes have been revealed to own luxury properties in France.

New in-depth analysis finds unacceptable level of money laundering risk in French real estate, despite transparency measures
Non-compliance, incomplete data and loopholes are creating a brick wall for attempts to follow flows of dirty money into French real estate, according to a new report by Transparency International France, Transparency International and Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC). Six years after France began collecting information on the beneficial owners of companies, almost a third of legal entities in France have failed to comply. Partly as a consequence, more than 7.33 million parcels of land – which could contain one or multiple properties – in France are anonymously held. This effectively creates a dead-end for efforts to follow the money of white-collar criminals, kleptocrats and sanctioned elites into French real estate, which is known to be a favoured destination for corrupt cash.

The report, Behind a Wall: Investigating Company and Real Estate Ownership in France, is based on an in-depth analysis of publicly available records on French-registered companies and real estate. The authors scraped roughly five million individual web pages containing company information from France’s company beneficial ownership register and cross-referenced the results with data from the French cadastre, or land registry plan.

The analysis returned alarming results. More than 1.53 million legal entities registered in France – just under a third – have not declared who ultimately owns and benefits from them, despite being required to do so since 2017. Nearly 10.35 million parcels – the smallest unit of the cadastre – across France are owned by private legal entities. Yet, in 7.33 million of these, the real owners remain unknown. The vast majority of these companies did not provide data on their real owners or did not appear in France’s beneficial ownership register at all. The latter may include foreign companies, which can own real estate in France without registering a French company that would be subject to transparency requirements. As a result, 71 per cent of all corporate-owned French parcels are anonymously held.

Despite the high number of companies failing to comply with beneficial ownership disclosure rules, only one criminal sanction has been imposed between 2016 and 2020, French authorities confirmed to the report’s authors. Authorities in France have presented slightly different compliance figures, but researchers have been unable to independently verify the government’s numbers.

Sara Brimbeuf, head of the illicit financial flows programme at Transparency International France, said: “Fifteen years after the start of the first ‘ill-gotten gains” cases in France, and at a time when tracking down the real estate assets of Russian PEPs and oligarchs is supposed to be a priority, it is unacceptable that more than two-thirds of corporate-owned real estate is anonymously held. We call on the authorities to quickly close loopholes, improve data collection and verification, and sanction companies that continue to keep their owners secret.“

The research also highlighted issues of data quality and completeness in the French beneficial ownership register. For example, historical data is not included, meaning that individuals expecting to come under scrutiny can disappear from the register by transferring ownership of their company to a relative.

Maíra Martini, research and policy expert on corrupt money flows at Transparency International, said: “We have known for a long time that luxury French real estate is hot property for criminals and the corrupt looking to stash and clean their ill-gotten gains. Transparency measures of recent years should have been game-changing, but we have a long way to go to ensure that these tools achieve their full potential. The authorities should scale up their fight against money laundering through the real estate sector, and bring data collection and reporting requirements in-step with the level of risk.”

Parallel investigations by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) have revealed more than a dozen properties in France linked to alleged money launderers, politicians accused of corruption and their relatives from across Latin America.

Additionally, the authors of Behind a Wall were able to identify 166 Russian persons of public interest listed in the French beneficial ownership registry, including Russian politicians, businesspeople, bureaucrats, journalists as well as their close family relatives. Almost half of their companies are société civile immobilière – a legal arrangement often used to purchase real estate properties in France. The Russian-owned companies were more than twice as likely to be registered at a “mass address”: a key red flag in the company formation process. The companies own parcels of land with properties ranging from villas in Saint-Tropez to ski chalets in the Alps and luxury apartments in the many of Paris’s most glamorous arrondissements.

David Szakonyi, co-founder of Anti-Corruption Data Collective, said: “The fact that journalists and researchers could identify these persons of interest and their properties in France speaks to the importance of having this information freely accessible in the public domain. Unfortunately, our analysis suggests that these cases could be merely the tip of a corruption iceberg. With so many companies failing to declare who controls and benefits from them, investigators will keep running into a wall until the compliance rate comes up and data completeness and accuracy issues in the register are fixed.”

Transparency International France, Transparency International and ACDC recommend that the French authorities move quickly to increase the cost of non-compliance, and improve their own data collection and verification mechanisms. They should also address money laundering risks associated with specific company types, the real estate sector and foreign companies.