Why I
belief in Social and Development Justice for better livelihoods for the world we went
As a
Social Activist I strongly belief in social justice, volunteerism and mentoring
as a way to help society implement change and also giving back to society the
return of its investment in me. I'm on assignment to my generation to creating
a global community of young people who are ready to work professionally and
passionately to solve sustainable development challenge. Working with a wide
range of school children, youth, university students’ movements and local
communities, by promoting sustainable livelihoods and Environmental issues. My
volunteer work included organizing and coordinating, demonstrations, talking to
media, blogging among many others. Have been involved in a number of regional,
national and international advocacy campaigns, in my view and belief in Social
and Development justice for better livelihoods, actively engaged in the
campaign for human rights, Democracy, trade justice, Peace, Climate Change and decent work
Our
world is currently at a crossroads. Facing multiple and interconnected crises
of environment, finance, food, energy, democracy and most of all a crisis of
deep inequalities, we are confronted with a challenge and an opportunity.
State policymaking over the past three decades based on a neoliberal economic
model has led to wealth, power and resources accruing to a minority of the
world´s richest and most powerful people and corporations. Our world is now a
plutocracy. This model of wealth accumulation is directly responsible for the
crises we now confront.
Governments have abdicated their responsibilities to protect the rights of
their populations to development. State policies of privatisation of essential
services, resources and infrastructure; deregulation of economies; wage
suppression; political repression including restrictions on the right to
freedom of association; and militarization have made the world grossly unequal,
insecure and unsustainable. They have contributed to increasing consumption,
financial speculation, corporate concentration, unregulated exploitation of the
world´s resources, and increased violations of human rights. The effects of
cross border and internal conflict have significant implications for peace and
security in the region affecting livelihoods and leading to displacement of
vulnerable populations.
Migration patterns in the region reflect the inequality of current economic
systems, as well as the effects of political instability and climate change.
The burden of this policy-making and the crises it has caused lies on the
shoulders of those least responsible and most vulnerable: poor women and men
living .
Our governments have the opportunity to chart a new course, a course that the
vast majority of peoples in this region want, a course of global equity, of
ecological sustainability, of social justice, human rights enjoyment and
dignity for all.
What is Development Justice is a
transformative and redistributive framework that aims to reduce inequalities of
wealth, power and resources between countries, between rich and poor and
between men and women.
A model of Development Justice should be framed by five foundational
shifts
- Redistributive
Justice
- Economic
Justice
- Social
Justice
- Environmental
Justice
- Accountability
to Peoples
Redistributive
justice aims to
redistribute resources, wealth, power and opportunities to all human beings
equitably. It compels us to dismantle the existing systems that channel
resources and wealth from developing countries to wealthy countries, from
people to corporations and the military. It recognises the people as
sovereigns of our local and global commons.
Economic justice aims to develop economies that enable dignified lives,
accommodate for needs and facilitate capabilities, employment and livelihoods
available to all, and is not based on exploitation of people or natural
resources or environmental destruction. It is a model that makes economies work
for people, rather than compels people to work for economies.
Social Justice aims to eliminate all forms of discrimination,
marginalization, exclusion that pervade our communities. It recognises the need
to eliminate patriarchal systems and fundamentalisms, challenge existing social
structures, deliver sexual and reproductive justice and guarantee the human
rights of all peoples, particularly women, widows, dalits, indigenous peoples,
migrants, refugees, children, youth, older persons, people living with
disabilities, people living with HIV and other illnesses, sex workers, domestic
workers and workers in the informal sector, survivors of trafficking, and those
excluded by caste, class, income, sexual orientation, gender identity,
ethnicity, or social status.
Environmental Justice recognises the historical responsibility of countries
and elites within countries whose production, consumption and extraction
patterns have led to human rights violations, global warming and environmental
disasters and compels them to alleviate and compensate those with the least
culpability but who suffer the most: farmers, fishers, women and marginalised
groups of the global south.
Accountability to peoples demand democratic and just governments,
transparency, and governance that enables people to make informed decisions
over their own lives, communities and futures. It necessitates empowering all
people, but particularly the most marginalised, to be part of free, prior and
informed decision making in all stages of development processes at the local,
national, regional and international levels and ensuring right of peoples to
determine their development priorities. It also requires guaranteeing the
right to freedom of information.
The new development framework must be based on the principle of non-regression,
embrace a holistic, rights-based approach, and ensure that the human rights
principles of equality, equity, non-discrimination and inclusive participation
and decision making underpin its policies and practices. Such an approach
ensures that the most marginalized can benefit from development and growth, and
become active agents of change.
To achieve redistributive justice and reduce economic inequalities within
countries, governments must:
- Develop
and implement laws and policies that ensure that small farmholders,
small fishingfolk, and indigenous peoples, particularly women, have access
to, control over and ownership of land, fisheries, property, productive
resources, information, and appropriate and environmentally sound
technology.
- End
policies that promote land grabbing by governments, corporations, the military,
and extractive industries; and implement redistributive land reform
that puts ownership of land and control over natural resources back in the
hands of communities, women and other marginalized groups, and strengthens
agricultural productivity and livelihoods.
- Peacefully
resolve cross-border and internal violent conflicts which violate human
rights and affect human and economic security.
- Provide
financial protection and subsidies to small farming communities to ensure
that they can participate on an equal basis in agricultural markets.
- Develop
specific national-level and time-bound targets and indicators for reducing
inequalities of wealth, power and resources, and promote fair asset
distribution between
countries, between rich and poor, between rural and urban areas, and
between different social groups, including men and women;
- Reform
tax policies to
eliminate indirect taxes, which disproportionately impact the poor; implement
progressive income taxes to ensure the wealthy contribute their fair
share; implement progressive capital gains taxes and financial
transactions taxes to increase government revenue and reduce harmful
financial speculation; and implement taxes on the inheritance of
individual wealth and property.
- Prioritize
public financing over public private partnerships to
fulfill state obligations and strengthen public institutions; set
minimum tax thresholds and re-channel military spending to finance social
spending; set specific budget allocation targets to guarantee the
maximum allocation of resources to protecting and promoting human rights,
including the right to health, education, food, and an adequate standard
of living; and increase accountability for how tax revenue is spent.
To
achieve economic justice:
- Enact
living wage laws
that guarantee that all workers, including women, those in the informal
sector, agricultural workers, and migrant workers, earn enough to live
with dignity; ensure that wages grow with productivity; and
increase cooperation between countries on exchange rates, trade and
fiscal policies, and wages to prevent a race to the bottom.
- Implement
policies to ensure that all women, men and young people have access to
decent work,
including by enacting legal protections to provide security in the workplace,
social protection for workers and their families, paid parental,
breastfeeding, care and sick leave; promote collective bargaining, and
organization, and the rights of workers to participate in decision-making
that affects their lives;
- Ensure
trade, investment, financial and intellectual policy rights policies that
do not impede countries’ abilities, policy space to provide economic
opportunities and services to their people or undermine the right to
development.
- Guarantee
universal social protection for all, including income security
for the unemployed and those whose livelihoods depend on precarious work,
the sick, the disabled, pregnant women, children and the elderly;
- Guarantee
the right to universal
access to quality public health services, education, food, water,
sanitation, energy and justice and implement targeted policies
and programs to ensure that women, the poorest and most marginalized,
including migrants, refugees and stateless peoples, are able to access and
benefit from these services.
- Move
towards economies that are owned, driven and planned by people to
meet their development needs and guarantee their human rights.
- End
policies that promote the exploitation of migrant workers and
the use of remittances to finance national development priorities, and
create an enabling environment for migrant workers to enjoy their human
rights; strengthen cross-border and multisectoral collaboration between
countries of origin and destination to promote migrants’ rights, including
to social protection; and guarantee access to health, education, and other
social services for migrants, regardless of their migration status.
To
achieve social and gender justice and reduce social and gender inequalities, governments must:
- Address
inequalities from an intersectional approach and
recognize how factors such as age, race, ethnicity, caste, HIV status,
disability, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, poverty,
migration status, refugee status, area of work, and geographic location
can compound stigma, discrimination, social exclusion and marginalization
and lead to violence and other rights violations.
- Eliminate
laws and policies that perpetuate discrimination on
the basis of gender and reproductive health services,
- Guarantee
women’s rights to inheritance, land, and property and
implement policies to expand their control over productive resources and
technologies;
- Protect
and enact legal protections for sexual and reproductive rights; guarantee
universal access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health
information, education and services and eliminate legal and policy
barriers to access; provide comprehensive sexuality education to all
children and adolescents, in and out of school and starting from the
primary school level, that challenges traditional gender norms and the
acceptability of violence against women and girls; promotes gender
equality and human rights, and provides them with the skills to have
control over all aspects of their sexuality.
- Guarantee
the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health for
all people; implement policies and programs to ensure that the most
marginalized and excluded groups can exercise this right and overcome
barriers to care; ensure universal access to free health services that are
available, accessible, and of good quality and provided through the public
sector; and provide universal access to diagnostics and treatment for
non-communicable and communicable diseases, particularly for HIV,
tuberculosis, hepatitis C, and malaria.
- Combat
rising fundamentalisms; eliminate the use of cultural and religious
justifications for violations of women’s and girls’ human rights; end
child, early and forced marriage and other harmful traditional and
customary practices that violate women’s and girls’ rights; and
guarantee women’s and girls’ human rights to equality, autonomy, bodily
integrity, to decide whether and whom to marry, to decide the number and
spacing of children, and the right to live free from violence.
- Enact
laws and policies to prevent and comprehensively respond to all forms of
violence against women and girls and ensure access to immediate critical
services for all survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, including
screening and referral, post-exposure prophylaxis to prevent HIV
infection, emergency contraception, safe and legal abortion, psychosocial
services and legal aid.
- Guarantee
universal access to public care services and ensure quality and decent
working conditions for care providers, in order to contribute to a
fairer redistribution of unpaid care and domestic work and address the
sexual division of labor.
- Limit
and reduce the production of weapons that increase inequality and
violations of human rights.
To
achieve environmental justice and shift to sustainable consumption and
production:
- Reclaim
and secure peoples’ rights to define, own, control and ensure the
sustainability of the commons; promote responsible stewardship of
natural resources, such as forests, rivers, watershed, and coastal
environments; recognize and promote indigenous peoples’ resources and
traditional knowledge in the sustainable management of natural
resources.
- Promote
ecological agriculture to guarantee food sovereignty and prevent
hunger and its consequences.
- Reorient
production, consumption and distribution systems to
meet peoples’ needs rather than to accumulate profits.
- Allocate
sufficient resources towards and promote scientific and traditional
knowledge for
understanding the social and environmental costs and impacts of human
activities; popularize this information and enact regulatory measures on
this basis.
- Commit
to carbon emission reductions and provide new, adequate, predictable, and
appropriate climate finance that contributed by countries from public
resources on the basis of historical responsibility for climate change,
and address the needs of those most affected, including for adaptation and
mitigation.
- Promote
energy conservation and efficiency; phase out subsidies for the fossil fuel
industry while guarding against adverse impacts on low-income and
marginalized groups; and promote community-based
decentralized renewable energy systems as the main component of a
renewable energy transition program.
- Promote
technologies for eco-efficiency and work toward elimination of waste; build
infrastructure and mechanisms to reduce, recycle and reuse waste; and
redesign products to ensure durability and optimum use.
- Ensure
resource extraction, such as water use, fishing, logging and
mining, is according to the needs of communities and subject to
sustainable management, while protecting the rights of fisherfolk,
small farmholders, indigenous people and women.
- Develop
and operationalize legal frameworks to protect livelihoods of poor and
marginalized people and avoid environmental disasters, particularly
as a result of resource extraction.
- Prepare
a new UN protocol to recognize State responsibilities to provide support
to climate-displaced populations.
- Develop
international mechanisms to address loss and damage caused by climate
change, with
special attention to its gender-differential impacts.
- Promote
the creation of decent jobs with the aim of creating
environmentally-sustainable industries, promoting environmental awareness,
and protecting against environmental destruction.
- To
develop and institutionalize mechanisms to monitor and mitigate the social
and environmental impacts of development initiatives.
To
guarantee accountability to peoples and participation of civil society:
- Establish
comprehensive and inclusive mechanisms for meaningful citizen
participation in determining, implementing and monitoring development
goals and indicators at all levels; eliminate barriers to
participation, such as cultural and language obstacles; create the
conditions for and guarantee the involvement of women, youth, indigenous
communities, people with disabilities, people of diverse sexual
orientations and gender identities, grassroots movements and marginalized
groups, among others; and build the capacity of decision-makers to
facilitate meaningful citizen participation.
- Provide
adequate and stable financial support and capacity development to civil
society organizations to enable effective and substantial public
participation in policy dialogues and in implementing agreements and
legislation at all levels.
- Recognize
and support the legitimate role of civil society actors in in promoting
human rights and
ensure an enabling environment for civil society organization development
effectiveness.
- Institutionalize
mechanisms for civil society participation in policymaking processes and
in policy dialogue forums at the local, national, transboundary, regional
and global levels, while respecting their right to self-organize;
guarantee adequate and stable financial, institutional and political
support from governments and the UN system to ensure operational
effectiveness, sustainability and national ownership.
- Guarantee
and institutionalize the right to freedom of information.
- Ensure
a fully transparent and inclusive monitoring process for implementation of
the Post-2015 Development Agenda that makes information freely available
to all stakeholders at all operational levels (local, national, regional,
and global); include
process indicators to improve qualitative evaluations; and guarantee the
consideration of reports from beneficiaries, in particular from the most
socially marginalized, on how development programmes impact their lives.
- Develop
mechanisms to monitor and regulate the growing influence of the corporate
sector in development, including in public-private partnerships; increase
accountability of corporations and the private sector, including
through mechanisms that would bind corporations to respect human rights
and other international laws (not just on a voluntary basis), including in
their cross-border activities; reinstate the UN Center for
Transnational Corporations to ensure that binding commitments are
implemented and agreed to by states in charge of regulating these
corporations; and establish independent commissions or other bodies for
accountability, that have mechanisms for redress to hold corporations
accountable for human rights and environmental violations.
To reduce
economic inequalities and injustice between countries and finance the post-2015
agenda:
- Respect
existing commitments and pledge new and additional funds for financing the
post-2015 development agenda; identify means of implementation to
accompany every goal; and develop a separate comprehensive commitment to
guarantee means of implementation for the entire framework.
- Monitor
and enforce commitments of donor governments to provide a minimum of 0.7
percent of GDP to official development assistance (ODA); eliminate
conditionalities on ODA; and track and monitor ODA spending to
ensure accountability and transparency.
- Develop
innovative means of financing for development, including by abolishing
havens for transnational corporations; debt cancellation, debt swapping
and debt servicing; pollution taxes; and global financial transaction
taxes.
- Provide
special considerations to address the development challenges so
that they can compete in the global market and raise domestic revenues.
- Eliminate
trade regulations that force countries to reduce subsidies or increase
taxes on basic necessities such as food staples and medicine to domestically
finance development schemes.
- Remove
barriers to access of developing countries to relevant technologies and
know-how that are barred by intellectual property rights regulations; and ensure
that intellectual property rights are not used to consolidate and
strengthen corporate control over productive capacities in developing
countries.
- Establish
an international technology facilitation mechanism to coordinate and
enable the development and transfer of environmentally sound technologies
to developing countries and communities; build the capacity of countries
to coordinate, assess and ensure that transfer of technology is based on
and appropriate to their needs; and include clauses for technology
transfer and ownership to the receiving country in all direct financial
investment.
Kenneth Nana Amoateng
Chief Executive Officer
Abibimman Foundation www.abibimmanfoundation.org
Email:amoatengken@gmail.com/kamoateng@iday.org/ 0244023651
