EL BLOG DE LA FIIAPP. Cooperación Española

Shortly before dawn, Maria crossed the Paraná River on a barge. She did not have the migratory permits to reach her destination, but rather the hope for a better life. The triple border that connects Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay for over 1,000 kilometres is easily breached. With the promise of a job as a household employee, she arrived in the Argentine province of Misiones. Upon arrival, her alleged employers took away her identity card and showed her around her new workplace, an illegal brothel on a ranch. From that moment onwards, Maria was forced into working as a prostitute in a small room, surviving on the minimum that her captors gave her.  She had become one of the more than 2.5 million victims of human trafficking worldwide, according to figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

She decided to escape, but did not get very far. She was found by a local police officer who, far from helping her, returned her to the brothel. This real case is an example of how the corruption of public officials facilitates or is complicit in human trafficking, a criminal phenomenon that particularly affects women and girls, usually for the purposes of sexual exploitation. This is underlined by Sergio Leonardo Rodríguez, head of the Administrative Investigations Office (PIA) at the Argentine Public Prosecutor’s Office: “A human trafficking network, especially for the purposes of sexual exploitation, cannot prosper without corruption. It’s just not possible. The public agent component is always needed to facilitate these crimes and the officers responsible for investigations must be conscious of this factor. This is why it is very important that cases are investigated from the beginning with this double vision: looking at both corruption and trafficking”.

The corruption of public officials is manifested in aspects such as the periodic collection of money and/or the possibility of receiving sexual favours. On the other hand, these officials can also neglect their duties regarding inspection and surveillance, or act by improperly facilitating the issuance of documents or permits. They may also hinder the action of justice by providing information on operations and offering protection to criminals, among other illegal behaviour. This deviant behaviour can occur in police bodies, customs agents, health agents, doctors, judges, prosecutors, municipal authorities, among others, along the length of the criminal people trafficking chain. In some cases they reflect the existence of small-scale corruption, but in others this behaviour is part of a systemic phenomenon. In other scenarios, their powers allow officials to control the criminal activity itself.

In October, and with the aim of combating this scourge, the First International Workshop on Corruption and People Trafficking was organised in Buenos Aires by the Democratic Governance area of the EUROsociAL+ Programme and the Argentine Public Prosecutor’s Office. Participating in the activity, carried out within the framework of the First Work Plan by the Network of Prosecutors Against Corruption, which pertains to the Ibero-American Association of Public Prosecutor’s Offices (AIAMP), were representatives from anti-trafficking and corruption departments from Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. The latter country also providing personnel from the National Ombudsman’s Office, the National Anti-Corruption Office, the Victim Protection Unit at the Ministry of Justice, the University of Buenos Aires and the NGOs Women in Equality and Citizen Power.

During the activity, corruption and the associated risks present in human trafficking were analysed, as well as various problems relating to the lack of identification and early prosecution of these practices, distrust in the state or fear of reporting caused by the perception that local authorities are involved with criminal organisations.

“The rescues we have had were of women and girls from extremely vulnerable homes”

The workshop also analysed how the extreme vulnerability of women and girls is capitalised on by the criminals who exploit this criminal economy. This is described by a Trial Prosecutor from Posadas (Misiones), Vivian Barbosa: “The rescues we have had were of women and girls from extremely vulnerable homes. Sometimes, they could not be defined as homes, since the parents themselves had been the ones who had handed them over to carry out this type of work. Therefore, they often do not feel as if they are victims, moreover, they considered they were better off in these places. They come from places without drinking water, with dirt floors. So when someone offers them a room with a bathroom, food and, eventually, the possibility of sending money to their families, they see it as an improvement and accept this condition, they don’t feel they are victims. I have frequently had the sensation, when a rescue is taking place, that the liberated women were angry because we had got them out of prostitution”.

A series of strategic proposals emerged in relation to such institutional and inter-institutional organisation, the early linking of anti-corruption investigations in cases of people trafficking where required, the strengthening of the capacity for analysis and the strengthening of anonymous complaint and protection mechanisms. Likewise, the importance of preventing these manifestations of corruption and making their risks visible was also outlined.

As far as Maria is concerned, with whom we started this article, she finally had better luck. Two Paraguayan friends managed to flee the ranch and the bus they were travelling on was intercepted at a border police control. They reported the situation and Maria and four other Argentine women who were still captive, two of them minors, were released. The two pimps, a man and a woman, were sentenced to 15 years in jail. No action was ever taken against the corrupt officials that facilitated this criminal activity.

Borja Díaz Rivillas, Senior Expert in Democratic Governance for FIIAPP and EUROsociAL+

Ana Linda Solano, EUROsociAL+ expert in corruption and gender

The COP25 World Climate Summit expected more ambitious agreements on climate change neutrality by 2050. The frantic level of discussions and negotiations from the almost 200 countries participating in the summit relentlessly sought a last-minute consensus. Nonetheless, the CO2 emissions market and other relevant issues were postponed until Glasgow COP26, scheduled for November 2020.

Over two weeks, representatives from countries, international organisations, institutions and civil society produced figures that testify to the urgent need for action: The oceans are receiving 13,000,000 tonnes of plastic annually, increasing acidification of the seas is affecting fishing and impacts on food security. Three quarters of the planet are under threat, over one million species are at risk of extinction, greenhouse gases have reached a new high. The next 50 years will see 250 million to 1 billion environmental refugees. The data is overwhelming. Commitments are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avoid the temperature rising by over 1.5 degrees.

Nonetheless, COP25 was not only about raising the alarm and the environmental emergency. It also offered spaces for awareness and dialogue to address environmental issues from a multi-disciplinary approach: biodiversity, gender, migration, town planning, industry, finance, technological development, etc. A wide range of topics to ensure that both specialists and the general public alike learn of the situation as it stands, without giving way to drama and pessimism, because there is still time to act.

Accordingly, FIIAPP worked closely with the High Commissioner for the 2030 Agenda, Cristina Gallach, helping to organise COP and promoting different activities, such as the panel on “Energy transition and economic investment opportunities in Cuba” in collaboration with the project coordinator Maite Jaramillo, Felice Zaccheo (European Commission Head of the Regional Programs Unit for Latin America and the Caribbean), Marlenis Águila (Director of Renewable Energies at the Cuban Ministry of Energy and Mines), Elaine Moreno (General Director of the National Energy Office in Cuba – ONURE), Ramsés Montes (Director of Energy Policy at ONURE) and Eric Sicart (Fira Barcelona). This event falls within the scope of the EU-Cuba Experience Exchange programme to promote renewable energy sources and energy efficiency, which is funded by the European Union and managed by FIIAPP. The main elements of the programme were highlighted at this event, along with the opportunities and challenges facing Cuba in developing renewable sources and using energy efficiently.

Island countries are directly subject to the consequences of climate change and are aware of how strongly environmental protection is linked to sustainable economic and social development. Formed by specialists from MINEM and ONURE, the Cuban delegation invited to the COP used the panel to announce the country’s ambitious policy to substantially reduce the use of hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 by progressively increasing renewable energy sources and enhancing their use in the electric power generation matrix.

Beyond the COP, the international community has begun to take steps towards ecological transition. However, the challenge is to do so in time and justly and fairly to prevent a worsening of existing inequalities. The responsibility for change requires public policies by countries, international and regional organisations aimed at decarbonising the economy, adapting the current system to the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda.

Even though the agreements reached at COP are not those envisaged, one thing has become evident in the course of the summit, namely, the interest of Spanish society in strengthening climatic action and in progressing towards CO2 emission neutrality. It is time to act and seek joint solutions.

31 October.  The phones keep ringing. And in silence the ticking of the clock reminds us that it’s time to act . There are four weeks left before COP25 begins. It will be in Madrid, there is hardly any time, and an invigorating mixture of excitement, confidence and nerves takes hold of us all.

Chile has rightly decided to attend to the social demands, which cannot wait. And since the fight against climate change is also pressing, solidarity triumphs in the form of cooperation and multilateralism.

COP25 is the last summit before the Paris Agreement comes into force in 2020. The United States has already announced that it is abandoning ship and Greta Thunberg, in such an eloquent paradox, shows us her sailing boat trip to the Summit in streaming video. Meanwhile, the European Union, Latin America and the other countries (a total of 196) stand firm in their commitment to complete Article 6 – still under building – to create a common framework for offsetting CO₂ emissions.

On the horizon are the contours of a future with zero-net carbon and a fair global energy transition. The 2030 Agenda permeates the atmosphere, marks the way forward and offers us a common language with which to promote – from Ibero-America, that has not changed – sustainable development in all its dimensions.

The two-week period from 2 to 13 December is the ideal occasion for exchanging perspectives and sharing the challenges, difficulties and solutions that together we are finding in adapting to and mitigating climate change. Political dialogue and policy dialogue: thus, COP25 will be a platform to give voice to Latin America and its adaptation agenda.

The oceans are the protagonists of this Summit, following the latest IPCC report . And it is in this context that the Atlantic Ocean is presented as a bridge for two continents united in the face of climate change challenges. The pavilion of the Chilean presidency is joined by that of Colombia (it is the first time that the country has a pavilion in a Climate Conference), Spain, the European Union and EUROCLIMA + to tell the rest of the world about our efforts on climate cooperation.

Mexico passed its first climate change law in 2012 and amended it in 2018, at the same time as Peru passed its own law. Chile and Spain are each in the process of approving bills and, in Panama, the design of their climate law has just begun. Cuba, for its part, now addresses the increasing inclusion of renewable energies within its energy matrix.

Similar or different experiences? We’ll find out as COP25 progresses! What is clear is that we cannot avoid designing, implementing and evaluating public policies with the reduction of inequalities and the search for a prosperous life for all at their centre, for an inclusive and sustainable future, based on a commitment to the environment.

Sunday 1 December. Everything is ready for the Summit. The phones stopped ringing and the clock hands can be heard again. The next dates – 2020, 2030, 2050 – are close. But the rhythm is no longer marked only by the ticking of the clock; since 2 December the voices of Latin America and Europe, which have found each other more than ever at COP25, have been added.

To Alma and Carolina, and to the team of the High Commissioner for the 2030 Agenda, thank you for your optimism and your contagious enthusiasm.

When my mother brought me into the world, the diagnosis they gave my parents was that I was “retarded”. I wonder what would have happened to me if they had gone along with that diagnosis, if I had not had a stimulating environment around me, if I had not been born in a European country.

I was born with Treacher Collins syndrome, a rare, disabling and incurable congenital craniofacial malformation that affects two out of every 100,000 people. Those of us who have this syndrome are born without cheekbones, with microtia (that is, without one or both ears), the jaw does not grow, we have a very narrow pharynx and, sometimes, we are also born with an open palate, which gives us a highly characteristic face and causes various problems – with our eyes (dryness and ulcers in the cornea), digestion (we cannot eat well), breathing (apnea) and hearing (deafness), among others.

After they recovered from the initial shock of the diagnosis, my parents were clear that they had to make me an independent person. They took me to a special education school, where they gave me my first hearing aid and a lot of speech therapy classes and taught me how to lip read. By the time I was eight or nine years old, I was going to an ordinary school where I passed my exams with a little luck, but without any special technical support beyond my retroauricular hearing aid and sitting in the front row to better hear the teachers.

I remember my childhood as being happy, with my siblings, friends, summers in the mountains, cousins, a horrible adolescence, after which a relatively satisfactory stage arrived. There have been two clearly distinct phases in my life: one in which what weighed most heavily on me was my face, that physiognomy that I felt comfortable with when I looked in the mirror but that caused rejection as it did not comply with the imposed ideas of beauty, and, another, in which what weighed most heavily was my disability.

The first occurred when I was a teenager, the second became apparent when I joined the world of work. Who in their right mind, having been born deaf, would think of becoming a journalist? Me! I have been working for 25 years now, 20 as a journalist for a news agency and five in the communications department of a large company that has inclusive employment as one of its principles.

During these years I have become aware of how ahead of their time my parents were, because I was born at a time when people with disabilities were considered a family misfortune and a drag on society (invalid, deformed, useless, abnormal or deficient are some of the nouns with which they referred to us). Throughout these years, I have been aware of how lucky I was to be born in a European country, and how unfair it is that your life is so different because you have a condition that you have not chosen and you live in a certain place.

For me, the determination of my parents was essential to me becoming the woman I am. Someone recently told me about the case of a deaf woman who was almost 30 years old, who uses hearing aids, but hears very little and who has been so overprotected all her life that she did not go to university, nor did she learn sign language, she has an unskilled job and does not know how to do anything without her family. She is much younger than me, a daughter of democracy, European, born in a society that has been changing its views about disability, where there are laws that have been passed throughout our history for our rights. She had factors favouring her personal development, but her family, that fundamental pillar in the development of any child, but especially those with disabilities, has made her incapable. It is not the only case that I have heard about. And it hurts. It hurts that these things continue to happen in European countries, and if they are happening in Europe, what must be happening in less developed countries?

Some 15% of the world’s population has a disability, more than 80% are poor, 50% of people with disabilities do not have access to health care, a very small percentage work (it varies from one country to another), and I won’t even go into whether they have a job with a decent salary or not. The vast majority of the more than 1 billion people with disabilities in the world live in developing countries.

Disability is a condition that we did not choose to have, it is a condition that is a factor in impoverishment, discrimination and inequality throughout the world because, even in the most advanced countries there are many barriers, the biggest being the lack of accessibility, which prevent our inclusion, our participation in society as full citizens.

I have a disability, I have an independent life, I have been able to study and I continue to do so, I work in the profession I chose, I have access to health care … but I am the exception, not the rule. A painful and embarrassing exception difficult to understand. And when I take a look at the statistics, I can’t help wondering what would have happened to me if my parents had settled for that unfortunate first diagnosis, that “your daughter is retarded”.

When we talk about the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development , which all countries have made their roadmap to design public policies, to generate multi-agent and multi-sector alliances, to transform the world so that no one is left behind, we are going beyond a vision of the future based on scientific evidence and values that represent a humanist vision of the world in which we live, rather we are dealing with a profound transformation targeting the creation of strong institutions to make democracy a space for social justice.

The 17 objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development give us a shared vision with which to build a new global social contract through which inclusive sustainable development will allow all people to develop their life project. A shared social justice and personal development action that centres on people.

Accordingly, we cannot lose sight of the fact that citizen empowerment is the only way to achieve these 169 Sustainable Development Goals.

It is time to open a space for radical collaboration where companies, institutions and citizens work in such a way that all their efforts are conducive to creating certainty in a world of constant change. Alliances that go beyond the sum of their actions, creating an ever-expanding vision that moves towards exponential transformation.

We already possess the knowledge required to know where to aim our efforts towards inclusive sustainable development. The first 15 objectives of the 2030 Agenda clearly show all those integrated and integral actions needed to set up a global alliance. Actions based on a holistic vision in which we not only meet the challenges and threats of the present head on, but also move towards the building of an environmentally sustainable future of shared progress and social justice. Nonetheless, to build this knowledge we need to commit to innovation and creativity in order to obtain a more open and shared vision of problems and solutions and to understand that the best way to move forward together is through the transfer of knowledge.

However, the essential values and transformations that are included in objectives 16 and 17 of the 2030 Agenda are just as important as the knowledge afforded by its first fifteen objectives. We tend to think that the importance of the different objectives corresponds to their numerical position in the list. But this is not the case, far from it. If we have already understood that the agenda is integral and integrated and therefore must be taken as a whole. It is also equally important to understand that the objectives in the lower positions are not only equally vital, but also essential to compliance with the other fifteen goals.

Therefore, when we talk about Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions (Sustainable Development Goal 16) and Partnerships for the Goals (Sustainable Development Goal 17) we are referring to the very kernel of the 2030 Agenda, we are talking about systemic change to drive the achievement of the rest of the objectives, about the momentum of the institutions, about the politics and the ethics of an action that can only be transformative if it is based on human rights.

Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that the actions to achieve the 2030 agenda need to come from a radical collaboration between all stakeholders. We cannot ignore the fact that democratic institutions constitute the nucleus of the thrust towards and the guarantee of the changes that need to be implemented. In the last analysis, leading entails taking charge of reality and projecting towards an inclusive future. In this new era, democratic institutions must become engines of transformation, vectors of transparency, examples of efficiency and justice. Efficiency to prevent the wasting of resources and justice to ensure that we all have the same rights and freedoms.

Sustainable development means having a thriving economy, an inclusive, environmentally sustainable and well governed society. Without strong institutions, we cannot move forward towards a just society. Without transparency, we will not have the confidence to build a fair society.

It is time to convert vision into transformative action, action to change and improve people’s lives through the strengthening of an economy put at the service of society, on an environmentally sustainable planet with open, efficient and transparent institutions for a strong democracy.

When it comes to preparing the National Evaluation Agendas, different goals come into play: accountability, policy improvement or programme evaluation (its design or management), transparency promotion as a democratic tool, and ultimately institutional or managerial learning. 

In terms of Disaster Risk Management, this evaluation is relevant to all of these matters. It is also a particularly sensitive matter: in addition to exposing the major vulnerabilities that afflict a large part of the world’s population, there are known cases of regrettable deficiencies in fund management for emergency and reconstruction. The unanimous opinion of specialists, also included in the Sendai Framework, is that in terms of disaster risk having a solid prevention system helps prevent the loss of human lives, as well as material loss and the loss of basic goods for population survival. It will also make a difference when facing subsequent reconstruction. 

On April 16, 2016, an earthquake of magnitude 7.8 (Mw)3 was recorded on the north-east coast of Ecuador.  671 people died and 6,277 were injured. The damage affected four provinces, and fourteen cantons were declared to be in a state of emergency.  

After assisting the first moments of the emergency, the Ecuadorian government approved the 2016 Post-Earthquake Reconstruction Plan, framed  within its Risk Management regulations and in the National Decentralized Risk Management System (SNDGR). The Reconstruction Plan’s aim is territorial recovery, canalise the reconstruction and recovery processes of post-earthquake livelihoods under the criteria of resilience and sustainability through intersectoral and multilevel coordinated interventions. 

What has emergency and reconstruction assistance coverage been like for the population in the affected areas? How many families benefited from this asisstance and for how long? How and in what way were the shelter, rental and food aid distributed? Were the most vulnerable people included? To what degree was infrastructure rehabilitated? How many public health facilities were rebuilt and rehabilitated? What is the degree of citizen satisfaction with regard to medical care and services? Is Ecuador’s National Decentralized Risk Management System working as well as it could to prevent and manage disasters of this nature? What improvements should be made to minimize the consequences of possible future disasters? 

These are just some of the questions that the evaluation will answer: Transparency, improvement, learning. 

The consulting team hired by EVALÚA has already completed the field work. In the next few weeks we will have the answers.