{UAH} Fwd: GCF head steps down, Bangladesh faces monsoon season, and IOM rebukes US nominee: This week in development

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From: Devex Global Development Briefing <info@devex.com>
Date: 5 July 2018 21:32:11 BST
To: georgeokello_8@hotmail.com
Subject: GCF head steps down, Bangladesh faces monsoon season, and IOM rebukes US nominee: This week in development
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This week's must-read development stories.

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To ensure delivery to your inbox, please add info@devex.com to your address book. July 5, 2018 THIS WEEK'S MUST-READ DEVELOPMENT STORIES GCF head steps down, Bangladesh faces monsoon season, and IOM rebukes US nominee: This week in development By Anne Paisley @devex The Green Climate Fund's leader steps down abruptly, the U.K. commits to "clearer" safeguarding guidelines, and global health leaders call for action on NCDs. This week in development: The Green Climate Fund's executive director stepped down abruptly on Wednesday, leaving the organization's future in doubt. Howard Bamsey, an Australian diplomat who had led the GCF since January 2017, resigned after a "difficult" meeting in Songdo, South Korea, during which the GCF failed to add to its portfolio of 76 projects, worth $3.7 billion. The GCF has struggled with disputes between rich and poor nations about how and where to invest — and progress was further hampered in 2017 after President Donald Trump pulled U.S. support. "Everyone said this is the low point," said Jasmine Hyman, an environmental consultant at the British firm E Co., who attended the meeting. "This was a disappointing meeting but hopefully it's a canary in the mine and not a nail in the coffin." The United States' candidate to head the U.N. migration agency was rejected last week, raising fears of retaliation from the agency's largest donor. António Vitorino of Portugal was elected as the organization's new director general, the first time in 50 years that the head of the International Organization for Migration is not an American. The U.S. candidate, Ken Isaacs, was a controversial pick due to his comments on social media criticizing Islam and dismissing climate change. A week before the election, 50 organizations working on migration signed a letter to IOM member states that, while not mentioning Isaacs by name, said the new agency head should demonstrate "a record of and commitment to respecting diversity and condemning xenophobia, discrimination and intolerance." Characterizing the election result as a "stinging rebuke" to Washington, Michael Clemens, a senior fellow at Center for Global Development, stated, "I would be very surprised if the United States did not take some retaliation" against IOM. The U.K. Department for International Development will provide "clearer guidance" about when and how to report potential safeguarding violations in advance of the International Safeguarding Summit in October, officials said this week. This comes after concerns were raised that previous guidance — which asserted that "any and all safeguarding concerns" would be referred to "relevant local authorities" — could put victims at risk in some contexts. During a parliamentary evidence session, members of the International Development Committee challenged DFID chief Penny Mordaunt and Peter Taylor, head of DFID's new safeguarding unit, about the new guidance. Mordaunt defended the order, saying that DFID and other aid-spending departments were well equipped to make those kinds of "careful judgments." "As secretary of state for DFID, I'm not going to take a dim view of an organization that takes a course of action to protect a victim from further trouble," she said. After a two-day visit to Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, World Bank President Jim Kim is calling for more global support to help the almost 1 million Rohingya refugees fleeing violence in Myanmar. Kim, along with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, visited the Kutupalong refugee camp, where he "saw firsthand the sheer scale of the crisis," and called for more international support for Bangladesh's work "managing the dire situation created by this large influx." Aid workers in Bangladesh's seaside district of Cox's Bazar are currently focused on ensuring vulnerable Rohingya refugees survive a lengthy monsoon season. Groups have already relocated more than 30,000 of those most at risk away from the landslide-prone hillsides, while others are training refugees in cyclone preparedness and search and rescue. Devex reporter Kelli Rogers sat down with IOM Bangladesh's new chief of mission to find out what the agency will prioritize in the next few months. More than 50 health experts signed a letter for action on noncommunicable diseases, outlining an eight-point agenda to reduce the global epidemic of NCDs and accelerate progress ahead of the U.N. General Assembly High-level Meeting on the prevention and control of NCDs in September. At the top of the agenda is assigning accountability at the highest political levels, which many NGO leaders said is key to unlocking financing for NCDs — but was a goal that previous high-level meetings failed to accomplish. During this year's meeting, health experts are determined to weigh in on best practices that should define the strong political commitments they hope will emerge from the 2018 meeting. For more on the global burden of NCDs, visit Devex's Taking the Pulse series. FROM THE EDITOR Top picks this week By Devex @devex PEPFAR's 'great leap into the unknown' of controlling HIV and AIDS Devex sat down with Chip Lyons, the president and CEO of Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation — a major implementer of global HIV treatment and prevention services — to discuss how PEPFAR has transformed U.S. global health, and where it goes from here. Descriptions of what PEPFAR has achieved in the past 15 years often include words such as "miracle" and "unprecedented." The initiative has provided antiretroviral medications to more than 14 million people, saving millions of lives and helping stave off an epidemic that threatened to consume entire countries. But there is widespread consensus among the initiative's biggest backers that if PEPFAR does not go even further — or if political support falters — the basic mathematics of the disease will bring about a new emergency, wiping out a victory that was never fully achieved. Devex dives into PEPFAR at 15. Devex exclusive: What are DFID's new country diagnostic pilots? The U.K. Department for International Development is internally piloting a new needs-based assessment strategy for a number of its country programs. The pilots will streamline attempts to identify the most significant problems that hinder development, as well as the main entry points and opportunities to create change, emphasizing interdisciplinary analysis — including how politics, state, security, and demographics interact with economic growth and human development. Devex has exclusive details on the pilot countries and which teams have begun NGO consultations. What you need to know about blockchain in 2018 The road for blockchain integration in philanthropy and international development is not an easy one. Although still in its early days, more than half of social-good blockchain initiatives are estimated to impact beneficiaries by the end of this year, according to a Stanford University report. Devex rounds up the top five things you need to know about blockchain and its most publicized application, cryptocurrency. With aims to assign a dollar figure to data, NGOs have a new financial avenue As data becomes increasingly critical to government, business, and nonprofit operations, there have been calls to make data a business and operations asset that forms part of the bottom line. For NGOs, this means bringing organization data out of the shadows to create value, both internally and externally. As violence escalates in Syria, new data on disabled children caught in the crossfire Before the start of the civil war in 2009, the Saïd Foundation estimated that around 2 million people in Syria were living with disabilities — about 10 percent of the population at the time — 700,000 of whom were children. In its recommendations to the U.K. government, Syria Relief called for more efforts to fill the data gap on disabled children in humanitarian crises, and for U.K. lawmakers to ring-fence a percentage of aid toward children with disabilities, in line with the government's "leave no one behind" agenda. 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