Social Watch News

Civil society fight for transparency of aid

Published on Fri, 2011-11-11 15:11

Women and children search a
garbage dump for cans to sell
in Timor Leste.
(Photo: Martine Perret/UN)

Three weeks before the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, civil society organizations don’t hide their disappointment about the expected results of the gathering. “In the relative obscurity of closed-door meetings, donor governments are making last-minute attempts to renege on their aid transparency commitments,” summed up Claudia Elliot, Make Aid Transparent campaign’s spokesperson. All the process seems to bring into question the whole concept of aid.

SOCIAL WATCH E-NEWSLETTER - Issue 63 - November 11, 2011

Published on Fri, 2011-11-11 08:13

Rio2012 through the lens of the Arab Spring

Published on Thu, 2011-11-10 07:58

The Arab Spring gave this region’s civil society fresh tools to contribute to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio2012). “The Arab peoples’ revolutions and uprisings which erupted first in Tunisia in December 2010 reflect the interlink between sustainable development, democratic governance, and freedom,” noted the Arab NGO Network for Development (ANND) in the paper it submitted to the preparatory process of the meeting.

Mirjam van Reisen: Eritrea can be considered the North Korea of Africa

Published on Wed, 2011-11-09 07:37

Mirjam van Reisen

The European Union (EU) should change its policy towards Eritrea, says Mirjam van Reisen, professor of International Social Responsibility at Tilburg University. The people are better of if the EU would spent its allocated subsidy for Eritrea on housing and education of the Eritrean refugees in Sudan, South Sudan, Libya, Egypt or Yemen, adds Van Reisen, also founder and director of Brussels-based Europe External Policy Advisors (EEPA).

Tunisia: Women assaulted in the campuses

Published on Tue, 2011-11-08 07:44

Photo: Women in the Mediterranean

The Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (ATFD, one of the focal points of Social Watch in that country) created an “emergency cell” to take statements of women who suffer assaults in the university campuses and to offer them support and solidarity.

The last incidents, according to the French newspaper L’Humanité, took place in the Manouba School of Economics and the High Institute of Theology.