Category: Education

For their first trip to a celebrated robotics contest for high school students from scores of countries, a team of Ukrainian teens had a problem.

With shipments of goods to Ukraine uncertain, and Ukrainian customs officers careful about incoming merchandise, the group only received a base kit of gadgetry on the day they were set to leave for the event in Geneva.

That set off a mad scramble to assemble their robot for the latest edition of the “First Global” contest, a three-day affair that opened Friday, in-person for the first time since the pandemic. Nearly all the 180-odd teams from countries across the world had been preparing their robots for months.

“We couldn’t back down because we were really determined to compete here and to give our country a good result — because it really needs it right now,” said Danylo Gladkyi, a member of Ukraine’s team. He and his teammates are too young to be eligible for Ukraine’s national call-up of all men over 18 to take part in the war effort.

Gladkyi said an international package delivery company wasn’t delivering into Ukraine, and reliance on a smaller private company to ship the kit from Poland into Ukraine got tangled up with customs officials. That logjam got cleared last Sunday, forcing the team to dash to get their robot ready with adaptations they had planned — only days before the contest began.

The event, launched in 2017 with backing from American innovator Dean Kamen, encourages young people from all corners of the globe to put their technical smarts and mechanical know-how to challenges that represent symbolic solutions to global problems.

This year’s theme is carbon capture, a nascent technology in which excess heat-trapping CO2 in the atmosphere is sucked out of the skies and sequestered, often underground, to help fight global warming.

Teams use game controllers like those attached to consoles in millions of households worldwide to direct their self-designed robots to zip around pits, or “fields,” to scoop up hollow plastic balls with holes in them that symbolically represent carbon. Each round starts by emptying a clear rectangular box filled with the balls into the field, prompting a whirring, hissing scramble to pick them up.

The initial goal is to fill a tower topped by a funnel in the center of the field with as many balls as possible. Teams can do that in one of two ways: either by directing the robots to feed the balls into corner pockets, where team members can pluck them out and toss them by hand into the funnel or by having the robots catapult the balls up into the funnels themselves.

Every team has an interest in filling the funnel: the more collected, the more everyone benefits.

But in the final 30 seconds of each session, after the frenetic quest to collect the balls, a second, cutthroat challenge awaits: Along the stem of each tower are short branches, or bars, at varying levels that the teams — choosing the mechanism of their choice such as hooks, winches or extendable arms — try to direct their robots to ascend.

The higher the level reached, the greater the “multiplier” of the total point value of the balls they will receive. Success is getting as high as possible, and with six teams on the field, it’s a dash for the highest perch.

By meshing competition with common interest, the “First Global” initiative aims to offer a tonic to a troubled world, where children look past politics to help solve problems that face everybody.

The opening-day ceremony had an Olympic vibe, with teams parading in behind their national flags, and short bars of national anthems playing, but the young people made it clear this was about a new kind of global high school sport, in an industrial domain that promises to leave a large footprint in the 21st century.

The competition takes many minds off troubles in the world, from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the fallout from Syria’s war, to famine in the Horn of Africa and the recent upheaval in Iran.

While most of the world’s countries were taking part, some – like Russia – were not.

Past winners of such robotics competitions include “Team Hope” — refugees and stateless others — and a team of Afghan girls.

Source: Voice of America

NEW YORK/GENEVA, 19 September 2022—At the Transforming Education Summit in New York it was announced that 12 African countries* have committed to Education Plus, a bold initiative to prevent HIV infections through free universal, quality secondary education for all girls and boys in Africa, reinforced through comprehensive empowerment programmes.

Speaking on the Leaders Day of the Summit on behalf of the Education Plus movement, the Executive Director of UNAIDS, Winnie Byanyima said, “School saves lives. We are coming together to champion the right for a girl to be in a classroom and in a safe classroom. Keeping girls in school helps ensure their rights and prevents HIV. We know that if a girl completes secondary education, the risk of infection reduces by 50%. That’s why we’ve teamed up with UNESCO, UNFPA, UNICEF and UN Women, with governments and with civil society, to champion the education and empowerment of adolescent girls in Africa to stop new HIV infections.”

Through Education Plus, champion countries across Africa are bringing sectors together to fight inequalities by ensuring access to and completion of secondary school, protecting girls and young women from HIV infection, sexual violence, teenage pregnancies and early marriages, and creating opportunities for access to education, health, and jobs.

Sierra Leone, an Education Plus champion, has been reforming its education system since 2018, enrolling an additional one million learners in four years. Speaking at the Summit President Julius Madda Bio said, “We have adopted a radical inclusion policy and have achieved gender parity in school enrollment. Girls can now be educated from primary through to university free of tuition fees, and pregnant girls can once again go to school. Education is not a luxury, it is a right. We must rally the international community behind the global initiatives being launched.”

International partners shared their backing for the initiative. Franz Fayot, Minister for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Affairs, Luxembourg said, “The risks of acquiring HIV and the challenges in accessing services in sub-Saharan Africa are very real and are compounded by stigma and discrimination, as well as legal and financial barriers. Financing to support education systems to deliver gender-transformative education is urgent. It will save lives and have a hugely positive impact on economies.”

Joyce Ouma, a young leader from the Education Plus hub, shared why young women’s movements are backing the initiative: “Some of us are still denied sexual and reproductive health information and services and sexuality education because of our age and this has a devasting impact on our lives. As young women living with HIV, we face discrimination, stigma and violence perpetrated within school environments and cannot easily seek essential medical care. Transforming education means we face these gloomy statistics head on. I urge leaders to listen and act on our collective concerns for better systems.”

UNAIDS latest report, In Danger, released in July this year showed that in sub-Saharan Africa 4 900 young women and girls (15-24 years old) acquired HIV every week in 2021. Once a person contracts HIV they require life-long treatment. In 2021 in sub-Saharan Africa, 22 000 adolescent girls and young women died of AIDS-related illnesses.

Fostering investments in access to health, education and jobs gives results. Girls—and their communities and countries—reap multiple social and economic benefits from their completion of secondary school. An extra year of secondary school can increase women’s wages by 15-25%. Educating adolescent girls and young women in Africa could add US$ 316 billion or 10% to GDP in the period to 2025 if each country makes advances in gender parity in schooling.

The United Nations Secretary-General recognized girls’ education and empowerment as crucial for development, “Girls’ education is among the most important steps to deliver peace, security, and sustainable development everywhere,” said Antonio Guterres.

Source: UNAIDS

NAIROBI — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Tuesday to raise concerns that tensions with neighboring Rwanda could spread instability in the region. Political analysts say the United States is also concerned about Russia and China’s access to rare earth minerals in the DRC.

The top priority during Blinken’s two-day stay to Congo is pushing for peace between the DRC and Rwanda, which Kinshasa accuses of backing militia groups.

Blinken is visiting the DRC as part of his second trip to Africa as the U.S. top diplomat. The trip follows a visit by his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, his first to Congo.

Analysts say the Cold War rivals are vying for influence in the DRC, which is marred with violence and conflict in its east because of the region’s rare minerals. Macharia Munene, an expert on international relations, said its part of a power play.

“The strategic resources, minerals and other critical ones that are used for industrial development as well as weaponry and technology, and Congo is extremely rich in these things so whoever can deny those things to other people becomes very powerful,” he said.

Munene said the conflicts in Congo are destabilizing the country along with neighboring Rwanda and by extension other nearby nations. He said the issue is one of concern to the United States.

“You never know who is going to come up and take advantage of the situation, to the detriment of the U.S. interest,” he said. “Now as [a] destabilizing force not just in eastern Congo but in Rwanda, maybe a bit of Burundi.”

Another top issue amid the long-standing rivalry between DRC and Rwanda is the re-emergence of M23 rebels. Kinshasa says Kigali is backing the rebels, but Rwanda has repeatedly denied the allegations. Congo’s army, along with a United Nations mission in Congo known as MONUSCO, defeated the M23 in 2013. In November of last year, its forces began to reappear.

Their reappearance is threatening human rights in Congo, according to the United Nations. Separately, Amnesty International’s advocacy director for Africa, Kate Hixon, said the U.S. should remain focused on rights issues.

“Blinken’s visit is a welcome engagement but only a few raise human rights issues with Congolese and Rwanda counterparts; the fact that it is Blinken’s second visit to the continent two years into his tenure demonstrates the importance of [the] DRC to the U.S. human rights policy,” she said.

Congolese officials say such high-profile visits to the DRC are raising hope that their country is beginning to attract developed nations. Congo’s presidential adviser, Jean Jacques Elaka, told VOA that such renewed interest could help Kinshasa get back on its feet.

“His coming shows Congo is beginning to be attractive; I can’t begin to mention leaders from nations all over the world who have visited Congo this year and last year. There were many,” Elaka said.

As part of hios Africa tour, Blinken is scheduled to visit Rwanda on Thursday. He has already visited South Africa on his trip.

Source: Voice of America

The tweeted invitation for a teach-in at Cornell University featured a photograph of “Pillar of Shame,” a sculpture that commemorates the deadly 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which authorities removed from Hong Kong University last year.

The topic: “Academic Freedom, Global Hubs and Cornell Involvement in the People’s Republic of China.”

The speakers: Three Cornell University academics with China-related specialties and Yaqiu Wang, a senior researcher on China at Human Rights Watch.

The event was organized as a rebuke to the university’s growing involvement in China and reflected a broader trend of calls for colleges and universities to cut ties with and divest from Chinese groups linked to human rights abuses. The call echoes past demands for universities to sell off investments in fossil fuels and apartheid-era South Africa.

Since last year, Cornell administrators have pushed the development of collaborative programs with Chinese universities. Despite students’ and professors’ concerns about China’s record of clamping down on academic freedom, Cornell, famous for its hospitality courses, moved ahead with a dual-degree program in hospitality and business, the Cornell-Peking MMH/MBA program. Graduates would earn a Master of Business Administration from the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University in Beijing and a Master of Management in Hospitality (MMH) from the Nolan School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University.

The Ivy League school in Ithaca, New York, also continues to expand a recently launched research exchange network with institutions from around the world. Named Global Hubs, the network includes six schools throughout China.

At the April 29 event, Eli Friedman, an associate professor and chair of international and comparative labor at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations School (ILR School), gave an overview of the history of U.S. university engagement in China, while Peidong Sun and TJ Hinrichs, both associate professors in Cornell’s history department, spoke on the state of academic freedom in China.

Richard Bensel, a Cornell professor of American politics and host of the teach-in, told VOA Mandarin that the event was intended not only “to review primarily Cornell’s involvement in the People’s Republic of China and academic freedom,” but also to convey “basic information on that involvement to the Cornell community.”

Wang spoke about censorship and self-censorship among overseas Chinese students.

She told VOA Mandarin that academic “programs in China are not the problem.” Rather she said, the problem is that they do not adhere to the same principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech that universities uphold in the U.S.

The Cornell conundrum

In July 2021, Cornell’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration and Peking University’s Guanghua School of Managementintroduced the Cornell-Peking MMH/MBA program, targeting mid- to senior-level executives in the hospitality and service industries.

Bensel and some other members of Cornell’s Faculty Senate expressed concern about the joint program. They feared that faculty members who traveled to China could get into legal trouble because of the country’s constrained academic environment. In 2018, Cornell’s IRL School suspended two exchange programs with China’s Renmin University because of academic freedom concerns, according to The Washington Post.

The Faculty Senate continues to suspect that the program’s real goal is not academic exchange but revenue generation for Cornell, according to transcripts of the senate meetings.

The dual-degree program is expected to bring in nearly $500,000 for Cornell starting in September 2022, with the potential to increase revenue as enrollment expands.

In March 2021, the Faculty Senate voted 39-16 against the proposed partnership with Peking University, according to the school’s newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun. However, the “sense of the senate” vote carries no legal imprimatur, so Cornell’s administration approved the project, according to a university press release dated May 28, 2021.

In fall 2021, the Cornell vice provost for international affairs, Wendy Wolford, presented another initiative to the faculty. Cornell planned to create a network, the Global Hubs, with top universities in countries that included China.

According to Faculty Senate records, many members worried that Cornell had not mentioned any standards or requirements regarding academic freedom and freedom of speech when selecting Global Hub partners.

In December, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution urging the administration to consult the senate before developing hubs in the future, senate records show.

The resolution in particular calls out Cornell’s continued expansion of collaboration in China.

Despite this resolution, the central administration continues to pursue the dual-enrollment project because, as Wolford said in an email to VOA Mandarin, “We at Cornell are very proud of our active international community and collaborations; these connections are particularly important at a time when some would suggest we turn inwards, building walls rather than bridges.”

Faculty members who supported the dual-degree program emphasized the importance of engaging with China, according to a Faculty Senate meeting transcript dated March 10, 2021.

“If you want to see change happen in China, engagements are the only way,” said Connie Yuan, a professor in the global development department. “Present the Chinese students alternatives, and let them decide if that’s the alternative that will work for them, and they are the person who decides which way to go.”

She also questioned whether the concerns about human rights abuses against the Uyghur minorities in China’s Xinjiang region, which were raised by professors who opposed the program, were influenced by what she called Western media bias.

“I think the Western news and Eastern news (are) biased,” she said, laying out another reason she voted for the program. “I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. And I think it’s Chinese government’s attempt to contain terrorism, but they may have gone a little bit too far.”

Push for divestment from China

Cornell faculty are not alone in their concerns about U.S. academia’s business ties with China. Since last year, faculty and students at several American universities have launched initiatives to have their schools audit China-related investments.

On April 26, Athenai Institute, a student-founded nonprofit pushing for U.S. universities to divest from China, tweeted an open letter to the presidents and governing boards of major public universities, calling for a break with China.

“We are asking you to take all possible steps to investigate your institution’s endowment, including the endowment of any institutionally related foundation, for ties to entities complicit in the genocide of Uyghurs, and to divest from any such holdings,” wrote the group.

U.S. politicians, including former undersecretary of state Keith Krach, have signed the letter.

John Metz, Athenai Institute’s executive director, said that other than moral reasons, universities should pull business ties from China for their own business interests, as investments in a country that is involved in human rights abuses could be subject to future sanctions.

Students from Georgetown University, George Washington University, the University of Virginia and the University of California, Los Angeles, are mobilizing toward divestment from China.

Metz told VOA Mandarin that “not only do (schools) have the potential to be leaders on this issue, but it also makes financial sense to avoid risk and to avoid involuntary divestment basically, and to avoid selling those investments after they’ve fallen 60 or 70%.”

In December, Catholic University of America’s administration began to independently examine its endowment for connections to the human rights abuses of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, according to the website The College Fix.

In January, Yale University’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility began to investigate potential investments in Chinese companies tied to human rights abuses, according to the Yale Daily News.

Metz told VOA Mandarin that the divestment movement is still in its early stage. But, he said, “We think divestment as a tactic has a lot of potential to extend beyond universities to other institutional investors, like pension funds, and ultimately to Wall Street.”

Source: Voice of America

YAOUNDE — Cameroon observed World Autism Awareness Day Saturday with rights groups advocating for autistic children to be given an education. Supporters say autistic children often can’t go to school because autism is falsely believed to be a result of witchcraft.

The Timely Performance Care Center, a school for disabled children in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, organized a campaign for parents and communities to stop the stigma that autistic kids often are subject to.

The center has an enrollment of 70 autistic children.

The school’s manager, Betty Nancy Fonyuy, said autistic children are frequently kept at home because of stigma. She said many communities and parents abuse the rights of autistic children by refusing to educate them or give them the freedom to socialize with other children.

“We want parents to accept the children that God has given them and to be able to educate the society that these children are not a form of divine punishment for witchcraft or a class of any evil thing. These children have a lot to offer to society if given a chance. Give them the chance. The world needs to know what autism is. Accept individuals born and living with autism,” she said.

Fonyuy said in January 2021, the center organized a door-to-door campaign to urge parents to send their autistic children to school. She said the response was encouraging, but that many parents still hide their autistic children at home.

To mark World Autism Awareness Day on Saturday, scores of community leaders, parents of autistic children and heads of educational establishments in Cameroon’s economic capital, Douala, emphasized at an event that autistic children, like any other children, need love, care and education.

Among the speakers was Carine Bevina, a psychologist at the University of Douala.

Bevina said parents should enroll their children in school because the parents would find it difficult to train their autistic children on their own. Bevina spoke by a messaging app from Douala.

She said autism level one means that a child needs regular attention and help to surmount difficulties initiating social interactions and maintaining reciprocity in social interactions. She said autism level two means that a child has repetitive behaviors and requires substantial support, and autism level three means the child’s communication skills are regressing.

Ndefri Paul, 45, is the father of an 11-year-old autistic child.

Paul said he came out on World Autism Awareness Day to tell anyone who doubted it that autistic children can compete with other children if well educated. He says in 2021, his autistic son, like many children without autism, wrote and passed the entrance examination to get into secondary school.

The educational talk at the Douala city council courtyard on Saturday was part of activities marking World Autism Awareness Day.

Similar activities were held in towns, including Bafoussam, a western commercial city, Garoua and Maroua on Cameroon’s northern border with Nigeria, and Yaounde.

Officials in Cameroon say there are 750,000 autistic children in the central African state. Sixty-five percent of them are denied education.

Cameroon’s Social Affairs minister, Pauline Irene Nguene, said communities should stop stigmatizing autistic children with the erroneous belief that autism is divine punishment for parents of autistic children. She said communities should denounce parents who hide autistic children at home and schools that refuse to teach children with the disorder.

The U.N. says that autism is genetic and families with one child with autism have an increased risk of having another child with autism. The U.N. says family members of a person with autism also tend to have higher rates of autistic traits.

World Autism Awareness Day celebrates the resilience of people affected by the disorder and supports causes that promote awareness of autism. Children in schools are educated about autism and encouraged to accept it. The U.N. launched World Autism Awareness Day for the first time in 2007.

Source: Voice of America

NEW HAVEN, CONN. — Entering Yale University’s St. Thomas More Catholic Chapel, Oksana Goroshchuk spotted sunflowers adorning a candlelit altar and thought of the fields full of her country’s national blossom near her grandmother’s home in Ukraine.

A mezzo-soprano launched into a traditional folk tune that Goroshchuk used to sing growing up, and the postdoctoral medical researcher broke down in tears of grief — and gratitude for the university community’s solidarity with her homeland.

“It’s people who support us and people who love us,” said Goroshchuk, 32, who was born in Kyiv and whose parents recently escaped the war-torn country.

Across the United States, campus ministries of different denominations are working to bring comfort to college students who, after two years of pandemic disruption and isolation, have been plunged deeper into feelings of crisis and helplessness by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

From Ivy League schools to public institutions to Catholic universities, they’re holding prayer vigils, organizing medical supply drives and staging emotional performances of sacred music. Chaplains say religious and nonreligious students alike, especially those with loved ones in war zones, urgently need a sense of community to help them cope.

“One of the best things we do in campus ministry is we foster community,” said Lisa Reiter, director of campus ministry at Loyola University Chicago.

At the Wednesday night peace concert and benefit at Yale, dozens of attendees gazed quietly at an image of a crucified Jesus Christ holding a dove, backlit by the blue and yellow of Ukraine’s flag. Cello suites, organ pieces, classical violin and piano melodies and a Ukrainian Orthodox chant echoed through the chapel.

“There’s this mass movement by Russia to take away lives of Ukrainians. But they can’t take away the culture, and they can’t take away the language or the song,” said Sofiya Bidochko, a 19-year-old Yale student from Lviv, Ukraine. “I feel the importance of preserving my Ukrainian-ness when I hear these songs.”

To the north at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, the campus’ Hillel organization recently welcomed several Ukrainian students to a Shabbat dinner, where they supped on matzo ball soup and deli sandwiches. The Jewish group’s members listened to their guests talk about their homes and families and promised to support them.

“It was just nice to have this bit of community,” said Yevheniia, a 20-year-old student who came to the dinner even though she was baptized Orthodox Christian and considers herself agnostic.

She asked that her last name be withheld to protect her parents — they live in an area in eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed separatists and recently messaged her to say they were going to a bomb shelter.

Also this month, at the University of Rhode Island, an interfaith peace vigil drew people from Christian, Muslim, Jewish and other faiths together in prayer. A Buddhist chaplain struck a Tibetan singing bowl to mark a moment of silence for those suffering and killed in Ukraine.

Organizers stressed the importance of not only making divine appeals but carrying out concrete, earthly action, and provided resources for students to do so.

“Prayer alone is not enough,” said Amy Olson, chair of the university’s Chaplains Association and executive director of its Hillel group. “We really put an emphasis on ways that people could either make charitable donations or contribute funds to help the cause, how they could write to their politicians or offer support to the Ukrainian community locally.”

A similar solidarity vigil was held at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. And at Loyola University Chicago, the campus ministry partnered with the newly recreated Ukrainian student club to stage a drive that collected 60 tons of medical supplies for war relief.

Campus ministers at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, have been collecting money for humanitarian aid at religious services and say some $700 was put in collection baskets at Ash Wednesday Masses alone. A kiosk has also been set up with a scannable QR code for online donations.

The school is home to many Somali American students who attended a recent prayer for peace. As the children of refugees or refugees themselves, they have seen firsthand the horrors of war and “get shaken by” seeing them repeated in Ukraine, Muslim chaplain Sadaf Shier said.

Many chaplains said that remote education and a lack of socializing and shared rituals during the pandemic have frayed the social fabric that would normally help assuage the struggles and anxiety of students, some of whom worry the hostilities in Ukraine could spill beyond borders and ignite a World War III.

That means their mission has changed, becoming less focused on just worship and more on helping young adults re-engage with each other and the world. Often that entails channeling their concern into charitable action.

“Students have been trying to figure out what to do,” said Sister Jenn Schaaf, assistant Catholic chaplain at Yale.

The mezzo-soprano whose performance at Yale moved Goroshchuk to tears was Karolina Wojteczko, a native of Poland who recently graduated from the university and now serves as music director at St. Thomas More.

Wojteczko was inspired to organize the concert by the distress she has noticed among both Eastern European and American friends. That included Russians, who she said are being “shunned from the communities right now.” One student with family in both Ukraine and Russia confessed to feeling utterly lost.

The concert has helped people unite, cope and heal.

“After COVID everyone has been so separated,” Wojteczko said, “and this is … a way to just sit there and be, and participate, and feel that you are connected to people who need help in the world.”

Source: Voice of America

YAOUNDE, CAMEROON — Teachers in Cameroon are refusing to work, citing unpaid salaries, some dating back years. Government-led negotiations Tuesday failed to reach an agreement, putting the education of hundreds of thousands of children on hold.

Students at Government Bilingual High School Deido in the city of Douala sing that the government should pay their teachers so children have access to education.

In the song, the children say their dreams of becoming government ministers, doctors, journalists and entrepreneurs will be shattered if the government fails to listen to teachers.

Architect David Muluh has three children in the school. He says he visited the school on Wednesday to find out why teachers come to school but refuse to teach and “because of COVID, children have not been regular in school. If they continue losing [education] because their teachers are on strike, the children’s future is jeopardized. So, my plea is that the government should look into their problems.”

Muluh said school attendance in Cameroon has not been regular since the central African state reported its first cases of COVID-19 in March 2020.

He said during the Africa Football Cup of Nations, which Cameroon hosted last month, the government interrupted classes so students could fill empty football stadiums. He said children have no time to waste if they are to prepare for this year’s final examinations, expected in May.

Ten Cameroon teachers’ associations and unions last week announced a strike against what they call the disrespect of teachers by the government.

The teachers say the monthly salaries of primary school teachers should be increased from about $150 to at least $400. They are also asking the salaries of secondary school teachers to be increased from about $400 to at least $800.

Valentine Tameh, president of the Teachers’ Association of Cameroon, says his colleagues are particularly angry because the government has recruited more teachers than it can pay and now owes several years of unpaid salaries.

“You have teachers who have gone for 9 years, 10 years, without salaries and the government has kept promising and kept promising and promising and what is most irksome is that those who have money, go and give bribes and they have their arrears, they have their salaries.”

The sides negotiated Tuesday, and the government promised to look into the teachers’ grievances and pay the outstanding salaries of at least 17,000 teachers, though it did not say when.

A statement from Fouda Seraphin Magloire, secretary general of the prime minister’s office, said the teachers agreed to suspend the strike.

Geography instructor Appolinnaire Ze, a spokesman for the disgruntled teachers, says the teachers agreed to no such thing.

Ze says all teachers should go to school, but should not teach. He says school children should be calm and understand that teachers are going through a very difficult time. Ze says teachers should be humble but courageous to ask intimidating police and government officials if the police and government officials can also work for so many years without being paid.

The government denies that its officials and the police are trying to intimidate the teachers.

Source: Voice of America

GENEVA — Aggressive marketing practices by formula milk companies undermine women’s confidence, discouraging them from breastfeeding their babies, a World Health Organization-U.N. Children’s Fund study reports.

Some 8,500 parents and pregnant women and 300 health workers in cities across eight countries were surveyed over a three-year period. The report reveals six of the world’s leading manufacturers of baby formula products engaged in systematic and unethical marketing strategies. All are in breach of international standards on infant feeding practices.

World Health Organization scientist and a lead author of the report, Nigel Rollins, said more than half of parents and pregnant women report being bombarded with messages about the benefits of formula milk. He told VOA industry claims are largely misleading and of dubious scientific veracity.

“There are many, many examples of how, for example, they see scientific terms being used,” he said. “Where there are scientific claims in terms of packaging, claims that it will improve brain development, that it will improve growth, that it will improve immunity. Even during the time of COVID.”

Rollins said there is no evidence to substantiate those assertions, but new parents may have difficulty judging the truthfulness of marketing claims. He said they want the best for their babies and are vulnerable to messages that promise solutions to day-to-day problems.

The survey was conducted in Bangladesh, China, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Britain and Vietnam. In those countries, between 49 percent and 98 percent of women surveyed expressed a strong desire to breastfeed their babies exclusively. However, the report says misleading marketing messages reinforce the difficulties of nursing, undermining women’s confidence in their ability to breastfeed successfully.

The WHO/UNICEF study notes global breastfeeding rates have increased very little in the past two decades. During the same period, sales of formula milk have more than doubled.

Rollins said the health consequences for infants and babies who are not fed with mothers’ milk are serious, especially in low-income countries.

“But, in fact, breastfeeding has a protective effect against mortality even in high-income settings,” he said. “But the impact on lifelong health — so, if you think about things like child obesity and child development and maternal health, risk of cancer — those are true for both children and mothers in every setting.”

The report says the baby feeding industry uses promotional gifts, commissions from sales and other inducements to entice health workers in all countries to persuade new mothers to buy their products.

The baby formula industry did not respond in advance of the report, which mentions no company by name. VOA will seek comment from the industry as soon as possible.

The WHO, UNICEF and partners are calling on governments to adopt legislation to end exploitative marketing practices. In addition, they said these laws must be enforced to ensure that the $55 billion industry abides by the landmark 1981 International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes.

Source: Voice of America

ACCRA, GHANA — Ghana is normally seen as a beacon of press freedom in West Africa, where some governments keep a tight control on the media. But press freedom advocates note an alarming surge recently in arrests and assaults on journalists.

Activists are raising questions as to whether Ghana is returning to the days where criminal libel laws were used to suppress free speech.

Two journalists were arrested last month after alleging the first lady acquired state land to build a personal home. Another was arrested after accusing the president of influencing the decisions of judges in electoral petitions.

All three were accused of publishing fake news, and they could face time in prison if convicted.

Sulemana Braimah, the executive director of Media Foundation for West Africa, tells VOA the state is hiding behind the police to criminalize free speech.

“I don’t think that if the president is fundamentally opposed to something it will happen, unless of course he is constrained or restrained by law. I believe that criminalizing speech in the manner that we’re seeing it is fundamentally detrimental to our democracy,” Braimah noted.

He also says the government should give greater powers to the National Media Commission, the agency tasked to regulate and monitor the media, if it wants to assert more control of the airwaves.

“I think as a country we need to revisit that conversation about empowering the National Media Commission. The other thing is about the broadcasting law, two decades on we’ve been talking. I think that if the government is indeed interested in sanitizing the airwaves what we must be seeing is a very committed strong effort at getting the broadcasting law passed. So that at least people will know that we have to operate within certain confines.”

Palgrave Boakye-Danquah, a government spokesperson on security and governance, tells VOA News the state sees the media as a partner in development and will never criminalize free speech.

But, he adds, officials are concerned about the abuse of freedom of expression in the media. He says the journalists who accused the president and his wife of wrongdoing had no evidence.

“It’s clearly the rule of law that is working. It’s quite unfortunate that people are abusing the freedom of speech, which as a government, we’re concerned about, and as a government, as well, we’re not trampling upon the freedom of people.”

He said the media should operate without fear or favor – but he said reporters must be responsible in their reporting.

“The president is very confident with freedom of speech, supports freedom of speech and encourages Ghanaians to have constructive criticism of government. I think that if you’re against government, there is a civil way to go about it.”

Police did not respond to requests to comment on the recent arrests of media personalities.

Source: Voice of America