Development

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering November 25 to December 2, was compiled with support from Becky Allen, Anne Connell, and Lauren Hoffman. Upheaval in South Korea Public protests in South Korea grew this week as the parliament delayed discussions of the potential impeachment of President Park Guen-Hye, the first woman ever elected president of that country and the first female president of any northeast Asian nation. Thousands of protesters demanded that Park step down due to her role in a corruption scandal involving the daughter of a controversial spiritual leader who reportedly received access to state documents and extorted money from major companies. While Park Geun-Hye cannot be indicted while holding the office of the presidency, she was officially identified as a criminal suspect in the case. She apologized publicly for her role in the alleged misdeeds, suggesting this week that she was willing to tender her resignation before her term ends in February 2018. Park gave no possible date for her resignation, and members of her party have suggested that any impeachment vote be delayed until December 9. The Constitutional Court may take up to six months to decide whether or not to ratify the vote. Women’s political leadership in Kuwait Only one woman out of fifteen female candidates running for office was elected to Kuwait’s sixty-five member parliament last weekend. Safa Al Hashem, the founder of a Kuwait-based consulting company—who won Female CEO of the Year in 2007 at the CEO Middle East Awards in Dubai—was re-elected for the third time to the nation’s legislature. Despite Al Hashem’s political success, women continue to be sidelined in Kuwaiti politics and relatively few women exercise the right to vote. While women obtained the right to run in national elections in 2005, not a single woman was elected to the country’s parliament until four women won seats in a landmark 2009 election. Subsequently, women held three seats in 2012 and one seat in 2013. With Al Hashem again serving as Kuwait’s only female parliamentarian, women compose just 1.5 percent of Kuwait’s parliament, landing the oil-rich constitutional monarchy in the bottom ten ranking countries in the world in terms of women’s parliamentary participation. UK efforts to combat violence against women To mark the internationally-recognized Day to Eliminate Violence Against Women, the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) announced a new package of financial support to protect up to 500,000 women and girls in the world’s poorest countries from violence and harmful traditional practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage. One in three women around the world experiences violence in her lifetime, which is not only a gross human rights violation, but incurs high economic costs: recent studies estimate that the cost of such violence could amount to 5 percent of the global economy. Members of the Labour Party also drew attention to the prevalence of violence against women within their own country, where an average of two women are killed by a current or former partner each week. Labour politicians called on the government to introduce relevant anti-violence education in schools and requested that DFID further increase the proportion of aid that goes directly to women’s groups abroad. Despite these efforts, the UK government—like the U.S.—has yet to ratify the Istanbul Convention on combating violence against women and girls.  

Emerging Voices highlights new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges from contributing scholars and practitioners. This post is from Niklas Kossow, communications officer for the European Union FP7 ANTICORRP project and the European Research Centre for Anti-Corruption and State-Building.  In this post, he considers the challenge of designing evidence-based reforms and measuring success in global development, and describes a new approach to objective measurement in the field of anticorruption and good governance: the Index of Public Integrity. In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly passed the sustainable development goals (SDGs) that will define the direction of global development for years to come. Among the seventeen goals that aim to end poverty, reduce inequality, and ensure quality education and healthcare, is Goal 16—a commitment to encouraging good governance. To achieve this, Goal 16 sets twelve specific targets, including promoting the rule of law, ensuring inclusive decision-making, and fighting corruption and bribery. Good governance as a UN goal would have been a surprise just a few years ago, but its addition to the development agenda reflects the increasing recognition that it affects economic growth, a functioning civil service, and development outcomes, such as better healthcare. In a corrupt system, development aid rarely ends up with those who need it the most. But measuring good governance—and especially corruption—is difficult, for the SDGs and more broadly. Existing indices, such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) and the World Bank’s Control of Corruption indicator (CoC), are perceptions-based surveys that ask experts and citizens to estimate how much corruption exists in a specific country. Though they have successfully raised awareness of corruption as a global problem and informed the policy debate, they are deeply flawed as corruption measures. As indices that aggregate expert opinions into a single country score, the individual factors experts use to make their judgements about corruption levels are hard to identify. And because these factors are unclear, policymakers are given little guidance as to how to better control corruption and ultimately, improve governance. Additionally, these types of assessments are highly subjective and influenced by recent events. Countries can end up with worse CPI scores after a major corruption scandal is uncovered, or the government begins fighting graft, even though these likely signal a country is getting better at controlling corruption, not worse. With these shortcomings in mind, the European Research Centre for Anti-Corruption and State-Building (ERCAS) developed a new way to measure corruption: the Index of Public Integrity (IPI). Developed as part of a five-year anticorruption research project funded by the European Commission, and focused on building objective and actionable data, the IPI uses the following six indicators that have proven crucial in fighting corruption: Administrative burden: measures the time and number of procedures it takes to start a business and the time and effort it takes to pay taxes; Trade openness: measures the number of documents and the time required to complete import and export procedures; Budget transparency: assesses the transparency of an executive’s budget proposal and how easily available it is to citizens; e-citizenship: looks at the number of internet users, broadband subscriptions, and Facebook users in each country; Freedom of the press: measures press freedom based on country scores in Freedom House’s annual Freedom of the Press report. Empirical research, led by Prof. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi of the Hertie School of Governance, has shown that these six institutional features can either enable or constrain corruption. High administrative burdens, trade barriers, and a lack of budget transparency reflect the “supply side,” giving public officials the opportunity to tap state budgets and extort money from citizens. Judicial independence, freedom of the press, and e-citizenship can affect the “demand side”—constraining corruption by empowering oversight of independent institutions and citizens, and bringing corrupt officials to account. This new set of indicators also helps policymakers identify areas where countries are performing badly, and where specific reform efforts are needed. For example, the IPI shows that Chile is doing fairly well overall—ranked 26 out of 105 countries globally, and second among its Latin America and Caribbean neighbors. Yet it lags on budget transparency, coming in at 83 out of 105. And Slovakia, ranked 33 out of 105, falls down on judicial independence—coming in at 92 out of 105. The IPI’s nuance gives governments willing to tackle corruption a roadmap to do so. It can more accurately show what progress countries have made, and whether certain policies helped or failed. For development professionals, these more actionable, objective metrics can help the international community design better policies to meet the SDGs’ targets and goals.

The Five Questions Series is a forum for scholars, government officials, civil society leaders, and foreign policy practitioners to provide timely analysis of new developments related to the advancement of women and girls worldwide. This interview is with Dr. Holly G. Atkinson, Distinguished Medical Lecturer at the CUNY School of Medicine and Assistant Clinical Professor of Medical Education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Judith Bruce, senior associate and policy analyst at the Population Council. Atkinson and Bruce are members of the Girls in Emergencies Collaborative, a multi-organization effort anchored by Omar Robles and Dale Buscher at the Women’s Refugee Commission to address the elevated risks adolescent girls face during humanitarian emergencies. What are the aims of the Girls in Emergencies Collaborative (GIEC)? HOLLY: The central concern of the Girls in Emergencies Collaborative is that many girls—the poorest of the poor—are already living in a “state of emergency.”  They suffer a number of abuses in their normative experiences: forced and child marriage, adolescent pregnancy, sexual violence, and disproportionately high HIV/AIDS infection rates, for example. That is the baseline. And then if a disruptive force of a humanitarian emergency is added, it compounds these issues several-fold. When the humanitarian aid community addresses girls’ needs, if at all, they address them way too late in the emergency cycle, usually after the worst abuses occur to the least visible young adolescents. JUDITH: A fundamental thesis is that investment in adolescent girls is core to addressing intergenerational poverty and all of its elements, including fertility, maternal and child health, disease burden, disease management, justice, education, sustainable livelihoods—keeping in mind that a high and likely rising proportion of adolescent girls will be sole or substantial support to themselves as well as younger and older dependents. Current strategies fail to reach adolescent girls, especially the poorest girls in the poorest communities, despite the fact that girls mediate the scarcities exacerbated by conflict, which may be driven or accelerated by a drought or scarcity. Take a slow-moving health emergency, like HIV: in high HIV-burden countries more than 60 percent of adolescent girls will be single mothers at some point in their reproductive lives. Or fast-moving health emergencies like a natural geologic disaster, or a cholera or Ebola epidemic: in Ebola zones, 75 to 90 percent of girls will be single mothers. Girls’ poverty is driven by exclusion from economic resources while they are at the same time heavily responsible for providing for their families. This happens with increased velocity in emergencies. An adolescent girl carrying wood walks near debris after Hurricane Matthew passed, in Camp Perrin, Haiti, October 8, 2016. REUTERS/Andres Martinez Casares How are adolescent girls particularly vulnerable in the different types of crises that arise from conflict and disaster, from Haiti’s 2010 earthquake or the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew, to the global refugee crisis we currently face? HOLLY: We focused our recent work on adolescent girls particularly in the realm of climate emergencies because now—and this is a stunning figure—climate-related events account for nearly 80 percent of the increase in humanitarian emergencies. But whether we are talking about displacement due to conflict or natural disaster, when we talk to families in camps, a father will say that he wants a daughter to marry early because of the threat of sexual violence; he would rather marry her off at young age for her “protection.” Of course, if refugee camps were safer and the humanitarian aid community changed their modus operandi to acknowledge the economic and scarcity drivers of girls exploitation—inside or outside of marriage—and assure their safe access to food, water, and services early in any response, we might help families make better decisions. JUDITH: In terms of the typology of natural disasters, there are some that are reoccurring climate-based events, such as coastal flooding. One of the things we recommend in our paper is that places with reoccurring disasters can be mapped. Take Bangladesh: we included in our paper reference to an interesting study that our colleague Sajeda Amin did, which disaggregated the effects of seasonal flooding and found that in the places where the families are displaced, girls may be married at younger ages as a compensation to the economic losses of displacement. Young girls are in effect a vital credit card for their families. Thus the first 45 days after a disaster hits are crucial, because many decisions about infrastructure and services are made during that early period that are meant to be temporary but frame the often “permanentized” emergency. These decisions can seriously undermine girls’ safe access to vital services. Why aren’t adolescent girls typically a targeted, high-risk group in humanitarian relief efforts during the immediate aftermath of an emergency?  JUDITH: It is absolutely in part due to the invisibility of their crucial role in family management and a disconnect between humanitarian relief and development. The vulnerability profile applied at registration in a refugee camp, for example, may overlook girls, and data is either not disaggregated or is analyzed too late to shape consequential early interventions. Boutique programs do not meet the need: for example, in a camp in Jordan that houses 120,000 people, respondents to our survey said that programs were reaching 300 girls. Simple demographics suggest that 15 percent of almost any population are adolescent girls. So 300 girls out of 18,000 reached in three different sites is hardly coverage.  Programming for girls in relief efforts reaches too few girls with too little content too late. HOLLY: Even in the short term, when the humanitarian aid infrastructure group moves in, their attention to adolescent girls either doesn’t exist or their actions are too late. One of the reasons why we created the GIEC is because, even despite rhetoric about gender-sensitive development, in fact it’s not happening. Or, again, it’s happening so late that the terrible things we’ve already enumerated have already happened to the girls. They’ve been married. They’ve been taken out school. They’ve suffered several forms of sexual violation. They may have already contracted HIV/AIDS. It’s way too late by day 90 or day 120 of an emergency. And this issue—paying attention to adolescent girls—is important not only because they are one of the most highly vulnerable populations but also because, paradoxically, they are one of the most promising populations to pay attention to because of their resiliency and potential to contribute to the recovery process. How can governments and donors more strategically invest in adolescent girls when emergency hits? HOLLY: Better data, asset investment, and funds and authority in the hands of on-the-ground program staff to field pilot programs. We need data because you can’t protect and offer girls safety if you don’t know who they are and where they are. If we don’t measure things, we’re not going to be able to move the ball forward. We need not only sex-disaggregated data, but we also need it in more finely-drawn age categories: a 10-to-12-year old is dramatically different from a 15-year old, who is different than a 19-year old. Donors and governments should start to use disaggregated data and fund and empower emergency staff to set up programs rapidly, including thinking about what roles can girls take in recovery processes. Donors and governments should give girls safe access to infrastructure, livelihood training, schooling, and health services. We need funding for pilot projects that give latitude to succeed, or not succeed, and give frontline workers learning tools and resources to share experiences. Can you describe how findings from pilot programs can be used to better meet the needs of adolescent girls in future emergencies? JUDITH: Pilot programs need running room, particularly in the chaotic early days of an emergency. Could we give girls 10 to 19 all orange bracelets and call a girls-only meeting as soon as they enter a camp? In Zaatari camp in Jordan, for instance, imagine that all the girls with orange bracelets are called to such a meeting, rather to a homogenized “child friendly space.” If there can’t be a girls’ tent with an orange flag, the child space could have girls’ sessions separate from boys’ sessions, given that boys have much more access to space and meet-ups with their peers. Girls could be given their own food ration cards. And imagine if solar lanterns are distributed through the girls’ groups. At a meeting of the Girls in Emergencies Collaborative in Jordan co-hosted by the Women’s Refugee Committee and the Population Council, our colleague Omar Robles presented a case example of working with program staff of the Danish Refugee Council in Tripoli, Lebanon, walking the terrain using a tool called Girl Roster to define the community in which the Syrian girls were concentrated. The team inventoried each household in ten-minute interviews and generated quick estimates of the total number of girls by age, those in school or out of school, at grade level for age or not, living with two, one, or no parents. All girls were placed into one or more categories. The finding was that the majority of girls are “off track.” They are either not in school, they are off grade level, or something else, like early marriage, has happened. They’re short of basic entitlements. The same tool can also be used to learn who is covered by core programs. The finding is typically that there is a skewing of benefits to the better-off. This kind of inquiry has been conducted by the Haitian Adolescent Girls Network with support of UNFPA in the post-earthquake areas of Haiti and soon in the hurricane-affected zones. In one program in South Sudan, to give another example, Omar worked in a resettlement area after the first wave of the renewed civil war. He asked the camp leadership about the population before the Girl Roster inventory was used. Camp leadership projected that 10 percent of girls were out of school. But at the end of two-day field work, the team discovered that the actual number was 45 percent. Now that’s important for two reasons: first, it is a very high proportion. But second is that it affected programmatic decisions: services, food supplements, and vital information about vaccines were being delivered through school. The Girl Roster tool enables staff to start to “see” the girls. The information gathered is fairly contemporaneous and the tool can be implemented by the staff actually on the ground, with the day-to-day responsibility to act.   Learn more about the GIEC: Atkinson H.G. and Bruce J. Adolescent Girls, Human Rights and the Expanding Climate Emergency. Annals of Global Health 2015; 81(3):323-330. http://www.annalsofglobalhealth.org/article/S2214-9996(15)01219-9/fulltext The Girls in Emergencies Collaborative, Statement and Action Agenda from the Girls in Emergencies Collaborative. Annals of Global Health 2015; 81(3). http://www.annalsofglobalhealth.org/article/S2214-9996(15)01220-5/pdf.  

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering from November 18 to November 24, was compiled with support from Becky Allen and Anne Connell. Violence against women in Turkey Turkey’s parliament introduced and then quickly withdrew legislation last week that would have pardoned men convicted of raping underage girls if they married their victims. Turkey’s government said the proposed amnesty would have applied to at least 3,800 men currently in prison due to crimes committed against young women and girls. The bill, proposed by Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), generated nationwide public protests by women across Turkish society and underscored international fears about regression of human rights in the country.  The legislation prompted condemnation by the United Nations, with officials noting that the bill, if passed, would “create a perception of impunity in favor of perpetrators of such child rights violations.” Human rights groups also argued that the proposal would legitimize the practice of child marriage, which persists with especially high rates in rural areas: data collected last year found that fifteen percent of all Turkish marriages involved one partner under the legal age of consent.  After a national outcry, the bill was sent back to a parliamentary subcommittee for revision. Abuse of civilians in Mosul Hundreds of women who fled Mosul for aid camps have shared new reports of violence and repression suffered under the rule of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. The women are among the more than 50,000 civilians who have fled Mosul since U.S.-supported Iraqi and Kurdish forces launched an offensive to retake the city last month. Dozens of women in the camps recounted living like prisoners in Mosul for more than two years under a system that forced them to abandon higher education, quit jobs, comply with a strict dress code, and suffer public lashings. “The message was that women were not wholly human—they need a male guardian for everything,” said one sixteen-year-old survivor who attended an Islamic State-run high school. Other women were compelled to join the Khansaa Brigade, the all-female morality police tasked with enforcing extremists’ harsh policies. Some women, particularly those from the persecuted Yazidi religious group, were held in captivity and forced into marriages. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power lauded the courage of these women, stressing that their “resilience [is] remarkable” despite the horrific conditions they faced. HIV/AIDS prevalence in Africa A new UNAIDS report suggests that the rate of HIV/AIDS infection among young African women is alarmingly high and likely to rise. While the number of HIV-infected people taking anti-retroviral (ARV) medicines around the world has doubled in just five years, adolescent girls in southern Africa are one demographic group that has been left behind. Data show that in southern Africa, girls aged between 15 and 19 years old account for 90 percent of all new HIV infections among adolescents; in eastern Africa, they represent 74 percent of new infections. The report found that preventing infection is particularly difficult in this age group, as girls are often unaware they are at risk and lack autonomous access to education and health services. UNAIDS chief Michel Sidibe suggested at the report’s launch that adolescent girls face a triple threat: “They are at high risk of HIV infection, have low rates of HIV testing, and have poor adherence to treatment. The world is failing young women and we urgently need to do more.”

The U.S. House of Representatives just signaled its commitment to women and girls globally. It took a historic step last week by passing the Women, Peace, and Security Act (H.R. 5332), which pledges that the United States act as a “global leader” in advancing the participation of women in preventing and resolving conflicts. The bipartisan legislation would require the United States to develop a government-wide strategy—including new efforts to train its personnel, consult with stakeholders on the ground, and coordinate with partners—in order to increase women’s participation in peace and security processes. As research shows, these steps would help the United States increase the effectiveness of its own security efforts and would set an example for others, contributing to more durable peace and security processes around the world. The House’s commitment reflects a growing body of research suggesting that the inclusion of women in peace and security processes could reduce conflict and improve stability. For example, one study found that peace agreements are 35 percent more likely to last at least 15 years when women participate in negotiations. At a hearing in March, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA), reflected on “the lives saved and economies maintained by a 35 percent decrease in repeated conflicts,” adding that, “simply put, when women are at the negotiating table, success is more likely.” Her Excellency Monica McWilliams, Irish peace activist; Hassan Abbas, professor at the National Defense University; and Jacqueline O’Neill, director of The Institute for Inclusive Security, offer testimony at a March 2015 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing "Women Fighting for Peace: Lessons for Today’s Conflicts." Inclusive Security/Allison Muehlenbeck A recent Council on Foreign Relations publication, How Women’s Participation in Conflict Prevention and Resolution Advances U.S. Interests, presents the quantitative and qualitative evidence for this claim. From moderating violent extremism to negotiating peace agreements to making security forces more effective, women provide distinct contributions that improve peace and security processes. Research shows that women successfully disseminate antiterrorism messages throughout families and communities, and that, when they serve as security sector officials, they have access to venues and populations that men do not, allowing them to gather additional intelligence on security risks. Research also shows that, when women were involved in a negotiation process, parties were more likely to initiate talks and reach an agreement, and that, when women participate politically and socially in post-conflict societies, the chance of conflict relapse is diminished. While more and more international leaders recognize women’s roles in security, female participation in peace and security processes remains low. Women served as less than 4 percent of signatories to peace agreements and 9 percent of negotiators between 1992 and 2011, and, in 2015, represented only 3 percent of UN military peacekeepers and 10 percent of UN police personnel. In the U.S. government, women represent 20 percent of the Defense Department’s officer corps, but hold less than 10 percent of leadership positions. Meanwhile, they represent one-third of senior foreign service officers at the State Department, and hold nearly half of mid- and senior-level management positions at USAID. With research showing that standard peacemaking methods would more effectively address current security challenges if women are included, promoting the participation of women in conflict prevention and resolution merits a higher place on the U.S. agenda. The House-passed Women, Peace, and Security Act would do just that. The bill was reintroduced in June with bipartisan support by Congresswoman Kristi Noem (R-SD), Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA), and Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Eliot Engel (D-NY). If enacted into law, it would require the president to submit a government-wide strategy (which would build on the existing National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security), and to report regularly on progress. It would also require U.S. defense, diplomatic, and development personnel to receive training on effective strategies and best practices to ensure the meaningful participation of women in peace and security processes. In addition, U.S. personnel overseas would be required to consult with local women leaders and other stakeholders on peace and security, and to coordinate with partners across foreign governments and intergovernmental bodies to advance these goals. It is now up to the Senate to help make the Women, Peace, and Security Act into law. The conversation is underway, with a similar bill introduced in January by Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Mark Kirk (R-IL), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH). Urgent action is required if the bill is to pass during this session. Successive Republican and Democratic administrations have recognized that women’s participation in security efforts advances stability at home and abroad. Congress is now signaling that it considers women’s participation in peace and security to be a central component of U.S. foreign policy. If Congress passes the Women, Peace, and Security Act, it would position the United States to make smarter investments in preventing conflict and building peace, and thereby save lives and resources around the world.  

Rachel Brown is a research associate for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the first part of a series on migration trends in China and India. Each minute, an estimated thirty Indians migrate from the countryside into cities. By 2050, as a result of this migration, Indian cities will house more than 800 million residents, many of them young people in search of work. However, the Indian government is ill-prepared to absorb this burgeoning youth population into cities and address their needs. Traditionally, Indian leaders resisted large-scale development of cities and the nation’s urbanization rate lagged behind those of other developing nations. Despite the large projected increase in movement to cities, the share of India’s population living in cities in 2015 was just 33 percent, while in China it hit 56 percent. A recent study also found that Indians move to urban areas less frequently than their counterparts in other large developing nations such as Indonesia, despite a higher rural-urban wage gap. (Although estimates differ markedly on rural-urban wage gaps across nations, and other studies report a higher gap in China.) But with India confronting predictions of an increasingly urban future, Indian policymakers must formulate a new response. Some have suggested that to handle greater flows of workers to cities, India should examine China’s hukou system, which attempts to control migration by distinguishing between residents based on their place of household registration. However, “looking to the east for lessons on labour” by studying the hukou system, as a blog from the Indian newspaper the Hindu recently suggested, would be ill-advised. Instead, policymakers should examine three areas that could help prepare cities to reap the benefits of greater urbanization and internal migration. 1. Increasing Investment in Urban Infrastructure When adequately financed, cities can offer an array of economic and environmental benefits such as reduced strain on resources, greater innovation, and improved delivery of services. Historically, however, India has underinvested in its cities – whether in housing, transportation, sewage, or other services. As of 2010, while China was spending $116 per urban resident on infrastructure each year, India was spending just $17. And while China built out (at times to excess) housing and transportation capacity in cities in anticipation of future growth, India did the reverse. This underinvestment led to situations like the sprawling slums that house over 50 percent of Mumbai’s population and the recurring water shortages that plagued twenty-two out of thirty-two major Indian cities in 2013. However, signs of a new commitment to cities are emerging. President Modi pledged to reduce slums by constructing twenty million homes under his ambitious “Housing for All” program and to build one hundred “smart cities” outfitted with new technology. If fully executed, these initiatives will help alleviate some of the pressure on city services created by greater urbanization. 2. Altering Incentives to Remain in the Countryside Currently, development policies focused on rural areas make it more economically appealing for many individuals to stay in the countryside. For example, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee provides a hundred days of paid labor for each rural household, which individuals may not want to sacrifice to move to a city with uncertain job prospects. To get the best of both worlds, many engage in short-term circular migration between cities and villages so they can earn urban wages and also preserve access to the protections of agricultural work and rural social insurance networks. Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava of Mumbai’s Institute of Urbanology argue that going forward India should embrace this pattern of urbanization and encourage the growth of smaller cities. The Indian government could also consider delinking work guarantees from household location. 3. Reducing Internal Migration Hurdles Finally, while India lacks formal legal restrictions on migration akin to the hukou system, informal social prejudices nonetheless deter some workers from moving. The Indian constitution enshrines citizens’ freedom to move to and settle in any part of the country, but when individuals do move to cities they often face discrimination based on religion, language, caste and provincial identity. Experts have even compared the caste system to the hukou system as a form of social exclusion that limits labor mobility. Compounding the problem is the fact that laws to protect migrant rights are not been well enforced. Additionally, like rural hukou holders Indian internal migrants frequently confront marginalization in accessing entitlements due to their identity documentation or lack thereof. However, the Aadhar program, which assigns every Indian a unique identification number, could remedy this since individuals can use the number to access food rations and other entitlements no matter their location. As India considers future internal migration policies, the “lesson from the east” should not be to study the hukou system and try to deter people from moving, but instead to design urbanization policies able to accommodate them when they do. Programs such as Aadhar and “Housing for All” offer promising steps in that direction; if India’s future is truly urban, similar projects will need to follow.

France’s Anticorruption Reforms After years of criticism for failing to prosecute foreign bribery, France adopted a new anticorruption law that will force companies doing business on its soil to take more aggressive preventative measures, and also gives the government stronger tools to fight corruption. The Sapin II law—named for French Finance Minister Michel Sapin—makes compliance programs mandatory for companies with over 500 employees and €100 million in revenue, and creates a new anticorruption agency that can impose fines up to €200,000 for individuals and €1 million for companies that fail to comply. Sapin II also expands whistleblower protections (though some say they do not go far enough), and introduces deferred prosecution agreements similar to those used by the U.S. Department of Justice—allowing prosecutors to fine companies for wrongdoing without a criminal conviction. These changes should help France make good on its OECD Anti-Bribery Convention commitments. Until now, only U.S. courts—not France’s—have sanctioned French multinationals for bribery abroad. Panama Papers Fallout Continues in Pakistan and UK Seven months after the Panama Papers revealed a vast network of often-stolen wealth hidden in shell companies, government-led investigations continue. In Pakistan—where the leaks revealed that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s family (long dogged by corruption scandals) used offshore companies to buy real estate near London’s upscale Hyde Park—the Supreme Court is setting up a commission to look into opposition claims that the money came from graft. And this week the United Kingdom announced it is investigating over thirty people and companies for potential tax fraud and financial crimes based on the papers’ revelations. The government also placed dozens of wealthy individuals under “special review” and is looking into the activities of twenty-six no longer anonymous offshore companies. The UK’s message: it wants to shed its reputation as an offshore tax haven and hub for illicit finance. India Strikes “Black Money” Research shows that removing large denomination bills from circulation can help cut back on corruption, tax evasion, and terrorist financing. Cash makes illicit payments hard to trace, and high-value notes especially allow people to discreetly move large sums of money around the world—a million dollars weighs fifty pounds in twenty dollar bills, but just 2.2 pounds in 500 euro notes. This week India put this theory into practice, abolishing its highest currency notes—500 and 1,000 rupee bills (worth about $8 and $15, respectively). The immediate aftermath was chaotic, as ATMs were overrun with citizens looking to deposit or exchange their bills. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi hopes the move will cut back on crime and replenish government coffers. Its moves follow those of the European Union, which discontinued €500 notes earlier this year.    

According to the World Bank, almost one third of West Africa’s population, responsible for creating 56 percent of GDP, lives along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea. Because of global warming, sea levels around the world are likely to rise by more than thirty inches (2.5 feet) by the end of the century. Africa, the Gulf of Guinea in particular, is expected to be especially hard hit: the number of people who could be flooded in Africa is estimated to rise from 1 million a year in 1990 to 70 million a year by 2080. Lagos is now one of the largest cities in the world, and it’s population is growing explosively. The population of Lagos has grown from 5.3 million in 1991, to 16 million in 2006, and reached 21.3 million in 2015 (these figures are estimates, only). The shortcomings of the city’s infrastructure are notorious: crumbling roads, inadequate public transportation, insufficient water supply, and poor sanitation. However the successive administrations of Governors Tinubu and Fashola have been perhaps the best in the country. Much of the Lagos metropolitan area is only slightly above sea level and several entire neighborhoods consist of shacks built on stilts in the lagoon. This will leave more than 3.2 million inhabitants and $117.3 billion in assests exposed to the dangers of climate change. Hence, as water levels rise, it must be anticipated that a large percentage of the population of the city will be driven to move to the mainland where the elevations are higher.

A new CFR Discussion Paper, How Women’s Participation in Conflict Prevention and Resolution Advances U.S. Interests, presents compelling evidence about the value of women’s contributions to peace and security efforts and urges increased U.S. investment in women’s participation in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and post-conflict reconstruction around the world: "Recurrent and emerging armed conflicts, expanded terrorist and extremist networks, increased targeting of civilians, and record levels of mass displacement have defined global security in the twenty-first century. Data shows that standard peace-making methods have proven ineffective at addressing these trends: nearly half of the conflict-resolution agreements forged during the 1990s failed within five years. Recidivism for civil war is alarmingly high, with 90 percent of civil wars in the 2000s occurring in countries that had already experienced civil war during the previous thirty years. New thinking on peace and security is needed. A growing body of research suggests that standard peace and security processes routinely overlook a critical strategy that could reduce conflict and advance stability: the inclusion of women. Evidence indicates that women’s participation in conflict prevention and resolution advances security interests. One study found that substantial inclusion of women and civil society groups in a peace negotiation makes the resulting agreement 64 percent less likely to fail and, ac-cording to another study, 35 percent more likely to last at least fifteen years. Several analyses suggest also that higher levels of gender equality are associated with a lower propensity for conflict, both between and within states. Despite growing international recognition of women’s role in security, their representation in peace and security processes has lagged. Between 1992 and 2011, women represented fewer than 4 percent of signatories to peace agreements and 9 percent of negotiators.  In 2015, only 3 percent of UN military peacekeepers and 10 percent of UN police personnel were women, substantially lower than the UN target of 20 percent.  And despite the role that local women’s groups could play in preventing and resolving conflicts, they received just 0.4 percent of the aid to fragile states from major donor countries in 2012–2013. The next U.S. administration should require women’s representation and meaningful participation in conflict resolution and postconflict processes, increase investment in efforts that promote women’s inclusion, reform U.S. diplomatic and security practices to incorporate the experiences of women in conflict-affected countries, improve staffing and coordination to deliver on government commitments, strengthen training on incorporating women in security efforts, and promote accountability. These steps will help the United States respond effectively to security threats around the world, improve the sustainability of peace agreements, and advance U.S. interests." Read the full CFR Discussion Paper>>

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering from October 15 to October 21, was compiled with support from Becky Allen, Anne Connell, and Lauren Hoffman. Women’s leadership in NATO                                                               Rose Gottemoeller, former U.S. undersecretary for arms control and international security, formally assumed the position of NATO’s Deputy Secretary General this week. She becomes the second most senior NATO official and the first woman in history to hold the title. Gottemoeller’s extensive career in public service and international security policy includes advising U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on arms control, non-proliferation, and political-military affairs and leading 2010 U.S. negotiations with Russia on the New START Treaty to restrict the proliferation of nuclear missiles and warheads. Gottemoeller’s appointment comes just months after the 28-member organization agreed in a summit in Warsaw to better deliver on commitments to increase women’s participation in peace and security efforts. Although gaps remain in women’s representation across the institution, women now hold a number of senior positions: besides newly appointed Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller, U.S. Navy Admiral Michelle Howard heads the Allied Joint Force Command in Naples, and U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Giselle Wilz serves as commander at NATO headquarters in Sarajevo. Thousands protest gender-based violence in Argentina                                                 This Wednesday, thousands of people took to the streets of Buenos Aires and smaller groups gathered in cities across Argentina to protest violence against women. The particularly brutal nature of a recent assault and murder of a 16-year-old Argentine girl caused national outrage and drew attention to high rates of femicide and domestic violence across Latin and South America, the region with seven of the ten countries with the highest rates of female murder victims. Protests also gained international attention via social media with the trending hashtag #NiUnaMenos tweeted across the world, including by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. According to the non-governmental group La Case del Encuentro, one Argentinian woman is killed every thirty hours by gender-based crime. The Argentine government has taken several steps in recent years to combat the alarming rate of violence against women and girls, including opening an office in the  Supreme Court dedicated to investigating domestic violence, amending the criminal code to define and include femicide, and announcing a national action plan to improve implementation of existing laws. Humanitarian response in Haiti                                                                                         Hurricane Matthew, one of the most powerful hurricanes to hit Haiti in a decade, devastated the southwestern region of the country earlier this month, leaving an estimated 1.4 million people in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. Over 540 people are confirmed dead and figures will likely rise as remote areas are fully assessed by government and international aid efforts. As has been well-documented in natural disasters around the world, women and girls are among the most vulnerable populations in the aftermath of a storm due to heightened risks of gender-based violence, spread of disease, maternal health complications, and destruction of livelihoods. UN Women’s Anthony Ngororano stressed that it is particularly critical that women are “at the heart of the humanitarian response in Haiti” given the lessons learned from the response to the catastrophic 2010 earthquake. Research found that scores of women and girls housed in sprawling temporary camps were attacked while getting water, sexually assaulted, or forced into transactional sex. Studies also suggested that the status of women and girls was overlooked in initial post-disaster needs assessments, and that basic measures—such as improved lighting, increasing women’s access to food, and creating sex-segregated shelters and sanitation facilities with lockable doors—could significantly improve safety in future relief efforts.

Susan Ariel Aaronson is a research professor and cross-disciplinary fellow at George Washington University. Ethan Wham is social media consultant and a member of the greater Washington, DC chapter of the Internet Society. In 2012, then CIA Director General David Petraeus gave a disturbing speech on the internet of things (IoT). He noted that individuals, firms, and governments increasingly rely on devices like cars, refrigerators, and smart watches equipped with sensors and connected to the internet. Petraeus contended that IoT-related technologies are changing societal notions of what tasks machines acting “on their own” or in communion with other devices can do. He warned that these devices not only “think, but they are learning to … sense and respond.” IoT devices use a wide range of data collected from individuals, groups of people, firms, machines, and governments to make decisions that can save time, lives, and money. These devices will dramatically alter how humans interact with machines, businesses, governments, and with each other; they will be ubiquitous. Thus, as General Petraeus noted, although the internet of things will help us become more efficient and productive, these devices may have unanticipated costs to individuals’ security and privacy. For example, an IoT-driven car can help a person travel, but the same car could be hacked or struggle to make ethical decisions (such as choosing between saving a passenger or pedestrian’s life). Many people are concerned about a future where humans are dependent on IoT devices. In 2016, the Mobile Ecosystem Forum surveyed 5,000 mobile users in eight countries including Brazil, India, and South Africa found that some 62 percent said they were concerned about privacy and some 54 percent said they were most concerned about device security on the internet of things. In a 2016 poll of cybersecurity experts 84 percent of respondents stated there is a medium to high likelihood of a cyberattack disrupting critical infrastructure that rely on IoT devices. Moreover, many users already struggle to control their privacy and security online. A 2012 study of Facebook users found that although these users sought privacy, “the amount and scope of personal information that Facebook users revealed … increased over time—and … so did disclosures to ‘silent listeners’ including Facebook … third-party apps, and … advertisers.” Given the sheer number of devices and magnitude of information, it will become even harder for users to control their data with IoT devices. Security and privacy in the internet of things presents what scholars call a wicked problem, where potential solutions could have significant unanticipated side effects. Citizens around the world must play a greater role in the development of norms to protect privacy and security for the internet of things. However, to participate effectively, individuals must first gain a better understanding of how these devices affect their privacy and security. It will not be easy to develop norms on these issues. Although some governments such as the United States and European Union have organized discussions on the internet of things, the bulk of the world’s population has little exposure to this debate. Moreover, every country has different social mores, yet many multistakeholder organizations contend that norms must be global and interoperable. Finally, every device is different and norms will vary based on use. Trusted multistakeholder organizations such as the Internet Society (ISOC) and the DONA Foundation can—and should—lead the education and norms building effort. ISOC is an international nonprofit organization that engages in a wide spectrum of internet issues, education and policy development that has long informed and engaged the public on such matters. The DONA Foundation administers, manages, and coordinates the registration and resolution of identifiers for digital objects, effectively providing the address book for the internet of things. Both organizations already use a wide range of outreach strategies—free online courses, blog posts, articles, papers, crowdsourcing, conferences, and public debates—to both educate more people and get them involved in a norms discussion. Moreover, both organizations have long worked with a variety of users, technologists, policymakers, activists, and business executives. As ISOC and DONA begin their outreach, there are a number of questions they should encourage individuals to ask themselves to kick start the norms discussion. These could include: Who owns and controls the data conveyed to IoT devices? How should the data be used and protected? How can norms be developed that do not favor one IoT technology or application over another? Understanding the potential costs and benefits of the burgeoning internet of things will only come through a sustained discussion with internet users, businesses, academics and policymakers. Over time, these discussions will hopefully lead to the development of industry norms, best practices, and regulation conceived both for and by the people.