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	Senegal’s new government must act to protect children from Forced Begging by ILO, Anti-Slavery International Senegal   April 2012   (Dakar) – Senegal’s new government should make it a priority to protect the estimated 50,000 children forced to beg each day on the country’s streets, a coalition of Senegalese civil society organizations, Anti-Slavery International, and Human Rights Watch said. Macky Sall will be inaugurated as president on April 2, 2012, after defeating incumbent President Abdoulaye Wade in the presidential runoff vote.   Known in Senegal as talibés, these children are sent by their parents to a daara, or Quranic school, to receive a Quranic education under a marabout, or spiritual guide. While many marabouts in Senegal continue the traditional practice of teaching their students the Quran, others have twisted the practice into a form of economic exploitation.   “It is paramount for President Sall to extend the new era he has described to Senegal’s most vulnerable,” said Catherine Turner, child labor program co-ordinator at Anti-Slavery International.   “Forced child begging is one of the worst forms of child labor and despite being clearly visible, tens of thousands of talibés are still suffering in Senegal. The government must enforce its own laws to protect talibés from this abuse and ensure that the education received in daaras equips these children with a rounded education, and does not allow forced begging.”   As documented in reports by Anti-Slavery International and Human Rights Watch, an estimated 50,000 talibés, most between the ages of 5 and 14, are forced by their marabout to beg in the streets for up to eight hours a day. Many of these exploitative marabouts impose a specific quota that the boys must return each day. Boys who fail to bring back the demanded sum often face physical abuse, including in some cases severe beatings or being chained or bound and left in isolation. Much of the money these boys bring back goes to the personal profit of their marabout, rather than to ensuring adequate food and health care, and a proper Islamic education for the children.   The Senegalese government enacted legislation in 2005 that criminalized forcing others into begging for personal financial gain. But the authorities have largely failed to take concrete steps to enforce the law and end the exploitation and abuse of the talibés.   Nine marabouts were convicted in September 2010 for forcing children in their care to beg, but the majority received deferred sentences and were released immediately. The following month, Wade expressed dissatisfaction with the application of the law during a council of ministers meeting, effectively ending further arrests and prosecutions. In all but a few cases, severe physical abuse of the talibés has gone similarly unpunished.   With the exception of a few state-sponsored modern daaras – which combine Quranic and state school curricula – the daaras in Senegal are subject to almost no government regulation. This has in part led to the proliferation of the unscrupulous marabouts who have failed to educate or provide for children in their care.   “A key solution to ending the problem of forced child begging is for the government to accelerate the modern daara program,” said Mamadou Wane, spokesman for the Plateforme pour la protection et la promotion des droits humains (PPDH), a coalition of 50 mainly Senegalese organizations working on the issue of forced child begging in Senegal. “There is also an urgent need for the new government to enforce laws protecting children from violence, no matter who is responsible for committing it.”   On March 2, the International Labour Organization (ILO)’s Committee of Experts criticized Senegal for its failure to protect talibés from abusive conditions and demanded that Senegal do more to prosecute those responsible for forced begging and to carry out “daara modernization” – ensuring that the schools meet basic international standards of education and child protection.
	First world happiness report launched at the United Nations by The Earth Institute at Columbia University USA   The happiest countries in the world are all in Northern Europe (Denmark, Norway, Finland, Netherlands). Their average life evaluation score is 7.6 on a 0-to-10 scale. The least happy countries are all poor countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (Togo, Benin, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone) with average life evaluation scores of 3.4.   But it is not just wealth that makes people happy: Political freedom, strong social networks and an absence of corruption are together more important than income in explaining well-being differences between the top and bottom countries. At the individual level, good mental and physical health, someone to count on, job security and stable families are crucial.   These are among the findings of the first ever World Happiness Report, commissioned for the April 2nd United Nations Conference on Happiness (mandated by the UN General Assembly). The report, published by the Earth Institute and co-edited by the institute’s director, Jeffrey Sachs, reflects a new worldwide demand for more attention to happiness and absence of misery as criteria for government policy. It reviews the state of happiness in the world today and shows how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.   The report shows that, where happiness is measured by how happy people are with their lives:   * Happier countries tend to be richer countries. But more important for happiness than income are social factors like the strength of social support, the absence of corruption and the degree of personal freedom.   * Over time as living standards have risen, happiness has increased in some countries, but not in others (like for example, the United States). On average, the world has become a little happier in the last 30 years (by 0.14 times the standard deviation of happiness around the world).   * Unemployment causes as much unhappiness as bereavement or separation. At work, job security and good relationships do more for job satisfaction than high pay and convenient hours.   * Behaving well makes people happier.   * Mental health is the biggest single factor affecting happiness in any country. Yet only a quarter of mentally ill people get treatment for their condition in advanced countries and fewer in poorer countries.   * Stable family life and enduring marriages are important for the happiness of parents and children.   * In advanced countries, women are happier than men, while the position in poorer countries is mixed.   * Happiness is lowest in middle age.   As case studies, the report describes in detail how happiness is measured in Bhutan and the United Kingdom, and it lays out how the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development plans to promote standard methods of data collection in different countries. The report itself proposes two evaluative questions that should be asked by social surveys of representative populations in all countries:   * Taking all things together, how happy would you say you are? (where 0 means extremely unhappy, and 10 means extremely happy)   * All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays? (where 0 means extremely dissatisfied and 10 means extremely satisfied.)   If possible, it would also be desirable to ask separate questions about how people experience their day- to-day existence.   Apr 2012   A World Adrift, by Jeffrey D. Sachs.   The annual spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have provided a window onto two fundamental trends driving global politics and the world economy. Geopolitics is moving decisively away from a world dominated by Europe and the United States to one with many regional powers but no global leader. And a new era of economic instability is at hand, owing as much to physical limits to Europe’s economic crisis dominated this year’s IMF/World Bank meetings.   The Fund is seeking to create an emergency rescue mechanism in case the weak European economies need another financial bailout, and has turned to major emerging economies – Brazil, China, India, the Gulf oil exporters, and others – to help provide the necessary resources. Their answer is clear: yes, but only in exchange for more power and votes at the IMF. As Europe wants an international financial backstop, it will have to agree.   Of course, the emerging economies’ demand for more power is a well-known story. In 2010, when the IMF last increased its financial resources, the emerging economies agreed to the deal only if their voting share within the IMF was increased by around 6%, with Europe losing around 4%. Now emerging markets are demanding an even greater share of power.   The underlying reason is not difficult to see. According to the IMF’s own data, the European Union’s current members accounted for 31% of the world economy in 1980 (measured by each country’s GDP, adjusted for purchasing power). By 2011, the EU share slid to 20%, and the Fund projects that it will decline further, to 17%, by 2017.   This decline reflects Europe’s slow growth in terms of both population and output per person. On the other side of the ledger, the global GDP share of the Asian developing countries, including China and India, has soared, from around 8% in 1980 to 25% in 2011, and is expected to reach 31% by 2017.   The US, characteristically these days, insists that it will not join any new IMF bailout fund. The US Congress has increasingly embraced isolationist economic policies, especially regarding financial help for others. This, too, reflects the long-term wane of US power. The US share of global GDP, around 25% in 1980, declined to 19% in 2011, and is expected to slip to 18% in 2017, by which point the IMF expects that China will have overtaken the US economy in absolute size (adjusted for purchasing power).   But the shift of global power is more complicated than the decline of the North Atlantic (EU and US) and the rise of the emerging economies, especially the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). We are also shifting from a unipolar world, led mainly by the US, to a truly multipolar world, in which the US, the EU, the BRICS, and smaller powers (such as Nigeria and Turkey) carry regional weight but are reticent to assume global leadership, especially its financial burdens. The issue is not just that there are five or six major powers now; it is also that all of them want a free ride at the others’ expense.   The shift to such a multipolar world has the advantage that no single country or small bloc can dominate the others. Each region can end up with room for maneuver and some space to find its own path. Yet a multipolar world also carries great risks, notably that major global challenges will go unmet, because no single country or region is able or willing to coordinate a global response, or even to participate in one.   The US has shifted rapidly from global leadership to that kind of free riding, seeming to bypass the stage of global cooperation. Thus, the US currently excuses itself from global cooperation on climate change, IMF financial-bailout packages, global development-assistance targets, and other aspects of international collaboration in the provision of global public goods.   The weaknesses of global policy cooperation are especially worrisome in view of the gravity of the challenges that must be met. Of course, the ongoing global financial turmoil comes to mind immediately, but other challenges are even more significant.   Indeed, the IMF/World Bank meetings also grappled with a second fundamental change in the world economy: high and volatile primary commodity prices are now a major threat to global economic stability and growth.   Since around 2005, the prices of most major commodities have soared. Prices for oil, coal, copper, gold, wheat, maize, iron ore, and many other commodities have doubled, tripled, or risen even more. Fuels, food grains, and minerals have all been affected. Some have attributed the rise to bubbles in commodities prices, owing to low interest rates and easy access to credit for commodity speculation. Yet the most compelling explanation is almost certainly more fundamental.   Growing world demand for primary commodities, especially in China, is pushing hard against the physical supplies of global resources. Yes, more oil or copper can be produced, but only at much higher marginal production costs.   But the problem goes beyond supply constraints. Global economic growth is also causing a burgeoning environmental crisis. Food prices are high today partly because food-growing regions around the world are experiencing the adverse effects of human-induced climate change (such as more droughts and extreme storms), and of water scarcity caused by excessive use of freshwater from rivers and aquifers.   In short, the global economy is experiencing a sustainability crisis, in which resource constraints and environmental pressures are causing large price shocks and ecological instability. Economic development rapidly needs to become sustainable development, by adopting technologies and lifestyles that reduce the dangerous pressures on the Earth’s ecosystems. This, too, will require a level of global cooperation that remains nowhere to be seen.   The IMF/World Bank meetings remind us of an overarching truth: our highly interconnected and crowded world has become a highly complicated vessel. If we are to move forward, we must start pulling in the same direction, even without a single captain at the helm.   * Jeffrey D. Sachs is a professor at Columbia University, Director of its Earth Institute, and a special adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. Access more articles by Professor Sachs: http://earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/1025 Visit the related web page
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