Ms Karol Balfe:

It is interesting to reflect on how Covid dominated the past few years, and there is still a fallout from the vaccinations not having been available throughout the majority of the global south. One of the implications of that, outside of the health implications, is the breakdown of trust as the global south watched Europe vaccinate itself without engaging in a global response. That contributed to that sense in the south of feeling as though it does not matter.

There was a rise in gender-based violence, as we see in all crises. Many of the programmes we work with say there has been a very clear deterioration in the rights of girls and women, and that is compounded and caught up in many other crises. In the case of the Horn of Africa, for example, it is very caught up in the food crisis, the drought and Covid. It is impossible to overstate how much the lives of people in the global south are caught up in this storm of complex crisis, the impact of the climate disaster, debt, not having the public services and Covid on top of that. It becomes part of that storm that people experience.

To touch on education as well, it is estimated there will be a need for 69 million additional teachers over the next ten years to achieve some of the education goals, and we have to also look at structural issues here. There was a lot of criticism in the eighties of the structural adjustment programmes of the IMF, which had a really detrimental impact on poverty. In fact, while the rhetoric of the IMF has changed, we are still very much seeing cuts to public sector wage bills and elsewhere in the public sector. Action Aid carried out research on 15 countries that estimated $10 billion had been cut from the public services of those countries. We need to look at those structural issues as well. If countries are being told by bodies such as the IMF to introduce austerity programmes, that will mean fewer teachers, bigger classes and not meeting those targets, so it is important we also look at those structural issues.