From Chernobyl to the Aral Sea: unfortunately the history of our region has been marked by significant environmental disasters. But did these events also have an impact on the social fabric of the affected communities? And, if so, how would it manifest itself? This was one of the questions we were interested to explore as we set to investigate the issue of social inclusion in our regional Human Development report.
Source: UNDP social exclusion survey, 2009
As a Japanese national, I was keen to join the celebrations for the victory of our women’s football team at the FIFA World Cup in Frankfurt until the festive mood quickly turned into the disappointing realization of yet another example of gender pay gap. There is no difference between the rules for men’s football games and the rules for women’s football games. And yet, the women who won the World Cup received ¥1.5 million each from the Japan Football Association for their first place finish whereas the men who didn’t reach the quarter finals in last year’s World Cup in South Africa received at least ¥10 million each. If that’s not discrimination, what is – I wonder.
Gregory Attila Connor and Toni Popovski
We are just back in Skopje from an exciting high-level conference in the lakeside town of Ohrid that brought together more than 100 key national and international political actors to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Ohrid Peace Agreement. That Agreement ended the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’s (FYROM) internal conflict in 2001. It also helped promote the country’s good governance agenda, which UNDP actively supports.
The main message from the conference was: the country has much to celebrate—particularly the cessation of hostilities and the integration of national minorities into political life. But, challenges remain.
Zuzana Aschenbrennerova
UNDP’s Development and Transition is looking for partners
”You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Raise your voice and tell the others ‘I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!’”
(Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night traveler)
Let’s be honest. It is quite unlikely that someone reading the latest issue of Development and Transition (D&T for our friends!), UNDP’s regional newsletter focusing on the former Soviet block (from Eastern Europe to Central Asia), will let the world fade and dispel every thought just to be able to dive in into the universe of local integrated development. We would very much hope they would at least tell the others with a raised voice ‘I am reading ! I don’t want to be disturbed!’
You know a trick or two to make this happen? Get in touch! The Development and Transition team is opening up several channels to engage more actively with our audience. Development and Transition’s aim is to discuss and think differently about development policy in our region. We work for and with practitioners to present a variety of viewpoints and analytical approaches from field experience, as well as from academia.
Early steps of cooperation between citizens and local authorities in Ukraine
Olena Ursu
These days, the problem of solid waste management is at the top of the list for many Ukrainian administrative and territorial units. In Tulchyn district (with a population of about 60,000) it requires an immediate solution. The sanitary situation is getting worse in the majority of district towns and villages: new, uncontrolled waste dumps keep emerging, while the existing landfill has exhausted its capacity and is 99 percent full.
As my colleague, Andrey Ivanov, reminded us in his TED Talk, Ukraine is certainly not the only country in Europe to experience problems with municipal waste management. While some European countries plan to completely stop using landfills to deal with waste over the next five to seven years, the majority of Ukrainian municipalities continue to intensively exploit existing landfills, many of which do not comply with established standards. As UNDP’s analysis (pdf, in Ukranian) on solid waste systems recently found out, 314 Ukrainian landfills (about seven percent) are overloaded, and 897 (about 20 percent) don’t meet safety requirements.