Civil society to UN: Don’t silence our voices

Faith-based organizations and other civil society groups at Seville conference protest their shrinking space

(LWI) - A decade ago, world leaders met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for a United Nations conference on financing for the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which promised peace, prosperity and a sustainable future for people and the planet. Ten years on, those promises seem increasingly out of reach, requiring a “bold reimagining and transformation of the global financial order.”

That is the appeal from the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and ecumenical partners who have joined hundreds of other civil society organizers in Seville, Spain, attending this week’s Fourth UN Conference on Financing for Development: the follow up to the Addis Ababa Conference. But as leaders meet once again to discuss an increasingly bleak development landscape - with increased conflicts, a growing climate emergency, rising militarization and declining support for humanitarian work - civil society representatives say their voices are being cut out of the conversation and the decision-making process.

“Ten years ago, in Ethiopia, our expertise, our contributions were welcomed, and we were valued as an important part of the discussion,” says Uhuru Dempers, director of the desk for social development at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Republic of Namibia. He also heads the Socio-Economic Justice Unit of the influential Council of Churches in Namibia and advises the LWF Council’s Committee on Advocacy and Public Voice. “Here in Spain, despite bringing grass roots experience and proposals for solutions that we want to share with governments, we have been denied any real participation,” he laments.

On the eve of the 30 June to 3 July Seville conference, faith-based organizations, including LWF delegates, joined civil society groups on the streets of the city to raise their voices and demand urgent action on debt relief, climate justice, fairer international trade and tax regulations, as well as more inclusive management for global financial institutions. “We are way off track to meet most of the SDGs,” Dempers notes, with a four trillion-dollar funding gap. But the communities we represent can’t wait another ten years to see the debt crisis deepen and governments unable to pay for basic health, education, and decent housing.”

Last year, his own government spent over 12 billion Namibian dollars on national debt payments – the same amount that it allocated to its own development budget. “The result is that our public health system is crumbling, clinics are running out of medicines and child malnutrition rates are between 30 to 40 percent in most regions,” Dempers says. “We can’t pay subsidies to our farmers and our country is highly prone to natural disasters like flooding, droughts and wildfires. During extreme droughts, we have seen children dying of hunger,” he adds.

Working with universities and research institutes to collect facts and figures, his office makes recommendations to the government and plays an important role in advocating for national policies to support the poorest and most excluded communities. “Namibia is classified among the top three nations with the highest levels of income inequality in the world,” Dempers says. “But over the last five years, we have helped the government to come up with a very progressive housing policy, increasing the budget from 50 million to 700 million dollars and prioritizing housing for the most vulnerable people.”

“People are not asking for handouts,” Dempers insists, “but for the possibility to live in dignity and grow their own food. We are only three million people, and we are the second least densely populated country in the world, yet 40 percent of the population lives in informal settlements or slums. We have advocated for free plots of land for those who can’t afford to buy, but now we need to follow up on implementation of the new policy.” A campaign, led by churches and civil society groups, for a basic income grant has also had some limited success.

Another important part of the work of Demper’s office is training church leaders and building capacity among local communities to understand more about local and national economic and political issues. “We teach them how government works, how to monitor their elected leaders and hold them accountable,” he says. “But we also work closely with government officials, building trust so that they know we are allies in the struggle for a fairer international system of economic governance that does not benefit the rich at the expense of people in the global south.”

“When the UN Charter was drawn after the Second World War,” Dempers concludes, “it talked about ‘We, the peoples of the United Nations’. As civil society organizations, we represent the voices of those people that our governments have been elected to serve. We must continue to have a place at the table in the United Nations, to work together with our leaders to find the bold, creative solutions that we need to meet the current global crises.”