The Weekly Lift - May 30, 2024

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Please note that The Weekly Lift is taking our annual summer break and will resume publishing in September.?

?Thank you for your continuous support. I wish you all a good summer (or winter if you are in the Southern Hemisphere), and I look forward to sharing new positive and hopeful headlines and articles stories in a few months!

?Saad

Creator and Editor

This week's selection of headlines and articles*:

International Relations: Biden Administration Eases Some Economic Restrictions On Cuba

The Washington Post (US) reports, "The Biden administration amended and clarified a number of existing sanctions against Cuba on Tuesday to allow private entrepreneurs and businesses on the island to open U.S. bank accounts and access online banking as part of its effort “increase support for the Cuban people” while avoiding any assistance to the government.

The actions followed the administration’s lifting of Cuba’s designation as a country that was not “fully cooperating” with the United States on counterterrorism earlier this month, according to senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the White House.

Lifting of the designation and other sanctions-easing measures came as Cuba has seen the largest exodus in the country’s history over the past three years. More than 500,000 migrants — roughly 5 percent of the population — have crossed into the United States along the southern border since 2021.

In view of what one administration official called the “dire straits” of Cuba’s economy, with growing shortages of fuel, electricity and food, “it’s clear the communist experiment in Cuba has failed and the government is no longer able to provide for its citizens’ most basic needs in a country where there are no free elections.”

By relaxing sanctions, the administration also seeks to stem recent outreach by the Cuban government to both Russia and China for economic and other assistance. “We believe the organic expansion of the private sector and evolution of the digital economy on the island, led by the Cuban people themselves and not by any foreign government, is critical,” a second official said.

Since the communist government in Havana legalized the creation of small and medium-size private enterprises in 2021, the Biden administration says, 11,000 private businesses have registered in Cuba, accounting for one-third of all employment there, in sectors from tourism to agriculture to car repair.

The new U.S. Treasury Department regulations, which exclude any business with ties to Cuba’s government or its security and intelligence services, will allow direct transactions with U.S. banks, facilitating the procurement of supplies to keep private enterprises alive, the officials said.

In addition to the banking access, U.S. companies will be able to provide private businesses in Cuba with videoconferencing, online learning and cloud-based services. Still in place is the 1960s economic embargo, which Cuba calls a blockade, and several subsequent legislative expansions, and the U.S. designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism — along with Syria, North Korea and Iran.

In a statement posted on X, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez called the new measures “limited” and said they “do not reverse the cruel impact and economic strangulation imposed on Cuban families by the genocidal blockade and inclusion in the list of state sponsors of terrorism.”

The state sponsor designation was first made in 1982 because of Cuba’s support at the time for revolutionary and guerrilla groups in Latin America and beyond. It was lifted in 2015 by the Obama administration as part of its diplomatic normalization with Havana, but reimposed by President Donald Trump just a week before he left office in January 2021.

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden vowed to roll back Trump’s Cuba policy. But the administration has hesitated to make major moves in that direction amid other international crises and strong opposition from some in Congress and Cuban American voters in Florida.

Trump’s justification was Cuba’s failure to comply with an extradition request by Colombia’s right-wing government for leaders of a militant group who were in Havana to participate in U.S.-backed peace negotiations. Iván Duque, then Colombia’s president, issued arrest warrants for the leaders after the group’s members attacked a Colombian military base in early 2019.

A decision by Colombia’s new left-wing government in 2022 to drop the extradition request eventually led to the Biden administration dropping the noncooperation designation.

The state-sponsor designation has had profound effects on Cuba’s tourism industry, as European and other visitors have resisted travel there for fear of running afoul of the U.S.-visa and other sanctions it authorizes.

The Cuban government’s eased restrictions on private enterprise were designed not only to improve tourism and other aspects of the economy, but to stem the brain drain from the island.

After illegal border crossings to the United States surged in 2021 and 2022, the Biden administration expanded opportunities for Cuban migrants and asylum seekers to enter the country legally. Since the beginning of 2023, illegal entries have fallen sharply, and the administration is allowing about 20,000 Cubans per month to enter the country legally, according to the latest U.S. data."

Politics: Leaflet By Leaflet, A Few Aging Activists Fight India’s Tide Of Bigotry

The New York Times (US) reports, "One recent morning, Roop Rekha Verma, an 80-year-old peace activist and former university leader, walked through a north Indian neighborhood prone to sectarian strife and parked herself near a tea shop.

From her sling bag, she pulled out a bundle of pamphlets bearing messages of religious tolerance and mutual coexistence and began handing them to passers-by. “Talk to each other. Don’t let anyone divide you,” one read in Hindi.

Spreading those simple words is an act of bravery in today’s India. Ms. Verma and others like her are waging a lonely battle against a tide of hatred and bigotry increasingly normalized by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his deputies have vilified the country’s minorities in a yearslong campaign that has escalated during the current national election, the small band of aging activists has built bridges and preached harmony between religious groups.

They have continued to hit the pavement even as the price for dissent and free speech has become high, trying to keep the flame alive for the nonsectarian ideal embedded in India’s constitution and in their own memories.

More than three dozen human rights defenders, poets, journalists and opposition politicians face charges, including under antiterrorism laws, for criticizing Mr. Modi’s divisive policies, according to rights groups. (The government has said little about the charges, other than repeating its line that the law takes its own course.)

The crackdown has had a chilling effect on many Indians. “That is where the role of these civil society activists becomes more important,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, a deputy director at Human Rights Watch. “Despite a crackdown, they are refusing to cow down, leading them to hold placards, distributing fliers, to revive a message that once was taken for granted.”

The use of posters and pamphlets to raise public awareness is a time-tested practice among Indian activists. Revolutionaries fighting for independence from British colonizers employed them to drum up support and mobilize ordinary Indians. Today, village leaders use them to spread awareness about health and other government programs.

Such old-school outreach may seem quixotic in the digital age. Every day, India’s social media spaces, reaching hundreds of millions of people, are inundated with anti-Muslim vitriol promoted by the B.J.P. and its associated right-wing organizations.

During the national election that ends next week, Mr. Modi and his party have targeted Muslims directly, by name, with brazen attacks both online and in campaign speeches. (The B.J.P. rejects accusations that it discriminates against Muslims, noting that government welfare programs under its supervision assist all Indians equally.)

Those who have worked in places torn apart by sectarian violence say polarization can be combated only by going to people on the streets and making them understand its dangers. Merely showing up can help.

For Ms. Verma, the seeds of her activism were planted during her childhood, when she listened to horror stories of the sectarian violence that left hundreds of thousands dead during the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947.

Later, as a university philosophy professor, she fought caste discrimination and religious divides both inside and outside the classroom. She opposed patriarchal attitudes even as slurs were thrown at her. In the early 1980s, when she noticed that the names of mothers were excluded from student admission forms, she pressed for their inclusion and won.

But more than anything else, it was the campaign to build a major Hindu temple in the town of Ayodhya in her home state of Uttar Pradesh that gave Ms. Verma’s life a new meaning.

In 1992, a Hindu mob demolished a centuries-old mosque there, claiming that the site had previously held a Hindu temple. Deadly riots followed. This past January, three decades later, the Ayodhya temple opened, inaugurated by Mr. Modi.

It was a significant victory for a Hindu nationalist movement whose maligning and marginalizing of Muslims is exactly what Ms. Verma has devoted herself to opposing. The Hindu majority, she said, has a responsibility to protect minorities, “not become complicit in their demonization.”

While the government’s incitement of religious enmity is new in India, the sectarian divisions themselves are not. One activist, Vipin Kumar Tripathi, 76, a former physics professor at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, said he had started gathering students after classes and educating them about the dangers of “religious radicalization” in the early 1990s.

Today, Mr. Tripathi travels to different parts of India with a message of peace. Recently, he stood in a corner of a busy train station in northeastern New Delhi. As office workers, students and laborers ran toward platforms, he handed information sheets and brochures to anyone who extended a hand.

His materials addressed some of the most provocative issues in India: the troubles in Kashmir, where the Modi government has rescinded the majority-Muslim region’s semi-autonomy; the politics over the Ayodhya temple; and ordinary citizens’ rights to question their government. “To respect God and to pretend to do that for votes are two different things,” read one of his handouts.

At the station, Anirudh Saxena, a tall man in his early 30s with a pencil mustache, stopped and looked Mr. Tripathi straight in the eyes. “Sir, why are you doing this every week?” Mr. Saxena asked. “Read this,” Mr. Tripathi told Mr. Saxena, handing him a small 10-page booklet. “This explains why we should read books and understand history instead of reading WhatsApp garbage and extracting pleasure out of someone’s pain.”

Mr. Saxena smiled, nodded his head and put the booklet in his handbag before disappearing into the crowd. If just 10 out of a thousand people read his materials, Mr. Tripathi said, his job is done. “When truth becomes the casualty, you can only fight it on the streets,” he said.

Shabnam Hashmi, 66, another activist based in New Delhi, said she had helped distribute about four million pamphlets in the state of Gujarat after sectarian riots there in 2002. More than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, died in the communal violence, which happened under the watch of Mr. Modi, who was the state’s top leader at the time.

During that period, she and her colleagues were harassed by right-wing activists, who threw stones at her and filed police complaints. In 2016, months after Mr. Modi became prime minister, the government prohibited foreign funding for her organization. She has continued her street activism nonetheless.

“It is the most effective way of reaching the people directly,” she said. “What it does is, it somehow gives people courage to fight fear and keep resisting.” “We might not be able to stop this craziness,” she added, “but that doesn’t mean we should stop fighting.”

Even before Mr. Modi’s rise, said Ms. Verma, the activist in Uttar Pradesh, governments never “showered roses” on her when she was doing things like leading marches and bringing together warring factions after flare-ups of religious violence.

Over the decades, she has been threatened with prison and bundled into police vehicles. “But it was never so bad,” she said, as it has now become under Mr. Modi. The space for activism may completely vanish, Ms. Verma said, as his party becomes increasingly intolerant of any scrutiny.

For now, she said, activists “are, sadly, just giving proof of our existence: that we may be demoralized, but we are still alive. Otherwise, hatred has seeped so deep it will take decades to rebuild trust.”

Global Development: Africa Inc Is Ready To Roar

The Economist (UK) reports, "Global gabfests tend to be gloomy affairs these days. Bigwigs bemoan the state of geopolitics, wring their hands over existential risks, urge greater global co-operation—and go home with little to show for it all.

The Africa CEO Forum, a gathering that took place on May 16th and 17th in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, offered a welcome contrast. As bosses, politicians and financiers gathered to discuss the role of Africa’s private sector in spurring its economic development, the tone was refreshingly practical.

Instead of dwelling on the grand sweep of history or the changing world order, the conference’s attendees knuckled down for discussions on how to boost cross-border commerce and strengthen local supply chains.

Permeating all of this was a conviction that Africa must take control of its own economic development. As Aliko Dangote, the boss of Dangote Industries, a Nigerian conglomerate, and Africa’s richest man, summed up, “We Africans will have to do it. If we wait for foreigners, it’s not going to happen.”

Some foreign firms have retreated from Africa in recent years as higher interest rates have made investing in riskier countries less attractive, particularly ones with volatile currencies and controls on the repatriation of profits. Political dysfunction in countries including South Africa and a string of coups along the Sahel have not helped.

The flow of foreign direct investment into Africa slumped from $80bn in 2021 to $48bn last year. In April Société Générale, a French bank, announced it would sell its Moroccan business to Saham Group, a local conglomerate. It has already left a number of other African markets such as Chad and Mauritania. In August hot-cocoa fans in South Africa were dismayed to hear that Nestlé, a Swiss food giant, was halting production of Nesquik, a chocolatey beverage, in the country.

African businesses, meanwhile, are steadily expanding. They are getting better at catering to the continent’s consumers. Yeshi Group, a conglomerate from C?te d’Ivoire, is launching a safety-focused beauty brand in Ethiopia, where harmful skin-bleaching products are widespread. That sort of tailoring has helped buoy local brands across the continent, says the boss of a South African supermarket chain.

As they have grown bigger, African businesses have become more sophisticated in how they manage their operations and supply chains, observes Matthieu Friedberg, the boss of ceva Logistics, a French company with offices in 25 African countries. Arnaud de Rugy, the Africa boss of Egis, a French construction firm, points to the recent success of companies like cira, a Malian firm, and scet, a Tunisian one, in winning contracts for major infrastructure projects in Africa.

Mr Dangote’s enterprise has grown into a pan-African behemoth with operations ranging from cement production (it is the continent’s leading supplier) to sugar milling. During the forum it was announced that the company had secured a deal with TotalEnergies, a French firm, to supply crude oil to a giant new refinery Dangote has built in Nigeria.

According to McKinsey, a consultancy, Africa is now home to 345 companies with over $1bn in annual turnover, with combined sales of more than $1trn. Many are turning to neighbouring countries for growth. Since 2018 intra-African exports have grown by 32%, to $109bn last year, compared with 18% for exports going elsewhere. Almost a fifth of African countries’ exports now stay within the continent, up from just over a tenth two decades ago.

Many businesses are betting that such trade will continue to grow. “More companies will produce in Africa, for Africa, so we’re preparing ourselves,” says Philippe Labonne, the boss of Africa Global Logistics (agl), a freight business with operations in 49 countries. arise, an industrial-park developer focused on Africa, has been helping set up commodity-specific manufacturing zones, including for cotton in Benin, meat in Chad and timber in Gabon, which it hopes will spur regional commerce.

Liquid Intelligent Technologies, a pan-African technology group, has built a vast network of fibre-optic cables across much of the continent and is now busily constructing data centres.

There is still plenty of work to be done to ease cross-border commerce. The African Continental Free Trade Agreement, an ambitious plan to more closely integrate the region’s economies, has been hamstrung by difficulties tracing the origin of goods and cumbersome visa rules, among other things.

In Kigali Mr Dangote lamented that he requires 35 visas to travel across Africa with his Nigerian passport, fewer than his French counterpart at TotalEnergies. It not easy for 54 countries to work together, notes Mr Labonne of AGL. Plenty more gatherings like the one in Kigali may yet be needed."

Environment: Japan To Launch First Eco-Friendly Satellite Made Of Wood

The Telegraph (UK) reports, "Japanese scientists have built the world’s first eco-friendly satellite made of wood and plan to launch it into space later this year.

The small, cube-shaped spacecraft is made from magnolia wood and has been assembled using traditional nail-free joinery techniques that have been used to build temples and shrines for centuries. The timber satellite, known as LignoSat, is the result of four years of research by a team including staff from Kyoto University and Sumitomo Forestry.

The concept is rooted in sustainability, with researchers aiming to create a satellite using wood instead of the metals and composite materials typically used in their construction. The satellite – whose name “ligno” means wood in Esperanto – is due to be handed over to Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency next week, before being launched to the International Space Station from Florida on board a SpaceX rocket in September.

The LignoSat is a 10cm cube with magnolia panels up to 5.5mm thick wrapped around a frame partially constructed from aluminum. It also features solar panels, and the entire structure weighs just one kilogram.

Early laboratory tests explored a range of different woods in order to determine which would be best at withstanding the stresses of space launches and long-term flights, resulting in the choice of magnolia. Koji Murata, head of the project, said: “Wood’s ability to withstand these conditions astounded us.”

Solar panels were also attached to some sides of the cube. The satellite was described by its makers as “an extremely valuable step for both the space and the wood industries” which will help “open up the possibilities of the use of wood, which is a sustainable resource”.

“Expanding the potential of wood as a sustainable resource is significant,” Takao Doi, Kyoto University professor and astronaut, told the Japan Times. “We aim to build human habitats using wood in space, such as on the moon and Mars, in the future.” The use of wood is also intended to reduce atmospheric pollution caused by a satellite burning up on re-entry at the end of its life span.

Typical satellites made of metal can release alumina particles, which can negatively impact weather and communication, according to researchers."

Philanthropy: Melinda French Gates To Donate $1 Billion Over 2 Years In Support Of Women’s Empowerment

The Los Angeles Times (US) reports, "Melinda French Gates says she will be donating $1 billion over the next two years to individuals and organizations working on behalf of women and families globally, including on reproductive rights in the United States.

French Gates earlier this month announced she would step down from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and vowed to focus on women and families. As a part of leaving the Gates Foundation, French Gates received $12 billion from Bill Gates for her philanthropy.

French Gates, one of the biggest philanthropic supporters of gender equity in the U.S., said Tuesday in a guest essay for the New York Times that she’s been frustrated over the years by people who say it’s not the right time to talk about gender equality. “Decades of research on economics, well-being and governance make it clear that investing in women and girls benefits everyone,” she wrote.

French Gates said over the last few weeks she’s started directing new grants through her organization, Pivotal Ventures, to groups working in the U.S. to protect women’s rights and advance their power and influence. The grants are for general operating support, meaning they are not earmarked for specific projects. The groups include the National Women’s Law Center, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Teresa Younger, the president and CEO of the Ms. Foundation for Women, who also received a grant, has long called on donors to give unrestricted, multi-year funding to organizations. She praised French Gates’ new commitment as a part of a larger trend of major women donors giving generously to nonprofits. “If philanthropy took lessons from the way that women are moving money, we would see more money in the field having greater impact,” Younger said.

Her organization learned of the grant, which is the first they’ve received from Pivotal Ventures last week, and Younger said there was no application process. She declined to disclose the amount of the grant but said it would help expand their work with organizations in the South and Midwest.

In addition, she also pledged to give 12 individuals $20 million each to distribute to nonprofit organizations of their choice before the end of 2026. Those funds will be managed by the National Philanthropic Trust, one of the largest public charities that offers donor-advised funds, a spokesperson for Pivotal Ventures said.

In total, French Gates announced $690 million in commitments out of the promised $1 billion, which also include an “open call” for applications that the organization Lever for Change will administer this fall. French Gates said $250 million will be awarded through that process to fund organizations working to improve women’s mental and physical health globally.

French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures is a limited liability company that also manages investments for profit ventures, so there is little public information about its grantmaking or the assets it manages. Pivotal Ventures has focused on a number of avenues to increase women’s economic and political participation and power, such as closing the wage gap, compensating care work often done by women, and encouraging women to run for political office.

In her essay Tuesday, French Gates touched upon the high maternal mortality rates in the U.S., noting that Black and Native American mothers are at the highest risk. “Women in 14 states have lost the right to terminate a pregnancy under almost any circumstances. We remain the only advanced economy without any form of national paid family leave. And the number of teenage girls experiencing suicidal thoughts and persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness is at a decade high,” she said.

French Gates will be leaving the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation next week. She helped co-found the organization nearly 25 years ago. The Associated Press receives financial support for news coverage in Africa from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and for news coverage of women in the workforce and state governments from Pivotal Ventures.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will change its name to the Gates Foundation. It is one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world. As of December 2023, its endowment was $75.2 billion, thanks to donations from Gates and the billionaire investor Warren Buffett. While it works across many issues, global health remains its largest area of work, and most of its funding is meant to address issues internationally rather than in the U.S."

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