World News
Rebuilding relationships over natural resources in Darfur

Every year on 19 August, World Humanitarian Day offers the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations an opportunity to celebrate the daily work of humanitarian responders worldwide and recognize their dedication to helping others. World Humanitarian Day also gives us pause to reflect on how to continue improving the humanitarian response to climate change and complex emergencies.
Here we report on how a flagship United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)-led project in Darfur has improved the livelihoods of over 100,000 people and brought communities together to better manage limited natural resources.
Across Sudan’s arid Darfur region, water has always been one of the most precious commodities. Without it, life literally trickles to an end.
With climate change, the availability of water for farming and living has become more unpredictable. Rainfall has been erratic, and temperatures are rising higher, leading to food shortages and conflict as farmers and herders compete for scarce natural resources.
“Water is a priority anywhere in north Darfur. We sometimes have only one shower per year, and often, as little as between 150–200 mm of rain a year,” said Mohamed Siddig Lazim Suliman, who works on a UNEP project on water resource management in Darfur.
Drought is not always the problem. Heavy rains can also bring misery – and death. When the ground has been baked dry over long hot months, it cannot absorb sudden downpours. When the water comes, it runs off in flash floods, barreling down dry riverbeds, sweeping all before them. In North Darfur alone, more than 40 people have drowned since last year in such incidents.
The damage caused by climate change is compounded by the region’s troubled history. Conflict between communities tore Darfur apart in the early 2000s, killing and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Many never dared to return to their home villages. This put great strain on local environments where they chopped down trees for firewood, reducing forest and plant cover.
Solutions that hold water
But there are innovative, nature-based solutions to tackle Darfur’s environmental issues. These are being put in place by UNEP and partners in Wadi El Ku near El Fasher – the capital of North Darfur state – where Mohamed Siddig works.
This initiative has constructed weirs to conserve rainwater and regulate it when the floods come. It has been in place for seven years and has won plaudits for making residents’ lives more sustainable and reducing conflict between the nomadic herders of camels, cattle and goats and farmers.
From the beginning, UNEP and project partners worked closely with the local communities, encouraging parties to come together to build the weirs, which allow constant flow of water, while increasing soil moisture for a variety of crops. About 100,000 people in the 35,000 sq km catchment area benefit.
“This initiative has led to very big changes in the area. All stakeholders are involved and come together to seek consensus. It can take a long time, but it works,” explained Mohamed Siddig.
“The Wadi el Ku project demonstrates why it is critical for UN agencies, donors and the government to work hand-in-hand with local communities on restoring the environment. Ensuring that the region’s residents, especially women, manage natural resources in an inclusive way is helping end mistrust between farming and nomadic communities,” said Gary Lewis, UNEP’s Director for Disasters and Conflict.
Leading by Example
The Wadi El Ku project is now in a second phase, which began in 2018. Ultimately, this will see the construction of several weirs, irrigation channels, community forests, shelter belts and other interventions that will improve the livelihood for 100,000 people while restoring the natural resources.
Over the last year, the COVID-19 pandemic made it necessary to adapt project activities to minimize health risks. Radio programs are now used to reach large areas with simple extension messages. Hands-on training takes place outdoors, and communication with government officials relies more on WhatsApp and SMS than in the past. Through many small adaptations like these, the project continues to deliver efficiently while minimizing the risk of infections.
In consultation with the Ministry of Health, messages about COVID-19 preventive measures have also been incorporated in all outreach activities.
The project has paid special attention to involving women in the decision-making processes. They are members of water management committees along with other village representatives. Some have benefited from micro-financing schemes enabling them to buy seeds and equipment.
Fawzia Abdelhamid, Head of Women Development Association Network, one of the project’s partners, said the weirs have led to huge improvements in land irrigation, which means that women no longer having to spend hours every day walking long and dangerous journeys to fetch water.
“Girls used to help their mothers and could not go to school, it affected their health and added to high illiteracy rates. That has ended and women grow so many more vegetables than before,” she said.
Adam Ali Mohamed, 42, has seen a 10-fold increase in his production of watermelons, cucumbers and lentils which he now has to ferry to market by car rather than the occasional donkey trip. It has also seen his income go from around 20,000 Sudanese pounds a month to some 300,000.
“I have opened a shop in El Fasher and bought a house too. One of my sons is studying law at university there too,” he said. “I thank God for bringing this project into my life.”
Below are details on the structure of the project:
Donor: EU, 10 million EUR
Project holder: UNEP
Implementing partner: Practical Action
Practical Action rely on “the networks” for much of the implementation. There are three local networks consisting of 260 community-based organisations:
- Women Development Association NetWork (WDAN)
- El-Fashir Rural Development Network (ERDN)
- Voluntary Network for Rural Help Development (VNRHD)
The project is implemented in close collaboration with the North Darfur state government. The following entities are directly involved in implementing WEK II:
- Ministry of Production and Economic Resources (MOPER) which is a “super” ministry that includes the previous Ministry of Agriculture
- Department for Agricultural Extension
- Department for Environment
- Department Range and Pasture
- Department for Animal Resources
- Natural Resources Directorate
- Ground Water and Wadi Department (GWWD)
- State Water Corporation (SWC)
- Forests National Corporation (FNC)
- Agricultural Research Corporation (ARC)
- University of El Fasher
- University of Khartoum
World News
Foreign Affairs: What sanctions on Russia can and cannot achieve

“U.S. policymakers began planning major sanctions on Russia in late 2021” (before the beginning of Ukrainian conflict!), recognizes ‘Foreign Affairs’.
Over the past decade, economic sanctions emerged as Washington’s preferred policy tool to deal with a range of concerns, from adversarial governments in Iran and Venezuela to international drug trafficking. Sanctions became popular because officials saw them as a low-cost tool that could hurt the United States’ foes, writes ‘Foreign Affairs’.
The United States and its allies slammed Russia with a raft of sanctions and other economic restrictions. But a year later, the effectiveness of these measures offers important lessons on their limits. Sanctions and export controls have been useful in undermining Russia’s financial resources and industrial base, but they have done little to change the Kremlin’s strategic calculus.
As Western policymakers dig in for both a protracted conflict with Russia and an era of geopolitical great-power competition with China, they should recognize that sanctions can do real damage to their targets but rarely succeed in making those targets change course.
U.S. policymakers began planning major sanctions on Russia in late 2021 (before the beginning of Ukrainian conflict!), as U.S. President Joe Biden grew concerned about the prospect of a wide-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Sanctions initially rattled markets, with the ruble plunging and Russia forced to double domestic interest rates to stem capital flight. Export controls had a compounding effect on Russian military-industrial production over the course of last year.
But by late 2022, it was increasingly apparent that Russia had weathered the initial economic storm better than many Western officials and experts had expected: Russia’s economy contracted by more than two percent in 2022, a sharp reversal from the five percent growth in 2021, but a dip not nearly as severe as some initial estimates of a ten percent or greater decline in GDP.
Russia’s economy proved resilient.
In the years leading up to the war, Russia had worked to insulate itself from Western sanctions. Moscow withdrew its reserves from the U.S. financial system in 2018 and bolstered holdings of gold. It built domestic interbank transfer and payment mechanisms that proved successful at handling domestic payments and those between Russia and its allies. Russia deepened diplomatic relations with China, India, and countries in the Middle East, providing new outlets after trade with the West collapsed.
And once sanctions were imposed, Russia adopted macroeconomic policies, such as capital controls and bailouts to firms hit by sanctions, to blunt the shock.
Yet policymakers should recognize that sanctions and export controls are not going to affect Putin’s strategic calculus, which will be shaped much more heavily by events on the battlefield.
The primary lesson of Western sanctions on Russia is one that sanctions experts and practitioners have long noted: officials should not rely too much on such measures, stresses Foreign Affairs.
World News
Elsie Initiative Fund: call for proposals to continue investing in women’s meaningful participation in peacekeeping

At an event that brought together more than 350 representatives from Member States, UN organizations, academia and civil society, the Elsie Initiative Fund (EIF) launched a third call for funding proposals to support the meaningful participation of uniformed women in UN peace operations.
“A more gender-responsive mission builds trust with the communities they serve and improves its effectiveness,” said UN Women’s Executive Director Sima Bahous while opening the event. Further, she highlighted the vital role women play in today’s multidimensional peacekeeping missions and stressed the need to ensure women’s equal participation. UN Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix called on Member States to continue promoting women’s meaningful participation in peacekeeping. “Our gender parity efforts are also a matter of justice – there should be no limitation on the grounds of gender to what women can achieve, in all roles and at all levels,”he stressed in his opening remarks.
Since its creation in 2019, the EIF has awarded over USD $17 million in grants to 20 projects. Among the recipients, the Ghanaian Armed Forces and the Senegalese Police and Gendarmerie have deployed four gender-strong units comprising of 1,277 personnel with 18 per cent women across all ranks. 14 EIF-supported security institutions have surveyed 3,689 personnel to examine barriers limiting women’s participation and committed to implementing evidence-based solutions to address identified barriers.
Meanwhile, the Togolese Armed Forces and the Senegalese Police raised awareness among 5,000 people on challenging gender stereotypes and encouraging women to join security institutions as part of large-scale recruitment campaigns. Five EIF-funded projects are creating inclusive environments for women, including through the construction of gender-sensitive accommodation and facilities in Jordan, Senegal, and Togo and improving deployment conditions for their uniformed women peacekeepers deployed to UN peace operations in Mali and Lebanon.
Commending the impact of the EIF, British Minister of State Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon announced an additional contribution of £1 million (USD $1.23 million) to the EIF. “It is wonderful to see how projects supported by the EIF are already tackling obstacles to participation. More investment will mean the Fund can scale up that impact and make gender parity a future reality,” he said at the event. The Republic of Korea also announced an additional contribution of USD $500,000. Meanwhile, Canada’s Ambassador for Women, Peace and Security Jacqueline O’Neill announced that the EIF’s lifespan has been extended to 31 December 2025 as “Canada is committed to continuing to support the EIF.”
Representatives of the Ghanaian and the Uruguayan Armed Forces also spoke at the event about innovative practices developed with EIF funding, including piloting gender – and family – friendly policies and providing cross – training to prepare military women for all roles and functions.
Through this third programming round, the Elsie Initiative Fund can accept Letters of Interest from current and potential Troop and Police Contributing Countries and as UN organizations. Three funding modalities are available: (1) barrier assessment (2) flexible project funding and (3) gender-strong unit premium. For more information on applying to the EIF, visit elsiefund.org/call-for-proposals to download the Letter of Interest Form and supporting resources.
World News
What Beijing’s Iran-Saudi deal means

The agreement to reestablish diplomatic relations between Tehran and Riyadh was no “peace deal,” but the rivals did decide to cool tensions and reopen embassies after a seven-year lapse. China’s role in facilitating the deal raised the most consternation in Washington, leading some to declare that “a new era of geopolitics” had begun and assert that the agreement topped “anything the U.S. has been able to achieve in the region since Biden came to office,” writes Grant Rumley, a Goldberger Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Reports on the new agreement suggest that both sides were readily able to reach consensus on important issues, at least on paper. Riyadh apparently agreed to soften coverage on Iran International, the London-based media outlet funded by Saudis, which Tehran has depicted as the leading anti-regime instigator throughout the recent protest movement. In return, Iran reportedly agreed to encourage its Houthi allies in Yemen to maintain the current year-long truce. Since that war began in 2015, Saudi Arabia has spent millions of dollars defending its territory against Houthi missile and drone attacks, which have often targeted major civilian sites. In short, Riyadh and Tehran already had strong incentives to take at least a few initial diplomatic steps to bolster their internal stability.
According to the trilateral statement issued on March 10, Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to “resume diplomatic relations” and reopen their embassies within two months. They also affirmed their “respect for the sovereignty of states and…non-interference in internal affairs,” as well as their intention to implement their 2001 security cooperation agreement and their 1998 deal covering economic, cultural, and scientific cooperation.
Yet the 2001 security cooperation agreement includes generic language encouraging information sharing and joint training to counter organized crime, terrorism, and drug trafficking, it does not provide a specific path toward initiating such cooperation. Moreover, the trilateral statement makes painstakingly clear that China’s role was “hosting and sponsoring talks,” and it may host another regional summit later this year.
Washington should therefore be clear-eyed about what Beijing’s mediation means — and what it doesn’t.
China’s investment in the Middle East will likely continue growing; after all, it is the region’s dominant economic force and has long sought to match its diplomatic standing with its sizable economic footprint.
Until now, its diplomatic reputation in the region has not been challenged by realities on the ground. Getting Iran and Saudi Arabia to publicly agree on a de-escalation accord is a win to be sure.
-
Finance4 days ago
U.S. bank trouble heralds The End of dollar Reserve system
-
Americas3 days ago
Bulletproof Panama: An Isthmus of Stability Becomes a Magnet for Migration
-
International Law4 days ago
Putin, Xi, the ICC, and the Demise of Global Judiciary
-
Middle East4 days ago
The New Middle East: The Winners and Losers
-
South Asia4 days ago
Pakistan’s Priority Ranking of SDGs
-
Economy3 days ago
Impact of Multinational companies on Pakistan
-
Science & Technology3 days ago
Communication as a realm of human enigmatic growth
-
World News4 days ago
Russia will deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus – EU and NATO went ballistic