CID Weekly: Cyclone Yasa CIDTalk, People's Vaccine Open Letter signatories & more.

Register for our first 2021 CIDTalk: NGOs Cyclone Yasa response

Join us virtually tomorrow for a discussion with representatives from organisations who are involved in the Cyclone Yasa response. 

New Zealand NGOs were an important part of the response, and in partnership with local agencies on the ground, continue to support the response and ongoing recovery from Yasa’s impact. Particularly, as Fiji continues to deal with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, traditional response mechanisms have included new challenges. This CIDTalk will be an opportunity to hear from aid professionals from a number of New Zealand NGOs that are involved in the response, and to hear some of the successes and challenges that this particular response included.

Register here

• 3:00pm - 4:00pm Wednesday 27 January
• Free for CID Members ($10 for non-members)
• Zoom link sent in registration email 

+ Open Letter for a People's Vaccine - Seeking Signatories 

NZ Alternative and Oxfam have written an Open Letter for a People's Vaccine, calling on the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to support a People's Vaccine, and back India and South Africa’s proposal for a temporary relaxation of intellectual property rules from certain provisions of the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspect of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) for the prevention, containment and treatment of COVID-19.

NZ Alternative and Oxfam are inviting CID Members and Supporters to sign this Open Letter, as an organisation, or as an individual.

Read the Open Letter for a People's Vaccine here

Please email Jo Spratt at joanna.spratt@oxfam.org.nz or Phoebe Matariki Carr at phoebe.matariki@nzalternative.org if you or your organisation would like to be a signatory.

+ Good Will Hunters Podcast Episode with Josie Pagani

Episode Three of the Good Will Hunters Summer Series: Development and Foreign Policy with Bridi Rice was released on 25 January. In this episode, Josie Pagani, Director of Council for International Development New Zealand, speaks bluntly about the differences between the Australian Pacific step up and the New Zealand Pacific reset, and her personal campaign to move the development sector away from what she calls the tilted head of compassion and towards a relationship of equals.

On the effects of increased poverty in Australia and New Zealand, Josie Pagani says:

"It [decreased poverty] happened because of civil society, good politicians influencing the policy debate, and getting good policies and good interventions, that was what was reducing extreme poverty.

Poverty is something we all understand. And somewhere we’ve got to get across the message now that just the urgency of dealing with it with the increase in poverty post COVID has got to be a priority for policymakers in our countries."

Listen to the new episode here.

+ Tracking aid flows during the Covid-19 crisis

The latest edition of the Development Initiatives aid tracker - Tracking aid flows in light of the Covid-19 crisis - has been released. This tracker uses real-time data to track and analyse aid commitments, and bring forth evidence about how aid trends may be changing.

The data tool compares the first 11 months of 2020 to 2018 and 2019 to illustrate the changes in aid flows from pre-Covid levels.  It brings together the latest International Aid Transparency Initiative data on aid commitments up to November 2020, but additional data is added each month as donors publish more recent information on their aid commitments. Development Initiatives briefing ‘How is aid changing in the Covid-19 pandemic?’, contains more detail on their methodology.
 

+ Vaccinating the Pacific for COVID-19 could take years

New research shows that it could take until 2015 for Pacific Island countries to vaccinate the majority of their populations against COVID-19.  The research suggests that wealthy nations could sideline the Pacific in the rush for the vaccine.  Pacific states are relying on wealthier nations, like the United States or New Zealand, to help with vaccinations, as well as the COVAX program run by the WHO.

New Zealand has purchased enough vaccinations to cover the Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau, Tonga, Samoa, and Tuvalu in addition to New Zealand's population.  Meanwhile, the United States is supplying vaccines for its Free Association countries, where vaccinations have already started in Northern Marianas.
 

+ Pacific role in Nuclear Disarmament Treaty

With the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons coming into force this month, it is a good reminder of the role the Pacific has played in helping ban nuclear weapons.

Pacific States make up ten of the fifty total ratifications for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Fiji, Kiribati, New Zealand, Palau, Samoa, Tuvalu and Vanuatu were among the first nations to sign the Treaty when it first opened for signature in September 2017. Cook Islands and Niue have also subsequently joined. And Nauru was one of the three countries that deposited their instruments of ratification at a signing ceremony in New York in October 2020, to push the Treaty over the line.