WAZIRI WA FEDHA AFUNGUA MKUTANO WA KIMATAIFA WA KUJADILI MATUMIZI YA TAKWIMU ZA UMASKINI

Waziri wa Fedha na Mipango, Dk. Philip Mpango akihutubia wakati akifungua mkutano wa kimataifa wa kujadili matumizi ya takwimu za umaskini na namna bora ya kupima hali ya umaskini Afrika jijini Dar es Salaam leo.

Mkurugenzi Mkuu Ofisi ya Taifa ya Takwimu (NBS), Dk.Albina Chuwa akitoa hutuba yake.

Balozi wa Umoja wa Ulaya Kanda ya Afrika Mashariki, Roland Van De Geer, akitsoma hutuba yake.

Mkurugenzi Mkazi wa Benki ya Dunia, Bella Bird akizungumza kwenye mkutano huo.

Mtafiti kutoka Taasisi ya Repoa, Dk.Blandina Kilama, akizungumza kwenye mkutano huo.

Mtakwimu kutoka Menejimenti Ofisi ya Mtakwimu Mkuu Tanzania Zanzibar, Mayasa Mwinyi akizungumza kwenye mkutano huo.

Taswira ya meza kuu.

Mkutano ukiendelea.

Taswira katika mkutano huo. 

Na Dotto Mwaibale

MATUMIZI ya Takwimu rasmi katika kupanga maendeleo ya wananchi kwa nchi zinazoendelea yamekuwa hayaendi kwa kasi inayotakiwa kimataifa imefahamika.

Hayo yameelezwa na Mkurugenzi Mkuu Ofisi ya Taifa ya Takwimu (NBS), Dk.Albina Chuwa Dar es Salaam leo wakati akisoma hutuba yake katika ufunguzi wa mkutano wa kimataifa wa kujadili matumizi ya takwimu za umaskini na namna bora ya kupima hali ya umaskini Afrika.

Alisema wakati dunia ikiendelea na utekelezaji wa malengo endelevu ya maendeleo ya dunia ya mwaka 2030 yapatayo 17, shabaha 169 na viashiria 231 ni dhahiri kuwa matumizi ya takwimu rasmi katika kufuatilia na kutathmini utekelezaji wake kila nchi haina budi kuyafanyia kazi ipasavyo.

"Kutokana na hali hiyo ndiyo maana Benki ya Dunia ikishirikiana na Wizara ya Fedha na Mipango, Ofisi ya Taifa ya Takwimu imeona umuhimu wa kuwa na mkutano huu wa kimataifa wa kukutanisha watakwimu, wachumi na fani nyingine za kitaalam kujadili kwa kina matumizi ya takwimu za hali ya umaskini na tafsiri yake kwa ujumla na nini kifanyike ili kuboresha zaidi tafsiri ya umaskini" alisema Dk. Chuwa.

Katika hatua nyingine Dk.Chuwa alitoa angalizo kwa kuwaomba wadau wote wa ndani na nje ya nchi kuwa takwimu za hali ya umaskini pamoja na utafiti wa mapato na matumizi ya Kaya nchini zinatolewa na serikali hivyo zisitumike vibaya kuichafua nchi kuhusu hali ya umaskini.

Alisema iwapo itatokea kuwepo kwa matumizi mabaya sheria ya takwimu ya mwaka 2015 pamoja na kanuni zake tayari zimesainiwa zitachukua mkondo wake. 

Alisema Takwimu zitumike kwa lengo la kuleta maendeleo ya kweli kwa wananchi maskini wa Tanzania na kwa nchi zinazoendelea hususan kwa nchi zilizoko Kusini mwa Bara la Afrika.

Mgeni rasmi wa mkutano huo wa siku mbili ambao umeandaliwa na Benki ya Dunia, Waziri wa Fedha na Mipango Dk.Philip Mpango alisema ilikuweza kujenga Afrika lenye neema nilazima kuhakikisha kuwa bara hili linaondokana na umaskini na kuwataka wataalamu waliohudhuria mkutano huo kutunganjia bora ya kupima umaskini.

Alisema ili kuendana na kasi ya dunia na utekelezaji wa malengo endelevu ya maendeleo ya mwaka 2030 yapatayo 17 ni wazi ufanyaji takwimu na utafiti unapaswa kufanyika ili kujua kiwango cha umaskini lakini pia aina ya umaskini uliopo.

Floods and erosion are ruining Britain’s most significant sites

From Wordsworth’s gardens to the south’s white cliffs and salmon rivers in Wales, climate change is wrecking historic sites, finds report

Cottages at Birling Gap were once one of seven properties. The fifth end-of-terrace pebble-dash terrace was demolished in March 2014. Photograph: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images

Damian Carrington

Climate change is already wrecking some of Britain’s most significant sites, from Wordsworth’s gardens in Cumbria to the white cliffs on England’s south coast, according to a new report.

Floods and erosion are damaging historic places, while warmer temperatures are seeing salmon vanishing from famous rivers and birds no longer visiting important wetlands.

The report was produced by climate experts at Leeds University and the Climate Coalition, a group of 130 organisations including the RSPB, National Trust, WWF and the Women’s Institute.

“Climate change often seems like a distant existential threat [but] this report shows it is already impacting upon some of our most treasured and special places around the UK,” said Prof Piers Forster of Leeds University.

Study reveals huge acceleration in erosion of England's white cliffs

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“It is clear our winters are generally getting warmer and wetter, storms are increasing in intensity and rainfall is becoming heavier. Climate change is not only coming home – it has arrived,” Forster said. It is also already affecting everyday places such as churches, sports grounds, farms and beaches, he said.

Wordsworth House and Garden in Cockermouth, where the romantic poet William Wordsworth was born in 1770 and learned his love of nature, was seriously damaged by two recent flooding events linked to a changing climate.

In November 2009, torrential rain caused £500,000 of damage, sweeping away gates and walls that had survived since the 1690s. Floods inundated the site again during Storm Desmond in December 2015. “When I saw the damage the floods had caused in 2009 I was shocked and it took almost three years to repair the garden,” said the house’s head gardener, Amanda Thackeray. “Then after all that hard work to see the devastation from flooding in 2015 was very upsetting.”William Wordsworth’s gardens in Cockermouth, Cumbria, before and after the 2015 floods.

Flooding: 'Up here in the north-east, we’re just forgotten about'

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A century-long record shows the UK is experiencing more intense heavy rainfall during winter. Researchers can also use climate models to reveal the influence of global warming on some extreme events and have found the UK’s record December rainfall in 2015 was made 50-75% more likely by climate change. Another study found Storm Desmond was 40% more likely to have occurred because of the human activities that release greenhouse gases, such as burning fossil fuels.

Birling Gap is part of the world famous Seven Sisters chalk cliffs on England’s south coast and over the last 50 years, about 67cm of cliff is eroded each year. But during the winter storms of 2013-2014, the equivalent of seven years of erosion occurred in just two months.

“The succession of storms provided a stark warning that coastal ‘defence’ as the only response to managing coastal change looks increasingly less plausible,” said Phil Dyke, coastal adviser at the National Trust. “We must learn how to adapt.”

Existing buildings at Birling Gap are being lost and new buildings will be designed to be easier to move back as the cliff disappears. Scientists know that climate change is driving up sea levels and increasing the likelihood of more intense storms, meaning the rate of erosion is likely to rise.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Cracks have appeared in Birling Gap chalk cliffs in East Sussex due to erosion. Photograph: Peter Cripps/Alamy Stock Photo

Rising temperatures are also affecting wildlife, including in the famous salmon rivers, the Wye and Usk, where otters and kingfishers also live. December is peak spawning time for salmon in Wales, but recent winters have been exceptionally warm.

“After eliminating other potential causes such as disease and lack of adults, we have come to the conclusion that the exceptionally high water temperatures of November and December 2016 are the reason for the disastrous salmon fry numbers this year,” said Simon Evans, chief executive of the Wye & Usk Foundation.

Landmark sites in the US at risk from climate change – in pictures

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2015 was little better, with young salmon found at just 17 sites out of 142, when they usually would be expected at 108 areas. Research has shown salmon populations across the Wye catchment fell by 50% from 1985-2004, despite cuts in water pollution. But stream temperatures have risen by up to 1C in that time, leaving researchers to conclude that climate change is a key factor in plummeting salmon numbers.

Slimbridge wetlands in Gloucestershire is one of the UK’s most important bird sites, hosting 200 species from all over the world, but is also seeing changes as the climate warms. Numbers of migratory white-fronted geese have fallen by 98% in the last 30 years due to warmer weather further north.

Geoff Hilton, at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust said the shrinking flocks could have knock-on effects on the wetland habitat: “These are quite big changes ecologically. If you suddenly lose thousands of geese from a wetland, there are bound to be big effects on that wetland.”

FacebookTwitterPinterest Numbers of migratory white-fronted geese have fallen 98% in the last 30 years due to climate change. Photograph: David Hoggett/Alamy Stock Photo

Warmer conditions have also meant water primrose, an alien invader to the UK, has grown aggressively in wide, dense mats and is seriously damaging native plants and fish. However, warmer winters have seen little egret numbers visiting Slimbridge increasing from just eight in the 1990s to 30 in 2013.

Other sites being ruined by climate change, according to the new report, include a famous riverside pub on Manchester’s river Irwell, the Mark Addy, which has not re-opened after the 2015 winter floods and the historic clubhouse at Corbridgecricket club in Northumberland, now demolished after the same floods.

The report also warns that the 5,000-year-old neolithic village at Skara Brae on Orkney, revealed after a great storm in 1850 stripped away grass and sand, could be destroyed in future as violent storms become more common.

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Up to 13,000 secretly hanged in Syrian jail, says Amnesty

Thousands of other opponents of Assad died from torture and starvation at Saydnaya prison, witness reports suggest

An aerial view of Saydnaya prison. Photograph: Amnesty

Martin Chulov

Tuesday 7 February 2017 00.01 GMTLast modified on Tuesday 7 February 2017 01.12 GMT

As many as 13,000 opponents of Bashar al-Assad were secretly hanged in one of Syria’s most infamous prisons in the first five years of the country’s civil war as part of an extermination policy ordered by the highest levels of the Syrian government, according to Amnesty International.

Many thousands more people held in Saydnaya prison died through torture and starvation, Amnesty said, and the bodies were dumped in two mass graves on the outskirts of Damascus between midnight and dawn most Tuesday mornings for at least five years.

The report, Human Slaughterhouse, details allegations of state-sanctioned abuse that are unprecedented in Syria’s civil war, a conflict that has consistently broken new ground in depravity, leaving at least 400,000 people dead and nearly half the country’s population displaced.

'The worst place on earth': inside Assad's brutal Saydnaya prison

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It suggests thousands more people could have been hanged in Saydnaya since the end of 2015, after which former guards and detainees who spoke to Amnesty no longer had access to verifiable information from inside the prison.

Among the 84 people interviewed were four former guards at two key buildings, a “red building” in which civilian detainees were held and a “white building” that held former military members and where hangings were carried out in the basement. More than 12 months of research focused on 31 men who were held in both buildings. A military judge was also interviewed.

The witnesses claimed that once or twice a week 20 to 50 people at a time were hanged after sham trials before a military court. Their bodies were taken to the nearby Tishreen military hospital where a cause of death was typically registered as a respiratory disorder or heart failure. They were buried on military land in Nahja, south of Damascus, and Qatana, a small town to the west.

The report’s author, Nicolette Waldman, said the estimate of the number of people hanged ranged from a minimum of 5,000 to a maximum of 13,000.

“There is no reason at all to expect that the hangings have stopped. We believe it is very likely that the executions are going on to this day and that many thousands more people have been killed,” she said.

“They came for them on a Monday. Before they were hanged, victims were condemned to death in a two- to three-minute hearing. The death sentence was signed by the minister of defence, who was deputised to sign by President Assad. It is inconceivable that all of the top officials did not know about it. This was a policy of extermination.”Saydnaya prison locator

Waldman said the hanging victims were separate to claims of the systematic killing of more than 11,000 detainees in Syria from March 2011 until August 2013, which were documented by a photographer codenamed Caesar who worked for the Syrian military police.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed last May that at least 60,000 people had died as a result of torture or dire conditions in Syrian prisons from the earliest months of the anti-Assad insurrection.

Since then, Syria has been gradually torn apart. The initial uprising was met with a brutal crackdown and mass detentions, and by late 2011 it had started to transform into an armed insurgency that aimed to topple the four-decade Assad dynasty and its supporting state structure.

By mid-2012 the uprising had been joined by jihadists from outside Syria, who blended with hundreds of hardcore Islamists freed from Syrian prisons who had begun to splinter the opposition. All the while, mass arrests and detentions accelerated, as did an exodus of civilians from most parts of the country.

The war soon sparked the biggest refugee crisis anywhere since the end of the second world war. Mass immigration has since been a focal point of political discourse in Europe and the US, feeding the rise of populism and nationalistic leaders such as Donald Trump, whose travel ban prevented Syrians, among others, from entering the US, until the order was overturned by a federal judge on Friday.

Amnesty said non-state armed groups had also carried out serious human rights abuses against detainees. It singled out the al-Qaida-inspired Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State as perpetrators of war crimes. But it said the “vast majority of detention-related violations since 2011 have been carried out by Syrian authorities”.

Witnesses to the killings in Saydnaya described a methodical routine in which those about to be hung were collected from their cell block in the red building in the afternoon and told they were to be transferred to another prison. They were instead taken to the basement of the white building, several hundred metres away, and repeatedly beaten. They were taken before a military judge and condemned, before being hanged between midnight and 3am.

“Some of them initially did not know what the sounds were,” said Waldman. “It is such a dehumanising and horrible experience in prison already.”

Amnesty said its witnesses had detailed each step of the process, with some giving graphic accounts of having heard the hangings being carried out in the room beneath them. The organisation said it had sought a response to its allegations from Syrian officials in mid-January but received no reply. Amnesty researchers are barred from entering Syria.

“What we have uncovered is beyond anything else we have seen,” said Waldman. “This demands a new kind of response. These practices have to stop. It is one more step of diabolical intent by the Syrian authorities.”