Safeguard & accountablility issues

By Samuel Nnah Ndobe

The notion of indigenous people has sometimes been controversial in Africa. There are some opinions that consider all Africans as indigenous people liberated from colonial powers, while others simply stress that it is very difficult to determine who is indigenous in Africa. The setting up in 2001 by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) of a Working Group on Indigenous Populations/Communities and the Group’s report submitted to and adopted by the ACHPR in 2003 have brought a new perspective to this problem. In this report for the first time there was a unanimous acceptance of the existence of indigenous peoples in Africa and this kicked off discussions on how countries could begin to integrate the rights of these peoples into the human rights mainstream. The indigenous peoples of Central Africa include the mostly hunter gatherer peoples commonly called the “Pygmies” and a number of pastoralist peoples. These peoples still suffer discrimination experienced through the dispossession of their land and destruction of their livelihoods, cultures and identities, extreme poverty, lack of access to and participation in political decision-making and lack of access to education and health facilities.

Projects and programme interventions of multilateral development banks have a record of systematic and widespread human rights violations for indigenous peoples in Asia. In many countries, indigenous peoples have been subjected to widespread displacement and irreversible loss of traditional livelihoods. Behind these human rights violations is the denial of indigenous peoples’ rights to their lands, territories and resources and to their right to give their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) to projects and programme interventions, including those in the name of sustainable development and human development. Among them, the large infrastructure (dams and highway construction) and environmental “conservation” projects have had the most detrimental adverse impacts on indigenous peoples. There are a good number of examples of such projects that have negatively impacted indigenous peoples’ communities in Asian countries, some of which follow below.

As the World Bank reviews its environmental and social standards, a major opportunity to overhaul World Bank approach to forests must not be missed.

The negative impacts of World Bank-financed projects on tropical forests have been an issue of concern for civil society and forest peoples for decades. In the 1980s, World Bank megaprojects in the Amazon and in Indonesia in support for infrastructure projects, agricultural colonisation and transmigration generated major criticism from the public. This in turn generated the political pressure that was a key factor in leading the World Bank Group to adopt mandatory social and environmental standards, known as safeguards, to demonstrate its commitment to preventing harm to people and the environment [See Article 1].

A coalition of NGOs, including Forest Peoples Programme, have written to the President of the World Bank, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, to encourage the World Bank to elevate secure community land rights as a priority, and to ensure that all assistance, advice, and investments promote development models that fully respect local peoples’ human rights.