Africa

The German MEP rejects folding farm policy into broader EU spending plans

The internet was shut during the general election, leaving many people without any income - or entertainment.

The internet was shut during the general election, leaving many people without any income - or entertainment.

The internet was shut during the general election, leaving many people without any income - or entertainment.

Die Frau soll in der russischen Botschaft in Berlin Informationen beschafft haben. Die Deutsch-Ukrainerin lebt schon seit Jahrzehnten in Deutschland.

Der 7-jährige Martin V. ist am 6. Januar tot in seinem Zimmer im Kinderheim Brugg AG gefunden worden. Die Behörden vermuten einen Unfall, doch sein Vater Lawrence V. (36) fordert im Gespräch mit Blick Antworten. Eine Untersuchung läuft.

Der Sturm Harry hält aktuell Süditalien in Atem. Besonders auf Sizilien plagen starke Regenfälle und Überschwemmungen die Bevölkerung. Bürgermeister wollten die Bewohner einer Stadt per Livestream vor dem Sturm warnen – und gerieten dabei selbst in Gefahr.

Bislang gehörte das Jumeirah-Hotel auf der spanischen Ferieninsel der deutschen Deka-Gruppe. Diese hat den Hotelkomplex nun an eine Holding aus Dubai veräussert. Im Sommer kostet das günstigste Zimmer 1000 Franken pro Nacht.

Kizza Besigye's wife has been to visit him at Luzira Prison and says he is extremely weak.

After chaotic scenes in the Africa Cup of Nations final, BBC Sport Africa explores what else we learned from just under a month of competition in Morocco.

After chaotic scenes in the Africa Cup of Nations final, BBC Sport Africa explores what else we learned from just under a month of competition in Morocco.

After chaotic scenes in the Africa Cup of Nations final, BBC Sport Africa explores what else we learned from just under a month of competition in Morocco.

It remains unclear whether SDF leader Mazloum Abdi will still accept a deal after negotiations collapsed on late Monday

Plus, Greenland, drone action, Ukraine loan

For the last twenty years, Sarah Nyaga, a smallholder farmer from Embu County in central Kenya, has farmed coffee. Like most across Kenya, she relies on the export market. A greater percentage of Kenya’s coffee ends up within the European Union market, but a new law threatens to disrupt what has been a source of […]

Lead author Prof. Kaveh Madani
 
Flagship report calls for fundamental reset of global water agenda as irreversible damage pushes many basins beyond recovery.

By UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 21 2026 (IPS)

The world is already in the state of “water bankruptcy”. In many basins and aquifers, long-term overuse and degradation mean that past hydrological and ecological baselines cannot realistically be restored.

While not every basin or country is water-bankrupt, enough critical systems around the world have crossed these thresholds, and are interconnected through trade, migration, climate feedbacks, and geopolitical dependencies, that the global risk landscape is now fundamentally altered.

The familiar language of “water stress” and “water crisis” is no longer adequate. Stress describes high pressure that is still reversible. Crisis describes acute, time-bound shocks. Water bankruptcy must be recognized as a distinct post-crisis state, where accumulated damage and overshoot have undermined the system’s capacity to recover.

A group of women fetching water from a dam in Taha, Northern Region of Ghana. Credit: Evans Ahorsu. Source: UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health

Water bankruptcy management must address insolvency and irreversibility. Unlike financial bankruptcy management, which deals only with insolvency, managing water bankruptcy is concerned with rebalancing demand and supply under conditions where returning to baseline conditions is no longer possible.

Anthropogenic drought is central to the world’s new water reality. Drought and water shortage are increasingly driven by human activities, over-allocation, groundwater depletion, land and soil degradation, deforestation, pollution, and climate change, rather than natural variability alone. Water bankruptcy is the outcome of long-term anthropogenic drought, not just bad luck with hydrological anomalies.

Water bankruptcy is about both quantity and quality. Declining stocks, polluted rivers, and degrading aquifers, and salinized soils mean that the truly usable fraction of available water is shrinking, even where total volumes may appear stable.

Managing water bankruptcy requires a shift from crisis management to bankruptcy management. The priority is no longer to “get back to normal”, but to prevent further irreversible damage, rebalance rights and claims within degraded carrying capacities, transform water-intensive sectors and development models, and support just transitions for those most affected.

Governance institutions must protect both water and its underlying natural capital. The existing institutions focus on protecting water as a good or service disregarding the natural capital that makes water available in the first place. Efforts to protect a product are ineffective when the processes that produce it are disrupted.

Recognizing water bankruptcy calls for developing legal and governance institutions that can effectively protect not only water but also the hydrological cycle and natural capital that make its production possible.

Water bankruptcy is a justice and security issue. The costs of overshoot and irreversibility fall disproportionately on smallholder farmers, rural and Indigenous communities, informal urban residents, women, youth, and downstream users, while benefits have often accrued to more powerful actors. How societies manage water bankruptcy will shape social cohesion, political stability, and peace.

Water bankruptcy management combines mitigation with adaptation. While water crisis management paradigms seek to return the system to normal conditions through mitigation efforts only, water bankruptcy management focuses on restoring what is possible and preventing further damages through mitigation combined with adaptation to new normals and constraints.

Water can serve as a bridge in a fragmented world. Water can align national priorities with international priorities and improve cooperation between and within nations. Roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals are used for agriculture, much of it by farmers in the Global South. Elevating water in global policy debates can help rebuild trust between South and North but also within nations, between rural and urban, left and right constituencies.

Water must be recognized as an upstream sector. Most national and international policy agendas treat water as a downstream impact sector where investments are focused on mitigating the imposed problems and externalities. The world must recognize water as an upstream opportunity sector where investments have long-term benefits for peace, stability, security, equity, economy, health, and the environment.

Water is an effective medium to fulfill the global environmental agenda. Investments in addressing water bankruptcy deliver major co-benefits for the global efforts to address its environmental problems while addressing the national security concerns of the UN member states.

Elevating water in the global policy agenda can renew international cooperation, increase the efficiency of environmental investments, and reaccelerate the halted progress of the three Rio Conventions to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and desertification.

A new global water agenda is urgently needed. Existing agendas and conventional water policies, focused mainly on WASH, incremental efficiency gains and generic IWRM guidelines, are not sufficient for the world’s current water reality. A fresh water agenda must be developed that takes Global Water Bankruptcy as a starting point and uses the 2026 and 2028 UN Water Conferences, the conclusion of the Water Action Decade in 2028, and the 2030 SDG 6 timeline as milestones for resetting how the world understands and governs water.

Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era | UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) (20 January) (press release)

Support Paper
Madani K. (2026) Water Bankruptcy: The Formal Definition, Water Resources Management, 40 (78) doi: 10.1007/s11269-025-04484-0)

IPS UN Bureau

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');  

In today's edition: Virkkunen's Grok warning, Cybersecurity revision, Vdl adopts 'EU Inc' rhetoric

In Wednesday's edition: Várhelyi’s fake adviser, Davos, Weber vs rebels, ‘bug off’ Trump

Der Premierminister von Grönland sagte bei einer Pressekonferenz am Dienstag, die Insel in der Aktis stehe unter grossem Druck. Eine Invasion der USA könne nicht ausgeschlossen werden. Die Bevölkerung müsse für alle Szenarien gewappnet sein.

Credit: Luc Gnago/Reuters via Gallo Images

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jan 20 2026 (IPS)

In December, the dust settled on Guinea’s first presidential election since the military took control in a 2021 coup. General Mamady Doumbouya stayed in power after receiving 87 per cent of the vote. But the outcome was never in doubt: this was no a democratic milestone; it was the culmination of Guinea’s denied transition to civilian rule.

Doumbouya has successfully performed an act of political alchemy, turning a military autocracy into an electoral one. By systematically dismantling the opposition, silencing the press and rewriting laws to suit his ambitions, he has made sure to shield his grip on power with a thin veil of electoral legitimacy.

The architecture of autocracy

The path to this moment was paved with precision. In April 2025, Doumbouya announced a constitutional referendum, a move that may have looked like it would herald the beginning of the end of military rule. But it was something else entirely. By June, Doumbouya had further centralised control by creating a new General Directorate of Elections. This body, placed firmly under the thumb of the Ministry of Territorial Administration, reversed previous efforts to establish an independent electoral institution.

The constitution was drafted in the shadows by the National Council of the Transition, the junta-appointed legislative body. While early drafts reportedly contained safeguards against lifetime presidencies, these were stripped away before the final text reached the public. The result was a document that removed a ban on junta members running for office, extended presidential terms from five to seven years and granted the president the power to appoint a third of the newly created Senate.

When the referendum was held on 21 September, it rubber-stamped de facto rule. Official figures claimed 89 per cent support with an 86 per cent turnout, numbers that defied the reality of a widespread opposition boycott and a palpable lack of public enthusiasm.

A climate of fear

With a blanket ban on protests in effect since May 2022, those who’ve dared challenge the junta’s controlled transition have been met with security force violence. On 6 January 2025, security forces killed at least three people, including two children, during demonstrations called by the opposition coalition Forces Vives de Guinée.

The political landscape was further cleared through administrative and judicial means. In October 2024, the government dissolved over 50 political parties. By August 2025, major opposition groups such as the Rally of the People of Guinea had been suspended. Key challengers, including former Prime Minister Cellou Dalein Diallo, remain in exile, while others, among them Aliou Bah, have been sentenced to prison – in Bah’s case, for allegedly insulting Doumbouya.

The atmosphere of fear has been reinforced by a brutal crackdown on the media. Guinea plummeted 25 places in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, the year’s largest fall. Independent outlets have had their licences revoked and journalists have been detained. Those still working have learned to practise strict self-censorship to avoid becoming the next target. This meant that as voters went to the polls, there was nobody to provide diverse perspectives, scrutinise the process, investigate irregularities or hold authorities accountable.

Coup contagion

Guinea is no outlier. Since 2020, a coup contagion has swept through Africa, with military takeovers in Burkina Faso, Chad, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Mali, Niger and Sudan. In each instance, the script has been similar: military leaders seize power promising to ‘correct’ the failures of the previous regime, only to break their promises of a return to civilian rule.

Guinea is now the third country among this recent wave to move from a military dictatorship to an electoral autocracy. It follows in the footsteps of Chad, where Mahamat Idriss Déby secured victory in May 2024 after the suspicious killing of his main opponent, and Gabon, where General Brice Oligui Nguema won a 2025 election with a reported 90 per cent of the vote.

The international community does little. Doumbouya routinely ignored deadlines and sanctions from the Economic Community of West African States, which once prided itself on a ‘zero-tolerance’ policy for coups, and no consequences ensued. The African Union and the United Nations offered rhetorical concern, but their warnings were not accompanied by tangible diplomatic or economic repercussions.

The world’s willingness to maintain business as usual while Doumbouya steered through a fake transition sends a dangerous message to other aspiring autocrats, in the region and beyond.

Democracy denied

When Doumbouya seized power in 2021, he was greeted with a degree of cautious optimism. His predecessor, Alpha Condé, had controversially amended the constitution to secure a third term amid violent protests and corruption and fraud allegations. Doumbouya promised to fix things, but instead became a mirror image of the man he ousted, using the same tactics of constitutional revision and repression to secure his power.

The statistics of the December election – an 87 per cent victory on a claimed 80 per cent turnout – do not reflect a genuine mandate but rather a vacuum: with no independent media to scrutinise the process and no viable opposition allowed to run, the election was a technicality.

The prospects for real democracy in Guinea appear remote. Doumbouya has secured a seven-year mandate through an election that eliminated the essential infrastructure needed for democracy. In the absence of stronger international pressure and tangible support for Guinean civil society, Guinea faces prolonged authoritarian rule behind a democratic facade, with dismal human rights prospects.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');