Are our joint responsibility
international solidarity is essential, and in everyone’s interest.
Social protection floors for all are affordable. The financing gap for all developing countries — the difference between what these countries already invest in social protection and what a full social protection floor (including health) would cost — is about US$1,191 billion in the current year, including the impact of COVID-19. But the gap for the low-income countries is only some US$78 billion, a negligible amount compared to the GDP of the industrialised countries. Yet the total official development assistance for social protection amounts to only 0.0047 per cent of the gross national income of donor countries.
International human rights law recognises that wealthy States have a duty to help fulfil social rights in countries with more limited resources, and a number of steps have already been taken to convert this commitment into concrete assistance. In 2011 an expert advisory group recommended donors provide predictable, multiyear financing to strengthen social protection in developing countries. In 2012, two independent UN human rights experts proposed a Global Fund for Social Protection to help low-income countries create social protection floors for their people. The same year the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) membership – governments, workers and employers from 185 countries – backed the idea of comprehensive social protection with a unanimously adopted pledge to “establish and maintain...social protection floors as a fundamental element of their national social security systems”. We regularly hear pledges education component of this council consists of the ministers of education of our 15 Caricom member states.
So, let us be very clear that the folks who work at the CXC headquarters building at Pine Plantation Road in Barbados are only employees and functionaries of the council, and their role is merely to administer and implement the policies that are decided upon by the council.
Now, having established that we must, and will, build back better from the current crisis. We can only do this if everybody has a minimum level of social protection, including the poorest and most marginalised.
Countries must deploy the maximum resources available to make social protection a reality for all. This may require more effective approaches to taxation and tackling corruption. Longer term, this redistribution of assets will help to curb inequality and discrimination and support the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’s promise to “leave no one behind”.
This crisis offers us many lessons. One is that building back better requires international solidarity and better social protection for all, not just those who can already afford it. If we ignore this message, we risk condemning future generations to endure once more the immense suffering we see today. That, surely, is an intolerable prospect.
Michelle Bachelet is UN high commissioner for human rights. Other contributors to this piece include Olivier De Schutter, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, and Guy Ryder, director general, International Labour Organization.
that factual background, let us concede that this year of 2020 was an especially difficult year for the CXC, in that the council had to deal with the challenges posed by COVID-19, and had to respond by making sudden changes to the modus operandi of its examinations.
Not unexpectedly, those sudden changes to the modus operandi seem to have resulted in some degree of malfunction, particularly in relation to the more strictly academic subjects tested by CXC. And it seems to me that the malfunction is more likely to have been with the computerised methodology for processing the marks obtained by the students, rather than with the system of marking itself.
To date, the council has responded by establishing a five-person independent review team to consider:
(1) the modified approach that was adopted this year in administering the exams;
(2) the moderation process that was applied to the schoolbased assessment component of this year’s exams; and
(3) the grading process for this year’s exams.
It needs to be emphasised that the setting up of this review process is not an “intervention” by Sir Hilary. Indeed, Sir Hilary, as chair of the council, constitutes the core of CXC. One, therefore, cannot