New Zealand workers speak out on unsafe conditions, wage cuts

Tom Peters

Workers in New Zealand remain deeply concerned about being exposed to the potentially deadly COVID-19 coronavirus. The Labour Party-led government’s four-week shutdown of schools and non-essential businesses began on March 26 in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading.

So far, New Zealand has confirmed 797 cases of the virus, with one death. The numbers are rising each day. Most cases relate to international travel, but many originated within New Zealand.

Despite Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s claim that her government has acted faster than other countries, there has been nowhere near enough testing to know the extent of contagion. Just over 26,000 tests have been conducted.

This week, the government finally widened the criteria so anyone with symptoms can be tested regardless of whether they have a history of travel. This will still not identify people who are infected but have no symptoms.

There are many reports of vulnerable workers being placed at risk. On March 28, Stuff reported on workers at a New World supermarket in the affluent Wellington suburb of Thorndon, near Parliament. They were sent an email telling them if they stayed home they would be placed on leave without pay, even if they had health problems.

A similar message was sent to workers in a Christchurch supermarket. “The email was signed off with the hashtag #bekind,” Stuff noted.

Stan, a resident of Levin, north of Wellington, told the World Socialist Web Site he and his wife were concerned as they share a house with a supermarket worker. “My wife has diabetes and fibromyalgia, which makes her more vulnerable to COVID-19.” The supermarket worker “has to be careful because he might pass it on,” he explained.

“It’s only been less than a week of the lockdown and frontline workers are getting stressed out and overwhelmed already,” Stan said. He added that “without mass testing, treatment and isolation, the quarantine will have limited long-term effect. Why haven’t they been stockpiling tests since November? Why aren’t they testing all staff in essential services?”

The WSWS spoke with a kitchen worker from a South Island public hospital, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid any negative repercussions.

She said the company she worked for had provided hand sanitiser and gloves but no face masks. Workers were informed about a two-metre social distancing rule, but this was not being enforced. “Protocols are very vague,” she said.

The worker explained that she had long-standing health problems. “I know that I’m at risk because it’s stated on the COVID-19 government website that people with high blood pressure shouldn’t be working. I take blood pressure medication because I have hypertension and I regularly see my doctor about my heart problems.

“So I went to work on Thursday, Friday, Saturday knowing that I’m at risk. It didn’t sit well with me.”

The worker then rang the Ministry of Health who told her “you’re right, high blood pressure is a risk.” After multiple phone calls and discussions with doctors and her employer, the worker succeeded in getting time off work, but her medical certificate still did not specify she was at “high-risk.” “Why is it so hard to admit that I am at risk and I am eligible for the wage subsidy?” she asked.

The lack of face masks for workers preparing hospital food is particularly concerning. The government has repeatedly stated that it has millions of masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE) available, and is procuring more from overseas. But hospital workers, disability carers and others have reported shortages. An online petition demanding higher-quality PPE for doctors and nurses has more than 16,000 signatures.

Another petition last week calling for the shutdown of the meat processing industry over unsafe conditions gained over 2,600 signatures. The Otago Daily Times reported on March 31 that a worker at Silver Fern Farms’ Finegand processing factory said there were no masks and workers were “told to be two metres away from others but that’s just really unrealistic in [this] type of work.”

“If we walk off the job, we won’t get the subsidy, and if we stay at work, we risk getting COVID-19,” the worker said. The Meat Workers Union is working closely with businesses to keep the factories in operation.

While the government is giving billions of dollars to businesses, thousands of workers have been sacked. Others have been forced to stay home during the lockdown on reduced pay. Companies affected by the pandemic can get a “wage subsidy” from the government but are not obliged to pay full wages, compelling many people to seek welfare payments.

A Taupo resident, whose husband had taken a pay cut from his restaurant job, told the WSWS it was too hard to get assistance. “They need to make it easier to get food grants while this is happening. Phones [are] overloaded with the Ministry of Social Development,” she said. “What about all those people who don’t have the internet or phone? There are still people who are poor enough that can’t afford these so-called necessities.”

Fletcher Building, New Zealand’s largest construction company, today announced a 20 percent wage cut for 9,000 employees during the four-week lockdown. Should the lockdown be extended, it will cut wages by 50 percent for the next four weeks, and 70 percent after that.

The WSWS has seen a letter sent to workers at Downer Group announcing a 20 percent wage cut. It declared, “we have to make some sacrifices now” to avoid redundancies. The wage reduction would last at least four weeks and could be “extended up to 12 weeks.” The construction and engineering company, which operates primarily in Australia and New Zealand and employs 53,000 people, made an underlying profit of $340.1 million in 2019.

The letter said Downer had been “working closely” with four trade unions which “are supportive of us working to retain as many jobs as possible.” The E Tu union released a brief statement on March 31 saying members at Downer were “free to accept this offer to ensure your income continues at 80 percent,” even though the union did not believe the company’s process was lawful. The statement has since been removed from the union’s website.

Indonesian government declares “national emergency” after downplaying coronavirus threat

Owen Howell

After weeks of government denials that the coronavirus had even reached Indonesia, and weeks more of official claims that adequate screening measures were in place, the country of 270 million people faces a health disaster unprecedented in scale.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Achmad Yurianto, the government’s spokesperson for COVID-19 affairs, announced 114 new infections and 14 new deaths. That brings the official total, which dramatically understates the extent of the spread, to 1,677 confirmed infections and 157 deaths. The virus has been detected in 32 of the country’s 34 provinces.

President Joko Widodo then declared a national public health emergency to be imposed until May 29.

Earlier in the day, Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said the government would ban all arrivals and transits by foreign nationals in Indonesia. The country is bracing for a wave of Indonesian workers returning from Malaysia, which recently declared a national lockdown.

With the highest death rate in South-East Asia, at almost 9 percent, current numbers suggest that more people in Indonesia are dying from the virus than have recovered. The figures also suggest that only those who are seriously-ill are receiving treatment and appearing in the official statistics.

Over 80 percent of the 1,528 confirmed cases detected are on Java. This indicates the development of clusters on the densely populated island, but likely also reflects the fact that testing has largely been limited to the country’s major cities.

Over the weekend, a report published by a team from the University of Indonesia warned that the coronavirus pandemic would result in a death toll greater than that of the devastating Aceh tsunami in 2004, which killed more than 167,000 people.

The report warned that without substantial government intervention, 240,000 people could die by the end of this month. Even with a “moderate intervention” by the authorities, 48,000 may perish in April. A “high-intensity intervention” could lower the fatalities to 12,000.

On Friday, the government acknowledged that as many as 700,000 people may already have come into contact with the virus. Achmad Yurianto, an Essex University professor of applied mathematics, said that up to half the population, or 135 million people, could be infected by mid-May.

Government measures, including limitations on mass gatherings and calls for people to practice social distancing, combined with a criminal lack of testing, have drawn heavy criticism from medical experts.

The critics have repeatedly spoken of the urgent need to impose obligatory social distancing, close down schools and workplaces, ban travel between provinces and limit public transport services. Their pleas, however, have thus far fallen on deaf ears.

“What we feared most is that our health system cannot cope with the pandemic,” Iwan Ariawan, a biostatistics lecturer at the University of Indonesia, told the Jakarta Globe. “In this regard, the number of our hospitals, hospital beds, ICUs [intensive care units], ventilators, and isolation rooms, would not be adequate if we do not implement the proper intervention.”

Warnings issued by the Indonesian Doctors’ Association, which has urged the government for weeks to provide more funds for healthcare, have taken on an increasingly desperate tone. Its spokesperson Halik Malik said last Friday: “The government’s plans are in tatters and they appear to be avoiding a lockdown. Our health system is not as strong as [in] other countries.”

Images on social media of doctors and medical workers threatening to go on strike have been widely shared. At least eight doctors have died of the virus. In a tweet that soon became viral, the brother-in-law of one of the deceased doctors attacked the government’s handling of the crisis, saying: “The limited amount of protective equipment is hard to forgive.”

Indonesia had fewer than four doctors for every 10,000 people, according to World Health Organization data from 2017.

There was speculation in the local media on Sunday that the capital’s metropolitan area, Greater Jakarta, deemed to be the epicentre of COVID-19 within the country, was likely to close its borders for travel. The Transportation Ministry, having curtailed some services, is reportedly discussing further restrictions on public transport in Greater Jakarta.

On Monday, however, Widodo again rejected calls for a lockdown of Jakarta. The decision is motivated solely by concern for corporate profit interests, including those of major transnational corporations with operations in the city. It means that the city’s almost ten million workers, many of whom live and work in densely-populated areas, are imperiled by unchecked community transmissions.

While some workers, including in office-based and professional sectors have been able to work from home, this has not been an option for the vast majority, who are employed in industries that rely on workers being on site. The extreme shortage of protective equipment, in a situation where the virus is known to have been spreading undetected for at least a month, has meant that workers must risk their lives on the job.

Economic instability in the major cities and fears of contracting the virus are forcing thousands, many unemployed or evicted from their dwellings, to return to their hometowns in the countryside. This mass exodus to the country, known as mudik, will be particularly widespread during the religious holiday period of Idul Fitri in late May. It could greatly accelerate the spread of the disease.

This year’s Idul Fitri season was expected to see around 20 million city dwellers travel to towns and villages. Jodi Mahardi, spokesperson for the Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Ministry, told the Jakarta Post last Thursday that a national ban on the mudik was being “seriously considered” by the government, but none has been announced.

Rural areas in Central Java province are witnessing an abrupt surge of incoming traffic, as tens of thousands of Jakarta residents continue to arrive by bus. Provincial governors across Java have announced their intention to monitor mudik travellers and prioritise them as the first to undergo COVID-19 tests, once more testing kits arrive from China.

At Tuesday’s press conference, Widodo announced a new regulation that “gives financial authorities the power to take extraordinary steps to ensure public health, save the national economy and the financial system.”

The regulation would waive a cap on a maximum budget deficit for three years. A stimulus package of $US24.9 billion, which includes significant corporate tax cuts and handouts, will widen the 2020 budget deficit to as much as 5.07 percent of gross domestic product, the largest in more than a decade.

Last year, Widodo introduced a series of pro-business policies, including the privatisation of water supplies, bills slashing regulations over corporate control of land and natural resources, and the further neutering of the state’s anti-corruption body. His administration’s agenda was met with opposition in the form of mass student protests across the country last September.

The increased presence of military figures and Suharto-era generals in the national cabinet, announced in October, was a clear expression of the Indonesian ruling elite’s fear of further social upheavals.

Now, confronted with this pandemic, Widodo’s cabinet has given permission to the national police to “take proportionate law enforcement steps.” The president warned at the press conference: “We are preparing the option of martial law under abnormal circumstances. We are prepared to take such a measure, but not under the current circumstances of course.”

His statements are a warning that growing anger over the government’s grossly negligent response to the pandemic will be met with state violence and repression.

Modi government represses desperate migrant workers amid calamitous coronavirus lockdown

Wasantha Rupasinghe & Keith Jones

People across India and around the world have been shocked and outraged by the pictures of poor migrant workers caught up in the Indian government's ill-conceived and socially reckless 21-day nationwide coronavirus lockdown.

Without prior warning and, as soon became only too readily apparent, without any serious preparation, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on the evening of March 24 that starting at midnight the country's 1.37 billion people—with a few, unspecified exceptions—would be confined to their homes for the next three weeks.

Modi provided no explanation as to how people would procure food, and in India's villages and urban shanty towns, water, while they were under lockdown. Nor did he say how the more than 90 percent of India's workers who work, usually for no more than subsistence wages, in the unregulated “informal sector” would be able to procure food and other essentials if they went three weeks without work and without pay.

Only on March 26 did the government bother to announce a meagre relief package. Much of this consists of handouts of basic foodstuffs promised for weeks and even months hence, and tiny increases in the funds, or in the case of the National Rural Employment Guarantee wages, paid out by poverty alleviation programs. Underscoring the slapdash and fraudulent character of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government's relief measures, the government arbitrarily included expenditures by state governments to which they have not committed, so as to inflate the headline money amount. Even so, the 1.7 lakh crore rupee (US $22.5 billion) package amounts in per capita terms to little more 1,200 rupees or about US $16.

Left to fend for themselves by a callous and criminally negligent government and ruling elite, poor working people have had to resort to desperate measures.

This is exemplified by the plight of India's migrant workers, who toil in construction, garment manufacture, as day labourers and domestics, and whom Modi's lockdown has cast adrift.

Without work, money, and in many cases shelter, because they slept at their place of work or because they can no longer afford their squalid makeshift dwellings, millions of migrant workers, sometimes with children in tow, have fled Delhi, and the urban centres of Maharashtra, and Gujarat to return to their native villages. And, since all rail and bus transport has been suspended, they are walking home—in some cases barefoot.

Tragically, in so doing, they risk bringing the coronavirus pandemic from India's urban centres to its villages, where the majority of the population still lives and where even rudimentary health facilities are nonexistent.

Having created this nightmare, India's far-right Hindu supremacist government and state apparatus have responded in their typically brutal and brutish fashion.

Fearing social unrest, as the movement of the migrant workers swelled into the largest migration since the 1947 communal Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, several state governments, including Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, announced they would organize for buses to ferry the workers home to their villages. But this measure was hastily organized, leading to chaotic scenes in which thousands, and in some cases tens of thousands, congregated en masse to scramble for bus seats—making further mockery of the Modi government's claim that its impromptu lockdown was the key to imposing the “social distancing” needed to break the chain of coronavirus infection.

Following this debacle, the central government's Home Ministry issued a directive Sunday that the migration must be stopped, with those already en route blocked from crossing state borders.

This soon led to clashes between workers and the police at several places. In one such incident, about 500 garment workers in Surat, Gujarat clashed with police, when the latter fired tear gas at them to prevent them embarking on the journey to their native villages.

Workers who have traveled in some cases hundreds of kilometres —so, as they have repeatedly told the press in anguished tones, as to escape hunger and starvation--have been met with hostility from authorities.

Particularly horrific was the treatment meted out to a group of migrant workers when they arrived in Bareilly, a city of more than a million about 250 kilometres east of Delhi. As documented in a video that has gone viral, municipal workers and firemen clad in protective gear forced the migrants, some with their luggage tied to their backs, to squat. They then sprayed them with a sodium hypochlorite solution that is commonly used as a bleaching agent and that Bareilly uses as a disinfectant in cleaning its buses. The city administration, which ordered the action, has continued to defend it as a necessary preventive measure. However, Dr. Rajan Naringrekar, an insecticide officer for the Mumbai city government, exposed their fatuous claims that the disinfectant is benign. "It can cause itching or burning and is not approved to be used on humans," he told the Indian Express.

The Modi government's response to the coronavirus is in keeping with its role as an enforcer for Indian big business, utterly indifferent and hostile to the interests and aspirations of India's workers and toilers. During its nearly six years in office, it has presided over brutal austerity, while promoting privatization, deregulation, and the spread of contract labour, and integrating India ever more deeply into Washington's military-strategic offensive against China.

Till its sudden announcement of a nationwide lockdown at midnight March 24, the BJP government's efforts to contain the pandemic focused almost entirely on bans on foreign travellers. Despite a mounting outcry from medical specialists, it refused to organize systematic testing, and even now in the midst of a nationwide lockdown is stubbornly refusing to follow the World Health Organization's injunction to all governments to prioritize mass testing and contact tracking. Yesterday, Dr. R. Gangakhedkar of the Indian Council of Medical Research said that to date India has conducted COVID-19 tests on a grand total of 47,951 people.

Although the number of confirmed cases has surged in recent days, with 370 new cases and three deaths yesterday, Indian authorities continue to publicly claim there is no “community transmission.” However, in arguing before the Supreme Court this week to uphold its efforts to block the movement of migrant workers, a government spokesman claimed that it is possible that three in every ten migrant workers is infected!

Given India's dense population, mass poverty, and dilapidated urban and virtually nonexistent rural health infrastructure, the coronavirus is unquestionably a terrible menace. But the actions of the Modi government, including its calamitous lockdown, have multiplied the threat many times over.

Undoubtedly, an important factor in the Modi government's swing from cavalierly claiming India was an exemplar to the region and the world in fighting the virus to imposing the 21-day lockdown was the calculation that it could serve its communalist, authoritarian political agenda. In the months preceding the lockdown, the Modi government had been shaken by mass opposition to its anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act and growing working-class resistance to austerity and poverty wages.

Significantly, yesterday the government approached the Supreme Court to ask it to sanction the censoring of reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a report published by the Committee to Protect Journalists, it has petitioned the court to issue a “directive to news outlets to refrain from publishing any COVID-19-related news without clearance from the government.”

The health and socioeconomic crisis now stalking India is not due just to the failure of the Modi government and the BJP, but of Indian capitalism and all its political representatives.

For decades, successive governments at both central and state levels have maintained health spending at little more than one percent of GDP. Thanks to the pro-investor policies pursued by all sections of the political establishment, from the BJP and the Congress Party to the Stalinist CPM and CPI, hundreds of millions of people—the rural toilers and much of the working class—have effectively no access to health care in normal times, let alone during a pandemic. Hundreds of millions of others, all but the most privileged sections of the middle class, the rich and India's newly minted class of 120-plus billionaires, make great financial sacrifices, including incurring massive debts, to purchase care from a patchwork private health care system, with the private sector accounting for 82 percent of all outpatient visits in India and 58 percent of inpatients.

Confirmed coronavirus cases in Africa exceeds 6,000 with more than 200 deaths

Stephan McCoy

The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 on the African continent as of Wednesday was 6,261 with over 200 fatalities.

The potential for an explosive growth of the pandemic is already clear, due to the prevalence of slums and overcrowded working class areas housing the most vulnerable in every country.

World Health Organisation Secretary General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has pleaded, “Don’t abandon the poorest to coronavirus.” Africa should “wake up,” he declared. As far as the fate of the African working class goes, his appeal will fall on deaf ears of the continent’s ruling elite and the imperialist powers.

Alexandra township in Johannesurg—with some 20,000 “informal dwellings”—and Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township, the second largest township in South Africa, have already confirmed cases.

In Khayelitsha, a 25-year-old woman tested positive and is in isolation with her three-year-old daughter. She was in contact with members of her family and a childminder. According to Times Live, the young woman was left to potentially infect others, while local authorities and the African National Congress government squabbled over who should take responsibility for her.

Following reports in Rwanda that two young men had been murdered by the police for violating the lockdown, the South African media reported that a man in Volsoorus, outside Johannesburg, had been shot and killed by metropolitan police.

According to Times Live, following a confrontation with a group of people, the police “discharged rubber bullets.” It is alleged that the deceased, Sibusiso Amos, 40, “was followed up to his veranda where he was fatally shot.”

After the release of the officer who shot Amos, Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) spokesperson, Sontaga Seisa, tried to placate public anger, telling the press, “He [the officer] is out now but that does not mean he is off the hook. I want to emphasise that being out does not mean he is not involved in this murder and other charges.”

The police have been charged with two further counts of murder in relation to the lockdown and are being investigated by the IPID.

The South African military is also being investigated after videos surfaced showing soldiers’ degrading treatment of people who allegedly violated the lockdown—with some forced to do push ups, sits ups and other exercises. The Financial Times reports more such abuses, “including footage of a balaclava-clad soldier who was seen kicking and beating civilians caught outside in the lockdown.”

Nigeriaʼs lockdown, which began on Monday, is set to put 30 million people under quarantine in Abuja, Lagos and Ogun. The Nigerian military and the police are enforcing the lockdown.

In Kenya, Amnesty International and 19 other human rights groups in a joint statement noted that they “continue to receive testimonies from victims, eyewitnesses and video footage showing police gleefully assaulting members of the public in other parts of the country. Police indiscriminately threw tear gas, frog marched and beat up members of the public trying to get home in time for the curfew.”

The statement continues, “We have testimonies from suppliers and trained medical practitioners who experienced intimidation and threats of arrest as they tried to provide services during the lockdown.”

Riven by social inequality, with ruling elites who will stop at nothing to protect their wealth, African governments are exploiting the lockdown to impose de facto martial law and abrogate democratic rights as they prepare for serious opposition from the working class.

Even as the national bourgeoisie clamour for aid and “bailout packages” and coronabonds from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, they remain subordinate economically and politically to the major powers. Global markets have rendered their policies of import substitution largely ineffective. The ruling elites are bitterly hostile to an independent movement of the working class which would challenge their rule.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought with it a resurgence of neo-colonialism, culminating in a new scramble for Africa—as US imperialism tries to offset the growing economic influence of Chinese capitalism on the continent, while the old colonial European powers try to maintain a foot hold.

The Financial Times reported that Ken Ofori-Atta, chairman of the joint World Bank-IMF Development Committee, had “co-chaired a meeting in which African finance ministers called for a $100bn stimulus package.” It noted that “the IMF said it was making $50bn available for emerging countries, with $10bn for low-income countries.”

However, the struggle for control of vital mineral and oil reserves, spheres of influence and other raw materials and markets means all aid or debt relief is tied to demands for free access to local markets by multinational corporations. The bulk of the debt will then be re-imposed on the backs of the poor, as ever deeper attacks are made on the working population to pay back the corporations, banks and financial institutions, like the IMF and World Bank.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) recently warned that half of all jobs could be lost on the African continent because of the pandemic—when 60 percent of the population remains unemployed and job insecurity soars.

Achim Steiner, administrator of the UNDP, said, “Without support from the international community, we risk a massive reversal of gains made over the last two decades, and an entire generation lost, if not in lives then in rights, opportunities, and dignity.”

This comes as the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) warns that Africa is two to three weeks away from being overwhelmed by the coronavirus storm.

“Africa accounts for 1% of global health expenditure” yet “it carries 23% of the disease burden, including hundreds of thousands of deaths each year from malaria, HIV/Aids and tuberculosis,” UNECA Executive Secretary Vera Songwe told Bloomberg. “Our hospital systems are so weak and so stressed already that another stress on them is going to break them.”

She warned, “If there is one African country or one country anywhere in the world that still has the coronavirus, the whole world has it. We’ve seen the speed of contamination and how quickly it can re-spread.”

A study by Imperial College in London showed that if early action had been taken to slow the spread of the virus, 800,000 would die from the coronavirus in Africa. However, if it was delayed, this number would soar to 4 million.

Save the Children UK chief executive, Kevin Watkins, told The Express, “If we act now and act decisively, we can prevent and contain the pandemic threat facing the poorest countries… Delaying prevention and containment in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will not only claim many lives in those regions, it will potentially fuel the pandemic in Europe, North America and other regions. Failure to act now will increase the numbers infected by coronavirus in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa by almost one billion.”

Oxfam International executive, Jose Maria Vera, said, “Without urgent, ambitious and historic action, we could easily see the biggest humanitarian crisis since World War Two… We can only beat this pandemic if we act in solidarity with every country and for every person. No one is safe until we are all safe.”

An internationally coordinated response to stop the spread of the virus on the African continent is urgent. Without measures to provide the necessary medical equipment and staff to halt the pandemic, the contagion will spread, killing millions and risks blowback on the entire world. Mark Lowcock, UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs told Bloomberg. “If we leave coronavirus to spread freely in these places,” the virus “will have the opportunity to circle back around the globe.”

Only by building a socialist leadership in the working class, pulling behind it the impoverished peasantry and in unity with workers in the imperialist centres, can the working class in Africa prepare the uncompromising struggle against the banks, corporations and world imperialism now required.

Hospital closures continue in Germany despite COVID-19 pandemic

Sybille Fuchs

Although every hospital bed in Germany is needed because of the coronavirus epidemic, many hospitals are facing closure.

Especially in rural areas, where health care is threatened due to the closure of medical practices, more hospitals will be shut down. This will put into practice the plan issued last year by the Bertelsmann Foundation, a right-wing think tank, according to which fewer than 600 out of some 1,400 hospitals will be maintained in Germany. The absurd justification for this is the claim that the mass closures would allow for the optimization of care, since small clinics close to patients’ homes lack both trained staff and necessary equipment.

Instead of better equipping smaller hospitals and improving pay for medical staff, especially nurses, hospital boards, including many private, church and municipal ones, prefer to close the facilities down.

As the World Socialist Web Site reported on March 31, the catastrophic consequences of the policy of cutbacks and privatisation of the last 30 years are now becoming apparent everywhere. Especially since the introduction of Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG), a patient classification system that standardizes prospective payment to hospitals, the health care system has ceased to be geared to the needs of the population, and instead to the generation of profit.

Hospitals were given an incentive to reduce capacity. Whole wards or departments were closed, which are urgently needed today. Clinics that sought to take countermeasures went bankrupt in droves, were forced to close, or were sold. The new owners are generally more inclined to close down if the facilities are not generating sufficient profit.

In the name of reducing “overcapacity,” hospitals enter into cooperative ventures and concentrate on service areas that enable them to make enough money to survive.

Numerous clinics have already been forced into insolvency. In the period from 1991 to 2017 alone, the number of hospital beds was reduced by a quarter. The number of clinics across Germany fell from 2,400 in 1991 to 1,400 today.

Because of the coronavirus crisis, the Robert Koch Institute and Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (Christian Democratic Union-CDU) are now calling on hospitals to clear beds for intensive care patients and increase the number of places available. This makes it even more absurd that some hospitals are about to close.

The hospital in Havelberg (Saxony-Anhalt) is to close despite the resistance of the local population. Hospital workers are being given their notices of termination this week.

The hospital in Lehnin is the smallest in the state of Brandenburg, with 55 beds. According to a report in Ärztezeitung, this hospital and its specialist department for internal medicine are to be closed. Only the rehabilitation clinic will remain.

This would also shut the accident and emergency centre operated at the same location. Only palliative care, which is located in the hospital, will continue to operate as a “special facility,” with 10 to 15 beds. There is resistance here too—also with reference to the coronavirus crisis.

The Loreley Clinics in St. Goar and Oberwesel (Rhineland-Palatinate) are also facing closure. The main shareholder, the Christian Marienhaus Hospital and Nursing Home Group, considers the two hospitals to be unprofitable. A takeover by the Red Cross failed for the same reason.

The affected small towns of St. Goar and Oberwesel, as well as the new Hunsrück-Mittelrhein municipality as co-shareholders, wish to keep the hospitals open. A few days ago, local residents hung bed sheets out of windows as a sign of protest.

The clinics’ municipal shareholders had suggested that the hospitals be used for the treatment of coronavirus patients. This was rejected by the Rhineland-Palatinate state Ministry of Health, since emergency and intensive care units at the Loreley Clinics had already been closed at the beginning of 2020.

However, it is not clear why they cannot be reopened. Elsewhere, appropriate emergency facilities will be set up in exhibition halls or similar facilities to ensure the care of COVID-19 patients. According to a Marienhaus spokesman, a final decision is to be made at a shareholders’ meeting on April 9.

The Marienhaus Group is also working on plans to close or merge clinics in the Saarland. The Marienkrankenhaus St. Wendel, the Marienhausklinik Ottweiler and the Marienhausklinik St. Josef Kohlhof in Neunkirchen have already been working closely together for years in the Saar-East alliance. Now the Marienhaus group of companies is working on a concept to close the site in Ottweiler and merge it with the clinic in St. Wendel to form a hospital. The reason cited for this is a considerable building renovation backlog at the clinic location in Ottweiler.

The closure of the hospital in Ottweiler endangers regional care in view of the coronavirus infections of employees at the St. Wendel hospital, which can admit only acute emergency patients.

In the Saarland, a considerable thinning of the overall hospital density is imminent. This summer, the Caritas hospital in Lebach, with 450 employees and 183 planned beds, will close. At a protest rally in front of the building, staff representatives and the Verdi union called for state intervention in order to secure health care and jobs. However, Verdi is not planning a fight to defend jobs, but is demanding a “social contract” and “burden sharing,” making a toothless appeal to the public authorities to assume their responsibility.

Politicians have initiated a discussion about a so-called Nordsaarlandklinik. This threatens both the hospital in Losheim and hospitals in Hermeskeil in Rhineland-Palatinate (institutions of the Marienhaus Group).

The board of the Marienhaus Foundation blames “massively tightened federal regulations” for the fact that more and more smaller hospitals are struggling to survive: ever new regulations covering personnel and structural requirements, the outsourcing of the nursing budget and now the new “reform” law covering the Medical Service (MD), which audits hospital accounts.

The reform provides for high penalties of €300 to €30,000 for hospitals, which are imposed even for minor errors in the billing of services, e.g., if a blood pressure measurement is forgotten in the documentation but is still billed. In principle, 10 percent of the total costs must be paid, which can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of euros for operations with complications and long periods of stay.

The complicated billing practices also require valuable time of doctors and nursing staff, who are currently urgently needed for the care and treatment of patients.

Hospitals in the Heinsberg district of North Rhine-Westphalia, which has been hardest hit by the COVID-19 crisis, sounded the alarm last week because they see a new wave of costs coming towards them as a result of the MD reform, which could threaten their existence.

The hospital in Riedlingen in Baden-Württemberg will be closed as early as April 1, three months sooner than planned. According to the operator, Sana, only one doctor will be available as of April. All others will have left by that date at the latest.

Numerous specialist clinics, whose facilities and 120,000 employees could also contribute to mitigating the coronavirus crisis, feel their existence threatened because a draft bill by Health Minister Jens Spahn stipulating that hospitals must cancel planned operations and treatments. They will face massive losses, which cannot be offset by the planned reimbursement of €400 to €500 per day of occupancy. Specialist clinics expect costs of up to four times the amount Spahn plans to reimburse per day of occupancy.

Rehabilitation clinics, which are supposed to ensure follow-up treatment and post-op rehabilitation, will also suffer huge losses due to the postponement of planned knee, hip and spinal operations. The number of these facilities has already decreased substantially as a result of cuts made in the health system in recent decades, and would probably be reduced even more by the measures planned.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it abundantly clear that the ruling class and its politicians are not able to guarantee the population a secure provision of health care facilities and the corresponding personnel. The turn to profit maximisation and privatisation, and massive health sector cuts in recent decades, whose deadly consequences are now becoming apparent, must be reversed. Clinics and health facilities must be converted into public utilities and placed under the control of working people in order to serve the sole purpose of the good of society.

Statistical lies used to justify continued inaction, paint the US epidemic as nearly over

Don Barrett

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics”—popularized by Mark Twain

As the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States surpasses 200,000 and the number of dead nears 5,000, increasingly sophisticated justifications are being made for the continued inadequacy of the federal government’s response to the pandemic. One of the most recent is a study from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which paints the massive outbreak in the country as nearly over, with two weeks to go until the worst is past.

The IHME paper, “Forecasting COVID-19 impact on hospital bed-days, ICU-days, ventilator-days and deaths by US state in the next 4 months,” was led by Chris Murray at the University of Washington in Seattle. Its main claim is that the resources needed to fight the spreading disease will “peak” on April 15. During this time, it estimates that there will only be 64,000 extra hospital beds needed nationally and only 15,000 ventilators. The paper also seeks to prepare its readers to expect some 84,000 deaths.

These figures contrast sharply with earlier estimates done by London’s Imperial College, as well as those by the White House’s own health officials. The former predicts 1.1 million dead in the United States even using its most optimistic scenario, while the latest minimum casualty estimates from Deborah Birx, the Coronavirus Task Force Response Coordinator, is 100,000 to 240,000.

The report also conflicts with the requests from cities around the country for 139,000 ventilators and millions of test kits and pieces of personal protective equipment, noted in the recent survey of 213 cities by the US Conference of Mayors. The IHME study tries to bury these and other grimmer predictions of the course of the coronavirus by stating that “these projections [that] imply that there would be millions of deaths in the United States,” and claiming such models “can overestimate health service need by not taking into account behavioral change and government-mandated action.”

This has not stopped the Trump administration, including Birx, from seizing on the new report in an effort to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic. Birx herself yesterday noted that the task force’s estimates had “the same numbers” as the ones in the IHME report. As a result, local and state health officials have also begun using this model to revise downward the number of deaths they will face while the national media has largely accepted this new account uncritically.

It is also being promoted to establish the justification for sending people back to work not when Trump originally proposed, after Easter Sunday, but by the first week of May. The IHME study is in line with the calls from both Trump himself and many from the corporate and financial elite to “get America back to work,” in order to continue generating billions in profits. The catastrophic number of lives that will be lost to the virus will just be the price of doing business.

The IHME is a project constructed at the University of Washington with approximately $400 million in ongoing funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Since its founding in 2007, it has faced criticism from many angles. After it published its first major study in 2010, the leading medical journal the Lancet editorialized that the IHME “struggled to generate support, legitimacy, and acceptance for their findings.”

A 2019 paper in the journal Global Policy examined the political connections of the IHME, and noted the “growing conflict between the expertise and norms of national and intergovernmental statistical production on the one hand, and the distinct epistemologies and logics of new non-state data actors. … In the world of development, as indeed in other realms, measurement is never an innocent matter where as it were, the facts speak for themselves.” With significant foresight, the paper notes that “measures…are contested matters because they are linked with…the outcomes [institutions] aspire to.”

Such statements are further borne out with a closer look at the study itself. While the estimated number of dead, for instance, is given as a 95 percent chance of being between 38,242 and 162,106, the estimations themselves are based on mathematical sophistry.

Here are the central unsupported assumptions of the IHME forecast:

• That the “curve” of deaths, its early exponential rise, its inflection, and then its leveling out at its end result, is best modeled by the unexamined assumption that the rate at which the death rate first rises is precisely the same as the rate at which it later falls off—and that it will fall off—in each modeled state.
• That the death rate rises, inflects, and falls in the same way that it did in Wuhan, with the same political decisions being made—isolating individuals within their homes, etc.—at the same “thresholds” of deaths. From this they conclude that peak daily deaths will occur 27 days after the implementation of social distancing. There is no analysis of the differences in the Chinese response, which involved a massive effort to test and trace contacts of the infected as well as the harshly enforced quarantine of nearly 60 million people.
• That the profound difference in approach between China and the US (and indeed, the major Western governments) is of little significance, that tracing the contacts of each case, testing and quarantining them either is not a defining epidemiological choice, or will “naturally” happen as thresholds are reached. The word “tracing” never occurs in the report, and testing is only mentioned to justify the use of death rates as the basis of modeling, not to critique the model as a whole.

The authors then conclude that if they are wrong, a major reason will be the “question of adherence to social distancing mandates,” whether “it is fundamentally different in the US compared to Wuhan.” In other words, if they’re wrong, it’s because the working class isn’t obeying here, not because the measures taken are adequate.

None of these assumptions survive a comparison with the reality of the European countries’ experience: Italy and Spain, which belatedly took heroic measures of isolation, have perhaps stabilized daily new cases, which continue at around 5,000 and 7,000 a day, respectively, but without widespread testing and tracing, have not demonstrated that this is adequate to begin a sustained drop in cases. It is too early to tell whether Germany, France and the UK have stabilized a growth in new cases with their measures to date. In any event, none shows the symmetric rapid “Wuhan-like” decline that marked the template to which US states are supposedly being fitted.

Nor, it must be mentioned, does the experience of New York City, Detroit, Seattle or New Orleans match the model. In each of these major metropolitan areas within the US, hospital systems are already disintegrating under the pressure of tens of thousands of cases. Even the IHME’s estimate of 84,000 deaths implies (at a 1 percent fatality rate) about 8.4 million cases nationally, a situation during which medical care in the US would essentially collapse.

The IHME report also does not address the fact that without testing and tracing, taken to the point of containment and then maintained, social isolation and major industrial closures must be maintained essentially indefinitely. Only one of two things would permit these to be relaxed long-term without exponential growth: widespread vaccination or an immunity purchased by near-universal infection—at immense cost in human life.

Workers must be on their guard. As the coronavirus crisis intensifies, more supposedly scientific studies will emerge attempting to justify a back-to-work order, claiming that the danger has passed.

US Conference of Mayors survey shows severe lack of equipment to combat coronavirus pandemic

Bryan Dyne

A survey conducted by the US Conference of Mayors and released on Friday documents the urgent need by cities across the country for medical equipment and supplies to care for those infected by the coronavirus and for testing kits to contain the accelerating pandemic. With coronavirus cases in the United States topping 210,000 and the death toll approaching 5,000, including more than 800 deaths just in the last day, the survey makes clear that there is no region in any state prepared to deal with the crisis.

Martina Papponetti, 25, a nurse at the Humanitas Gavazzeni Hospital in Bergamo, Italy poses for a portrait at the end of her shift, March 27, 2020. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

The exponential spread of the pandemic is underscored by comparing the situation as of Wednesday with the situation just one month ago. At that time, the US had suffered two deaths and the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases was 89. Virtually all projections, moreover, say that the country is only on the cusp of an acceleration whose apex is still several weeks away.

New York State continues to be the most hard-hit region, with 83,712 cases (now more than China) and 1,941 deaths. This includes 7,729 new cases and 227 new reported deaths.

The survey covered 213 cities in 42 states and territories, which are home to a total of 42 million people and include areas with populations ranging from 2,000 to 3.8 million people. This includes 45 cities with a population below 50,000 and six with populations greater than one million. Among the cities surveyed are some of the most inundated metropolitan regions, including Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco and Las Vegas.

In summary, the responses from the cities show that:

• 92.1 percent do not have enough test kits to trace and contain the pandemic in their region
• 91.5 percent of cities do not have enough masks for either first responders or medical personnel
• 88.2 percent do not have enough other personal protective equipment for these workers
• 85 percent do not have enough ventilators to keep severely and critically ill patients alive
• 62.4 percent have received no emergency supplies from their state

This snapshot of the utter failure of the richest country in the world, with by far the greatest collection of billionaires, to mount an effective and coordinated response to the virus is an unanswerable indictment of the entire political and economic system of capitalism. The naked indifference, ignorance and cruelty of the president, Donald Trump, is only the most concentrated and odious expression of the outlook that prevails within the ruling elite and both of its political parties.

Some cities provided estimates of what they need to fight the disease outbreaks in their cities. These include:

• 28.5 million face masks
• 24.4 million other PPE items
• 7.9 million test kits
• 139,000 ventilators

New York City, the current epicenter of the contagion in the US, did not respond to the survey, meaning the actual need across the country could be double or more what is reported.

What cities and states are being promised by the Trump administration is a mere fraction of these needs, and the majority of urgently needed supplies are still weeks if not months away.

These numbers are an indication of what is to come in cities across the country. The Trump administration is currently projecting a “best-case” scenario of between 100,000 and 240,000 coronavirus deaths in the US—already a human and social catastrophe—and calling this a “good” outcome. But the disastrous lack of medical supplies around the country suggests that many times that figure will die as cities and states are overwhelmed by the disease and are unable to provide even basic medical care to those infected, or protection to doctors, nurses, medical staff and first responders.

The survey also sheds light on the chaotic distribution of goods from the federal to local and state governments. When asked about its materials on hand, Montgomery, Alabama responded that the masks it received had expired despite having been approved by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Of these, 13 percent were dry rotted.

Los Angeles has separately reported that the 170 ventilators it received from the federal government arrived broken and had to be fixed. Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker announced that instead of getting a shipment of 300,000 N95 respiratory masks, his state was instead sent thousands of surgical masks, which are far less effective in preventing infection.

Moreover, mayors and governors are complaining that they are being forced to bid against one another as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to buy equipment on the market, resulting in price gouging that pushes up costs by factors of five-fold, ten-fold or more.

None of this information on the dire situation facing the American people made its way into yesterday’s White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing. The event opened not with the state of the pandemic, but with “Commander in Chief” Donald Trump, flanked by Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, other uniformed military brass and Attorney General William Barr, announcing an “enhanced counter-narcotics operation” in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, targeting Venezuela.

During the second part of the press conference, Trump continued to make the false claim that, “Nobody could have known a thing like this could happen,” despite the fact that his administration was well aware of the possibility. It is reported, for example, that Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar altered the National Security Council as early as January 3 of the dire implications for the US of the coronavirus outbreak in China.

Vice President Mike Pence in an interview earlier Wednesday on CNN claimed that Trump never underestimated the threat represented by the virus and instead blamed the delay in responding on the CDC and China. He said that “in mid-January the CDC was still assessing that the risk of the coronavirus to the American people was low,” and added, “The reality is that we could’ve been better off if China had been more forthcoming.”

At no point during the press conference did Trump express sympathy for the families of the dead or the hundreds of thousands infected. Instead, he boasted of the “11 companies making ventilators right now,” singling out Ford and GM. No mention was made of the unsafe and virus-infected conditions being imposed on their workers. He went on to tout a new “big order from WalMart” for medical supplies and the purchase of “2.2 million gowns for the national stockpile from [Ohio-based] Cardinal Health.”

As the survey of the country’s mayors shows, 2.2 million gowns are about a tenth of what is actually needed to keep medical workers safe from the virus. But none of the members of the servile press even brought up the damning report by the US Conference of Mayors, or any other the other multitudinous and tragic facts that expose the absurd and lying presentations given out daily by the White House.

Instead, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, the medical figureheads aiding and abetting the criminal indifference of the task force, continued to promote the newly expanded “social distancing” guidelines from the White House. What they did not say is that while such actions can slow the spread of the virus, they do nothing to ultimately stop the pandemic from continuing.

As the World Health Organization has repeatedly stressed, “measures that increase social distancing such as canceling sporting events may help to reduce transmission,” but the only way to properly fight the pandemic and prevent a resurgence of the virus is to “find, isolate, test and treat every case, to break the chains of transmission.”

Fauci said that at some point, “I think it makes sense that you are going to have to relax social distancing. The one thing we hopefully would have in place, and I think we will have in place, is a much more robust system to be able to identify someone who’s infected, isolate them and do contact tracing. Because if you have a really good program of containment, that prevents you from ever having to get into mitigation.”

In other words, there will “hopefully” be in the future the infrastructure needed to know exactly who is infected and isolate and treat those individuals. In the meantime, however, the government has essentially given up on testing and contact tracing. Its guidelines themselves tell people to stay home if they are sick, rather than get tested, and local health officials are testing only those who require hospitalization.

Fauci is arguing, in effect, that instead of training new workers for the public health system and providing them the tools necessary to track the virus, tens or hundreds of millions of people should accept the fact that they will get infected and possibly die.

Nor was any mention made of the colossal sums of money, more than 6 trillion dollars, to be handed over to the corporations and banks under the massive bailout bill passed by Congress last week in a near-unanimous bipartisan vote. In contrast, a mere pittance has been allotted to hospitals under siege from the pandemic and only temporary and completely inadequate aid to workers who face the loss of their jobs and livelihoods.

This must be categorically rejected by the working class. Alongside the urgent need for the medical equipment and personnel to provide the necessary care for those infected, there must be a clear plan that includes a robust, well designed and international strategy to test broadly and identify the silent movement of the infection deep in the community.

The resources exist to combat the pandemic and save untold numbers of lives. But the allocation of those resources requires the independent, mass mobilization of the working class in opposition to the ruling elite that monopolizes the wealth produced by the workers. The struggle against the pandemic is inseparable from a struggle against capitalism.

India: Supply Chains During a Health Crisis

Shoumitro Chatterjee

One silver lining for India during the current pandemic is that there is no aggregate food shortage in the near-term. The stocks of the Food Corporation of India (FCI) are almost three times the buffer stock. Therefore, although India does not face a “supply crisis,” it might face a “supply chain” crisis as it figures out how to move food from one part of the country to another. In the last week, the retail prices of perishables like tomatoes and onions have spiked by about 25-30 per cent. How can India swiftly address these supply-chain bottlenecks in agriculture?

First, administrative barriers to food movements across all political boundaries need to be removed. By-and-large India has not faced local price shocks in recent years. This is due, in large extent, to marked improvements in rural road and highway infrastructure in the last two decades. However, recent episodes of state border closures and excessive policing undermine free movement, making the country more vulnerable to local price shocks. The central government must coordinate with the states to facilitate the movement of all essential goods such as food across the country.

Second, the government will need to waive the multiple embedded statutes that force agriculture trade and procurement through official agricultural markets or Agricultural Produce Market Committee (AMPC) mandis. State governments should waive any state or mandi taxes until this crisis is over. This will remove bureaucratic hurdles, especially at state borders, and ensure that physical congestion, the antithesis of social distancing, does not occur.

The congregation of people, especially during peak marketing season, can risk mandis becoming a hotspot of virus transmission. Ensuring social distancing protocols within mandis will be a severe challenge. Since agriculture marketing practices vary significantly across states, even for commodities that are procured by public authorities, governments should encourage all decentralised approaches that encourage sales at the farmgate as much as possible, with the help of Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs), Self-Help Groups (SHGs), co-operatives, arthiyas, etc.

As India moves to off-mandi sales, it is important to remember that the mandi performs two essential functions. One, it serves as a node for information exchange. This is where farmers meet, learn about prices, and aggregate market conditions. Information about market prices is the basis of the bargaining power of farmers. If farmers do not know the market value of their produce, they do not have an anchor to bargain on. The state agricultural departments should, therefore, push daily information on local market prices of commodities to all cellphones via SMS or WhatsApp.

Mandis also serve as a site for benchmarking product quality. Market intermediaries often underpay farmers (below market prices) by making deductions based on the quality of their produce—shape, size, dust content, and extent of damage. In the absence of any benchmark, farmers have to accept what intermediaries offer. Thus, there is a need to quickly innovate on transparent sampling at the village level in a way that ensures sanitisation, safe handling, and reduced contact. For this, moisture meters could be provided to villages for collective use. Visual sampling can be done using images taken on smartphones. In the medium-term, the government can also explore artificial intelligence (AI)-based detection. Such software, for example, by IntelloLabs of Gurgaon, is being used in India, albeit on a small-scale.

Third, changes in procurement must be accompanied by changes in payment systems. State governments need to ensure that payments are made on time. This writer’s research shows that a delay of six months in payment, even in Punjab, is commonplace. Timely payment will ensure the flow of credit in the supply chain and assure rural consumption. Some states require documentation to prove that the farmer is a resident of their state before they can sell and impose limits on how much they can sell. All such procedures need to be waived, with an emphasis on facilitating quicker transactions with minimal contact. It is possible that the country could end up with excessive procurement, but that can be off-loaded in the global market, which is likely to see a shortage amidst this crisis, later.

Fourth, the government must ensure adequate supply of credit for the farming sector. The agricultural supply chain functions on credit rotation. Moreover, this will leave farmers exposed to local money lenders who are likely to charge exorbitant rates. Anantha Nageswaran and Gulzar Natarajan, among others, have argued that there needs to be debt forbearance, interest-free loans for a year to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and advance market commitments (AMCs). Similar policies are required in the agricultural sector. A more extended moratorium on payment of agricultural loans, extending the credit on Kisan Credit Cards to those farmers who haven’t excessively defaulted in the past, and ensuring a credit line to co-operatives who finance the input costs of many farmers, is worth considering. Based on past data, advance Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) payments can be made for input purchase; and if needed later in the year, advance payments can be made for Kharif procurements.

Fifth, as a result of the mass exodus of migrant labour following the 21-day national lockdown, rural labor wage rates will increase. This will be especially true in the key agricultural states of Punjab and Haryana. A major impact will be seen on the cost of procurement, as labour that performed the key tasks not only of harvesting but also of loading, unloading, cleaning, grading, and sorting of crops is now scarce. The government will have to bear this cost—otherwise farmers could just dump their produce.

Admittedly, these measures will not benefit each and every farmer. Unlike Jandhan Aadhar and Mobile Money, which have a much wider coverage, digital infrastructure in the agriculture sector lags behind. Not everyone has a Kisan Credit Card, and the landless are not covered under PM-Kisan. But, given the scale and intensity of the crisis, and the need to act rapidly, the best should not become the enemy of the good. And if this works, it will provide a guide path for the next generation of reforms in agriculture markets.

WISE Accelerator for Education Technology Projects 2020

Application Deadline: 20th April 2020 at 16:00 GMT.

Eligible Countries: All

About the Award: The WISE Accelerator is a program designed to support the development of innovative projects in the field of education. Selected projects receive the guidance and expertise of qualified mentors and partners who provide effective strategies and practical support for their further development. Each year, five projects are selected to join the one-year program, during which time they benefit from tailor-made mentorships to address their specific needs. In addition, the WISE Accelerator assists the selected projects to connect with an international network and create opportunities to share knowledge and find support among donors and investors.
The WISE Accelerator supports innovative projects that have a high potential for:

• scalability
• a positive impact in education Projects addressing education challenges through the use and/or design of technology in all sectors and regions are welcome to apply.

Projects in this particular field may cover a wide range of activities. From the conception of apps and digital games to the creation of online platforms or the design of new curricula and pedagogies integrating technology, all education projects that are using or linking technology to their DNA are invited to apply.

Type: Entrepreneurship

Eligibility: Ideal candidates for the WISE Accelerator will be existing projects at an early stage of development, with the following attributes:

• Established for at least two years;
• A significant and growing number of beneficiaries or customers;
• A record of activities with a product or service that has been successfully implemented and beyond proof of concept;
• Existing, stable revenues, and new opportunities for growth;
• A dedicated team, with an established physical space or office;
• Deep knowledge of the market/education context and of their beneficiaries’ or customers’ needs;
• Clear future objectives and motivation to develop further;
• Good understanding of the project’s current challenges in scaling.

Projects from all sectors and regions of the world are invited to apply for the WISE Accelerator.

Selection Criteria: The WISE Accelerator Committee, composed of leading experts in education and social entrepreneurship, will conduct a rigorous selection process.

Applications will be assessed according to the following criteria:

• • Solution and innovation;

• • Strategy and management;

• • Development beyond proof of concept, and potential for growth

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Program: The year-long program is designed to assess and meet project needs as fully and precisely as possible in order to bring them to the next stage of successful development.

Duration of Program: 1 year

How to Apply: APPLY NOW

Visit Program Webpage for details