Society's Self-Sabotage: How Discrimination Cripples Nations

2 hours ago 2

Opinion by Mandeep Dhaliwal (united nations)
Monday, March 10, 2025
Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 10 (IPS) - One look at the headlines recently and anyone would know that cuts to foreign aid are jeopardizing hard-won progress on a range of issues. AIDS is one of them.

According to UNAIDS, without new resources 6.3 million people could die from AIDS-related causes by the end of the decade. With the stroke of a pen, the promise of ending one of the deadliest epidemics vanishes.

But what if I told you that money alone will not be enough to get us back on track? That discrimination is quietly sabotaging economies, destabilizing nations and turning preventable and treatable diseases into death sentences?

It has never been more urgent that we take action to protect those being left behind. That is the commitment 193 countries made when they adopted the Sustainable Development Goals.

Between 2021 and 2022, discrimination increased in 70 percent of countries, while global freedoms have steadily declined year-over-year for nearly two decades. Today, no country has all the laws needed to prohibit discrimination against women, and too many countries have laws on the books that criminalize the typically marginalized.

These actions are not just morally wrong, they are economically self-defeating. Discriminatory laws and policies deprive individuals of human dignity, essential services and opportunities, damaging entire economies. Globally, for example, the gender education gap costs about US$10 trillion annually.

Discrimination also fuels and feeds off instability. When marginalized communities are shut out of civic participation, barred from economic opportunities and denied healthcare, resentment and unrest grows, and peace is undermined. The suppression of women's rights, increasing crackdowns on marginalized communities and the persecution of refugees all fracture societies and stifle human progress.

Discriminatory laws and policies deprive individuals of human dignity, essential services and opportunities, damaging entire economies.

History has also repeatedly shown that discrimination harms health. From colonial-era medical exploitation to the apartheid-era denial of healthcare for Black South Africans, discrimination has long determined who receives care and who doesn’t.

Even today, these disparities persist. In the United States, Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women. And now the advent of technologies such as AI, which hold tremendous promise to transform societies and economies, threaten to hardwire historical discrimination into healthcare if not appropriately regulated.

But nowhere is the impact of discrimination on health more visible than in the fight against HIV. From the earliest days of the AIDS crisis, stigma and government inaction allowed the virus to spread unchecked, leading to countless preventable deaths that devastated families and communities.

In 1990, President Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act into law. These laws made the case for non-discrimination as an essential tool in the fight against HIV and played a pivotal role in improving health equity and shaping anti-discrimination legislation across the world.

Decades later, when we have game-changing prevention and treatment tools to finally end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030, discrimination continues to increase risk and block access for far too many.

Ending discrimination is in our hands. As we marked Zero Discrimination Day on 1 March, we must remember that discrimination is a human construct that calls for human solutions.

Ending major public health threats like AIDS in a climate of discrimination requires leadership and decisive action. It also requires investments that go beyond funding medicines and commodities. Governments must remove the punitive laws that drive new infections and undermine access to life-saving tools, promote equality for all, and fund community-led responses, ensuring that those left behind have a voice in shaping solutions.

In 2021, countries committed to such steps, recognizing that a rights-based approach is critical to ending AIDS and advancing sustainable development. Yet, with the deadline set for this year, not a single country is on track to meet these goals. Leaders must make good on these commitments—the return on investment for generations will be profound.

We know that the price of discrimination is poverty, instability and disease. The price of equality? Prosperity, peace, health and the end of AIDS as a public health threat. The way out of our crises is clear—deliver on the promise of a world free of discrimination.

Mandeep Dhaliwal is Director of the HIV and Health Group, UNDP

Source: UNDP

IPS UN Bureau

Read Entire Article