January 25th, 2012
Another famine is looming in Africa’s Sahel region – the third drought in the area in the last 10 years. And the big question facing the international community is whether the lessons of not responding soon enough to the drought in the Horn will be learned – and acted upon – here.
We know already that the European Union has taken a lead. And DFID has announced that it is sending therapeutic food to help 68,000 children in Chad, Mali and Niger, three of the countries worst affected by poor harvests.
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Tags: CERF, Chad, DFID, Drought, Ethiopia, EU, Famine, Kenya, Mali, natural disasters, Niger, Sahel, Somalia, UNICEF, WFP
January 22nd, 2012
Welcome to 2012. However, this year is unlikely to be better than 2011.
The thing about major disasters is that whilst we don’t know exactly where the next one is going to hit, we can be certain that there will be a next one – and even take some well-informed guesses about where it might hit.
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Tags: Cambodia, China, Climate change, CRED, Djibouti, Drought, earthquake, Global warming, Japan, natural disasters, New Zealand, Niger, Philippines, Somalia, Thailand, USA
January 19th, 2012
A report this week by Oxfam and Save the Children has concluded that many lives were lost, livelihoods unnecessarily ruined and a lot of donor money wasted because the early warnings about the famine in the Horn of Africa were not heeded and not acted upon.
Readers of this blog will not be surprised by this conclusion, as we wrote back in July how the early warnings had been ignored for a year by the international community with the result that food aid had to be flown in by the 747-load, when other, more cost-effective and more life-saving, procedures could otherwise have been followed.
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Tags: Drought, Ethiopia, Famine, FEWS, Kenya, natural disasters, Oxfam, Save the Children, Somalia
January 17th, 2012
Early in February there’s a big change happening that could impact significantly on the way that development assistance is spent – and on the impact that it can have. The United States of America is changing its stance on procurement to allow US-donated funds to be spent on buying goods from developing countries. And it will no longer be insisting on that spend going to American companies
As with so many really important changes, it’s all in the small print – in this case pages 1396 to 1405 of Volume 77, Number 6 of the Federal Register. And what has happened is a revision of the S/O/N regulations that cover the ‘source’, ‘origin’ and ‘nationality’ of goods and services.
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Tags: China, India, Local procurement, USA, USAID
December 14th, 2011
A year ago, in the run up to the independence referendum and then to independence itself, there was widespread fear that there would be war between Sudan and the new state of South Sudan. But in the event things passed off relatively quietly.
Since July’s independence, there has been ongoing, but relatively low-level, fighting and disturbances in the South Kordofan province of Sudan where the largely Nubian and Christian population is unhappy about being part of the largely Arab and Muslim state of Sudan.
SPLM-N fighter in Blue Nile state
But now, a year on from the initial concerns, the refugee numbers in South Sudan are building and there is a very real fear that there will be a border war between the two Sudans.
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Tags: Blue Nile, South Kordofan, South Sudan, Sudan, UNHCR
December 11th, 2011
If you are not already a fan of TED, you should be. TED is a nonprofit organisation devoted to a concept it calls ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’ and there are some fabulous ideas on there, beautifully and succinctly presented.
Launched in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds, Technology, Entertainment and Design, its scope has since become a lot broader and embraces annual conferences – the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh each summer – plus the TEDx programmes that take TED conferences to a wide range of other countries.
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Tags: Ethiopia, Nigeria, TED
December 8th, 2011
As EU commissioner Georgieva was speaking about the growing frequency and intensity of natural disasters – and linking them explicitly to climate change – the world’s leaders were, in effect, agreeing to do nothing about said climate change at COP 17 in Durban.
Of course, they wouldn’t put it like that, they’re all being very reasonable whilst at the same time doing what they perceive to be their jobs in representing their national interests.
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Tags: Climate change, Copenhagen, Durban, EU, Global warming, Kyoto Protocol, Qatar, UN, USA
December 7th, 2011
European Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva warned yesterday that the Sahel region of West Africa was in danger of slipping into famine and that help should be provided now – indeed it was already being provided by the EU.
She said that it was not only ethically and morally right to send aid now, before things reached crisis point, but also cheaper in the long run as disaster risk reduction (DRR) is dramatically more cost-effective than responding to disasters.
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Tags: Burkina Faso, Chad, Disaster Risk Reduction, Drought, EU, Floods, Global warming, Japan, LSE, Mali, Mauritania, natural disasters, Niger, Nigeria, Sahel, Thailand, World Bank
December 4th, 2011
The population in war-torn Somalia received another blow last week as Al Shabaab banned 16 aid agencies from territory that it controls, including UNICEF, the World Health Organisation, UNHCR, Norwegian Church Aid and others from Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Germany, and France.
These aid agencies were banned, according to Al Shabaab, because they were “fostering secularism”, “amplifying the refugee crisis”, “financing, aiding, and abetting subversive groups seeking to destroy the basic tenets of Islamic penal system” and “undermining the livelihoods and cultural values of the population.”
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Tags: Al Shabaab, Baroness Amos, Dadaab, Denmark, Drought, Famine, France, Germany, Italy, Kenya, natural disasters, Norway, OCHA, Somalia, Sweden, UNHCR, UNICEF, WHO
December 3rd, 2011
Good news for sub-Saharan Africa – it’s not as corrupt as some other parts of the world according to the latest Corruption Perceptions Index produced by Transparency International (TI). Although there’s still quite a lot of work to be done if you have a look at the colourful map on page four of the TI report.
Unlike the recently-published 2011 version of the Human Development Index, in which the bottom places were packed with sub-Saharan African countries – and Afghanistan – there are a mere four African countries in the bottom ten of this global table. Somalia comes equal bottom with North Korea, and the other African countries in the Highly Corrupt group are Sudan, Equatorial Guinea and Burundi.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Botswana, Burundi, Denmark, Equatorial Guinea, Finland, France, Germany, HDI, Mauritius, New Zealand, North Korea, Portugal, Rwanda, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Sweden, Taiwan, Transparency International, UK, USA
