Archive for November, 2010

Maersk Line donates 300 containers, worth $500,000, to Advance Aid

November 24th, 2010

Maersk Line is donating up to 300 forty-foot containers to Advance Aid for us to use for storage of non-food items for emergencies across Africa.  If we had had to buy these containers on the open market – and this is something that we were looking into – it would have cost approximately $500,000, so this is a truly wonderful gift-in-kind.

The containers we are being given have been used for sea transportation for around ten years and are now being de-commissioned.  Maersk is going to deliver them for us to a number of African ports from where we will deploy them to our various warehouse hubs.  Once there, they will be loaded with NFIs – tarpaulins, nets, blankets, kitchen sets, hygiene kits, buckets, stoves – manufactured by African companies, that can be used to service African emergencies.

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Tortured questions in the thistle field of aid

November 18th, 2010

“Is Humanitarian Aid Bad for Africa?” asks Margaret Wente in the Toronto Globe & Mail.

And the Globe & Mail has been paying a lot of attention to this subject over the past month, with a news story on Oct 19th reporting that, “The Canadian government says it is ‘deeply concerned’ by a report that its foreign aid to Ethiopia is being used as a weapon to crush political dissent and bolster the power of the ruling party.”  This followed an editorial the previous day, which picked up on a Human Rights Watch report that alleged that aid distribution in Ethiopia was tied into loyalty to the ruling political party.

Well, the “Is Aid Bad for Africa?” question is a massive one that, in its bald form, is very hard to answer with a simple “Yes” or a “No”. What humanitarian aid are we talking about, in what circumstances, in which country?  Although it has to be said that Dambisa Moyo, in her famous book ‘Dead Aid’, clearly felt that the answer was “Yes” and argued that all aid to Africa should be run down and then stopped over a very short timescale.
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How big a disaster is it going to take to get the North focused on climate change?

November 16th, 2010

So it would appear that it takes the inundation of 160,000 square kilometres of land, an estimated 1,600 deaths and 20 million people affected by flooding for Pakistan – a tiny emitter of greenhouse gases – to decide that it needs a climate change strategy to mitigate the effects of extreme weather events caused by global warming.

What, therefore, is it going to take for the major emitters of CO2 – China, the US, Russia, India, Japan and Germany in total tonnage rank – to do the same and really start to get to grips with the emissions that they are generating?  After all, it is these emissions that are the root cause of the melting glaciers in the Hindu Kush.  And it is the meltwater from these glaciers that, along with unusually high rainfall, caused the flooding.
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Time to act on cotton hypocrisy

November 15th, 2010

Hypocrisy is deeply unattractive – especially when it comes in the form of calls by Northern countries for free trade to ‘help the poor’.  Calls that totally ignore all of the restrictive trade practices that they themselves maintain in order to protect their voters/farmers/industries from competition from these same poor.

Take cotton.  At the G20 meeting in Seoul just a week ago the UK and others called for a free trade area for Africa – in effect a merging of the existing three trade groups, EAC, ECOWAS and SADC.

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New HDI catalogues total failure of development in Africa

November 12th, 2010

If anyone had any doubt that Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa in particular, had not benefited from decades of emphasis on ‘development’, the new Human Development Index (HDI) published earlier this month by UNDP as part of the Human Development Report 2010 gives sadly comprehensive evidence of failure.

UNDP administrator, Helen Clark, said, “The Report shows that people today are healthier, wealthier and better educated than before.”  And that may well be true for the world as a whole but for most sub-Saharan Africans that is just not the case.

The bottom fourteen countries in the HDI are all African (taking places 156-169).  And from 139th place onwards, the litany of African countries is only interrupted by Haiti and Afghanistan.  That, surely, says it all.  With just over 50 countries in the continent, thirty eight of the bottom places in the world are taken by African countries.
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Cost of natural disasters could hit $250bn a year by 2100 – but there are cheap and easy prevention actions that can be taken

November 12th, 2010

In a boost for disaster preparedness spending, a new report by the World Bank and the United Nations declares that, “prevention pays but you do not always have to pay more for prevention”.

The report, ‘Natural Hazards, UNnatural Disasters – The Economics of Effective Prevention’, is targeted directly at the world’s finance ministers, who ultimately hold the purse strings, it suggests that annual global losses from natural disasters could triple to $185 billion by the end of this century, even without calculating the impact of climate change.
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