Archive for March, 2011

Ashdown recommends radical shake-up of the way that emergencies are funded by DFID

March 28th, 2011

Lord Paddy Ashdown has spoken, with the publication today of his Humanitarian Emergency Response Review (HERR) for DFID, and he has some interesting things to say.  We have to welcome, in particular, the section on ‘Changing the funding model’, something that Advance Aid has been arguing for.

Within this section there is an acknowledgment that funding is not done well at the moment and he states that, “DFID…needs to use its funds to promote change – to ensure that agencies are equipped to respond fast and deliver what people really need.”  He goes on to offer the following damning critique, “Funding is not proportionate to needs, it is not equitable, it is not coordinated or harmonised, it does not focus enough on prevention and it does not demand demonstrable performance of funded agencies.”
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Africa tops the charts with 11 million displaced people in 2010

March 24th, 2011

Africa still has more than 11 million displaced people, and accounts for 40% of all displaced people around the world according to the latest annual report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).  The IDMC says that globally, “the recorded number of people displaced within their country due to conflict or violence rose to 27.5 million in 2010, which is the highest in a decade.”

The number displaced in Africa at the end of 2010, 11.1 million, was the lowest for four years, although sadly recent events may well mean that that number – and indeed the four-year downward trend – is already out of date.
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500,000 Ivorians in ‘forgotten’ emergency – with more in southern Libya

March 23rd, 2011

We’ve written often in this blog about ‘forgotten’ crises, emergencies that don’t make it to the Ten O’Clock News and so somehow don’t exist.  The knock-on effects of this are terrible – a failure to respond, driven often by a failure to raise the money needed to buy the necessary goods.

Now, with Japan dominating the natural disaster headlines and the war in/on Libya dominating the man-made disaster headlines, events in Ivory Coast are being almost completely overlooked, not to mention the plight of Africans fleeing south out of Libya.  And then there’s the looming prospect of conflict over oil between Sudan and (come July) newly-independent South Sudan.
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Change in the air as Ashdown Committee report looms?

March 22nd, 2011

In just under a week, DFID’s Humanitarian Emergency Response Review (also known as HERR, otherwise knows as the Ashdown Committee) will be submitting its recommendations.   It could be a real red-letter day for those involved in the provision of emergency relief, because the way that we currently do things has to change and Ashdown has the ability, and the remit, to deliver change.
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African poverty is all the NGOs’ fault – or is it the journalists’?

March 21st, 2011

The Columbia Journalism Review is not the place that one normally looks for incisive comment on aid, development and emergencies, but there’s an interesting article published online that casts some light into the slightly murky world of the way that things get reported – or, in some cases, don’t get reported.

Author Karen Rothmyer comes with considerable credibility as she is a former managing editor of The Nation, was a Peace Corps teacher in Kenya in the 1960s and has lived in Kenya full-time since 2007.  So she has seen the NGO/journalist interface from both sides.
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DFID reviews support for multilateral agencies – four lose all funding and four go into ‘special measures’

March 3rd, 2011

Alongside the review of which countries the UK will continue to support with aid, covered in this blog yesterday, DFID has also been carrying out a review of the 43 multilateral agencies into which it will pour £3.7 billion in 2010/11.

The 43 have been ranked as Very Good, Good, Adequate or Poor.  At the extremes, nine are ranked as Poor and nine as Very Good.  In the middle, nine are Adequate and 16 are Good.
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DFID review leads to increased Africa focus

March 2nd, 2011

DFID yesterday announced the results of its bilateral aid programme and the decision that has been made is that it will be focussing its money on 27 countries, many of them in East Africa.  The review says that it wants to target support “where it will make the biggest difference and where the need is greatest”.

These 27 countries, according to DFID, account for three quarters of global maternal mortality and nearly three quarters of global malaria deaths.  And seventeen of them are in Africa: Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda , Zambia and Zimbabwe.
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Business opportunities at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Literally

March 1st, 2011

The second of Advance Aid’s monthly columns – View from the Middle – has now been published on Ethical Corporation magazine’s website and you can read it here.

Inspired by a recent visit to Kibera in Nairobi, this column is about the commercial opportunities offered by the lowest common denominator of human experience – defecation.
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