admin 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
admin 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
admin 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
admin 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