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admin 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

• East Africa , Great Lakes , News , Southern Africa , West Africa
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admin November 4th, 2011

The 2011 version of the Human Development Index (HDI) has been released and it’s predictably bad news for Africa.

The bottom of the pile – the Low Human Development sector – is dominated by sub-Saharan African countries.  Indeed, positions 159 – 187 in the table, the bottom twenty eight in the world, are all African with the exception of Afghanistan.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Botswana, Burundi, DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, HDI, Latin America, Mozambique, Niger, Norway

• East Africa , Great Lakes , News , North Africa , Southern Africa , West Africa
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admin May 31st, 2011

Bang in line with Andrew Mitchell’s approach at DFID, Accenture has produced a new report that argues that the way forward for international development is ‘convergence’.  This convergence it sees as a narrowing of the gaps that currently exist between the commercial and NGO sectors – plus a changing relationship of donors (government and private) with both.

Accenture talks about a “convergence of solutions”, which it describes as “an approach that puts the needs of those most affected squarely at the heart of the matter”.  NGOs would surely say that this is what they do already but the key to what Accenture is arguing surely comes in its observation that “development problems are so complex, so large, so persistent, so fluid that they require a wide range of approaches” and it suggests that these approaches could just as well come from the private as from the NGO or the public sectors.
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Tags: Accenture, Afghanistan, Andrew Mitchell, Bayer, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Clinton Foundation, DFID, Ericsson, GSK, Heineken, Mercy Corps, NGOs, Rwanda, UNHCR

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admin 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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Tags: Afghanistan, Algeria, Botswana, Burundi, DRC, Gabon, Haiti, HDI, Libya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Niger, Tunisia, UNDP, Zimbabwe

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admin July 29th, 2010

Opinion is growing that a La Niña phenomenon has officially arrived and this means that disaster response teams probably need to brace themselves for heavier monsoons, bigger and more frequent hurricanes, and angrier cyclones.

“There is global consensus that we are at the beginning of a La Niña, but we cannot pronounce the intensity of the event yet – we have to wait for it to evolve,” Rupa Kumar Kolli, Chief of the World Climate Applications and Services Division at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) told IRIN News.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Climate change, DRC, Floods, IDPs, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, NASA, Pakistan, Red Crescent, Red Cross, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, WMO

• Americas , East Africa , Great Lakes , Latin America , North Africa , South Asia , South East Asia , Southern Africa
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admin March 3rd, 2010

The first nine weeks of 2010 would appear to have brought an intensive run of earthquakes around the world – from Haiti in January to Chile in March, but with other significant quakes so far this year in the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, the China/Russia/North Korea border and Afghanistan/NW Pakistan.  All of these measured more than 5 on the Richter Scale.

But there are smaller quakes all over the globe, all the time.  The US Geological Survey (USGS) has a real-time map here showing the latest earthquakes in the world over the past seven days.  The current total, at the time of writing, is 366.  For the past seven days.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Chile, China, CRED, Drought, earthquake, Floods, Haiti, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, natural disasters, North Korea, OCHA, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Storm, tsunami, USGS

• Americas , South East Asia
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admin December 23rd, 2009

Civilians attacked, bombed, and cut off from aid in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), along with stagnant funding for treating HIV/AIDS and ongoing neglect of other diseases, were among the worst emergencies in 2009, the international medical humanitarian organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) reported today in its annual list of the Top Ten humanitarian crises.

The list, the twelfth that MSF has produced, is drawn from its operational activities in close to 70 countries, where the organization’s medical teams witnessed some of the worst humanitarian conditions.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Civil War, DRC, Pakistan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, War, Yemen

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admin December 1st, 2009

The Conference of the Parties (COP), which is due to start in Copenhagen next Monday (Dec 7th), is said by many to be the most important international meeting EVER.  It’s especially important for the developing countries – many of them in Africa – that suffer most from the effects of global warming.

This is COP15, signifying that it is the fifteenth annual meeting to take place since the agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in June 1992. [Before you start to do the maths, the first COP took place in 1995 in Berlin].
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Tags: Afghanistan, Canada, China, Climate change, Copenhagen, Doha Round, Global warming, Iraq, Kyoto Protocol, Somalia, United States, WTO, Zimbabwe

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