Archive for the tag 'Chad'

Will the lessons of responding to the famine in the Horn of Africa be learned for the Sahel?

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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Famine looms in the Sahel, but $1 invested now can save up to $7 later

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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Baroness Amos gives $84m to ‘neglected’ emergencies

January 17th, 2011

We write a lot on this blog about disasters that are perceived not to have happened because they are not covered on CNN – or in the British papers.  Amongst the pernicious effects of this ‘not on CNN’ syndrome are not just the under-resourcing of smaller (and not so small if they are in Africa) emergencies, but the over-funding of the ones that do generate all of the media coverage.

But last week Valerie (Baroness) Amos, who took over as head of OCHA in July last year did something about this by allocating around $84m, as part of the first round of allocations for 2011 from the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), to assist people affected by hunger, malnutrition, disease, displacement and conflict in 15 ‘neglected’ emergencies around the world.

Nearly three quarters of the $84m is going to ‘neglected’ emergencies (as defined by OCHA) in Africa.  And, to some extent, the locations of these emergencies will not surprise – Somalia receives $15m, the largest single allocation, with $11m going to Ethiopia.  Agencies working in Chad will receive $8m, while humanitarian partners in Kenya will receive $6 million to start up programmes for 2011.
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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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Floods hit Chad, making 70,000 homeless

September 17th, 2010

Floods have been everywhere in the news recently, and UNHCR is now reporting that 150,000 people in Chad have been affected by flooding in recent weeks, including 70,000 who have become homeless because their homes were destroyed.

They are suffering from the heaviest rains to hit that part of the country for 40 years – this rain following on from a fierce drought.  UNHCR says that, “Humanitarian access to affected areas across Chad remains a challenge due to destroyed roads and bridges in areas where populations are in need of help.”  Early in August, northern Chad was hit by what were reported to be the heaviest rains for 50 years.

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Two cheers for DEC, the least bad model for emergency funding

September 6th, 2010

The “UK provides a model for private funding of emergencies” according to a story today on IRIN News.  IRIN is a UN OCHA project.

Well, as Evelyn Waugh famously wrote in Scoop, “Up to a point, Lord Copper” which, for those uninitiated in the wonders of Scoop, was his hero’s way of saying ‘No’ to the particularly monstrous newspaper proprietor for whom he worked.

Although maybe it would be fairer to say that the UK’s Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), for that is the ‘private model’ to which the story refers, is one of the least bad ways of organising private responses (i.e. responses by individuals) to emergencies.  DEC has thirteen member agencies and they are: ActionAid, British Red Cross, CAFOD, Care International UK, Christian Aid, Concern Worldwide, Help the Aged, Islamic Relief, Merlin, Oxfam, Save the Children, Tearfund and World Vision.
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Will compassion stretch as far as the Sahel?

August 30th, 2010

The eyes of the world, of course, are on Pakistan and the terrible damage and displacement that the floods there are causing.  But in West Africa a crisis of similar proportions is affecting just as many people – but generating only a tiny percentage of the column inches (or the donor dollars) that accrue to Pakistan.

First, drought led to crop failures and the threat of famine – especially in Niger and Chad, where more than seven million people are affected.  Now the drought has broken, but it has been replaced by torrential rain, which has created further problems by causing flooding and destroying crops.
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DEC comes out with Pakistan appeal as 15 million are affected. But what about the starving millions in the Sahel?

August 10th, 2010

Shortly after we published the last entry on this blog, where we asked why there had been no DEC appeal, DEC announced that it was mounting a coordinated appeal for money to help the estimated 15 million people now affected by the floods in Pakistan.  You can donate here.
Pakistan floods_Aug10
The 15 million figure comes from Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) who said on Monday that, if the Pakistan government’s calculations are correct, the scale of the disaster could be worse than Haiti’s January earthquake, the 2004 Tsunami, and the 2005 Pakistan earthquake combined.
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Floods, famine, fires and full markets create a confusing picture in Pakistan, Russia and the Sahel

August 3rd, 2010

The complexities of global warming and the interconnectedness of world markets have been starkly illustrated this week.  And, as so often, the people to suffer from these random events are the poor in general and the African poor in particular.

As the worst famine for several years stalks Niger and Chad, IRIN News reports that the 2010 rainy season in West Africa has opened with hail storms in Guinea and the heaviest rain in 50 years in northern Chad.  Floods have killed at least 80 people and destroyed homes, bridges, septic tanks, livestock, crops and food stocks; dams have broken, and wells and latrines and have been submerged.
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ActionAid asks “Where’s the $22 billion promised for smallholder farmers?”

June 21st, 2010

As famine closes in on Chad and Niger (and Save the Children says that nearly 400,000 children under the age of five in Niger are facing starvation) ActionAid is asking whether the G8 countries have made good on promises made last year to give $22 billion to help small farmers in developing countries.

Key to this proposal was that the money should go not in emergency food aid, or in aid to boost production of cash crops for export, but to help smallholder farmers.  The importance of smallholders is that they grow food to feed themselves and their families, with surpluses generally sold in local markets.  So this is an important step towards increasing food security and self-sufficiency in food at the local level in developing countries.
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