AdvanceAid

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 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although sadly recent events may well mean that that number – and indeed the four-year downward trend – is already out of date.
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Tags: DRC, IDMC, IDPs, Ivory Coast, Norwegian Refugee Council, Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe

• East Africa , Great Lakes , News , South Asia , Southern Africa , West Africa
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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 31st, 2010

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is reporting that almost 90,000 people have been displaced in the Beni Territory of the North Kivu Province in the eastern DRC following armed confrontations there.  It says that the displaced people are in need of protection, food, water, shelters, medicines and non-food items.  The 90,000 include unaccompanied children as well as other vulnerable people.

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Tags: DRC, IDPs, OCHA, Uganda

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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 July 19th, 2010

Total humanitarian aid worldwide was $15.1 billion in 2009 according to a new report by Global Humanitarian Assistance.  In Part 1 we looked at how much was given.  In this part we are going to look at where the money goes.

By region, in 2008, it went largely to Africa (52% – $5.9 billion) and Asia (42% – $4.8 billion).  And six of the top ten recipient countries in 2008 were African – Sudan (first place), Ethiopia (fourth), Somalia (fifth), DRC (sixth), Zimbabwe (ninth) and Kenya (tenth).  Even tenth placed Kenya received $304 million.  Sudan got $1.4 billion.
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Tags: Africa, Asia, DRC, Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, NGOs, Red Cross, Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe

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admin May 19th, 2010

At the end of 2009 an astonishing 27.1 million people around the world were displaced within their own countries by conflict or violence – the highest number since these records began in the mid 1990s.  This is the conclusion of the annual report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

Since 1997 the number of internally displaced people (IDPs) has grown from 17 million to more than 27 million.  Over the same period, the number of refugees has remained fairly stable, fluctuating between 13 and 16 million.

Africa now has 11.6 million of the total 27 million IDPs (43%), and nearly seven million people globally were newly displaced in 2009, many more than in previous years.
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Tags: Climate change, Colombia, DRC, Ethiopia, IDMC, IDPs, OCHA, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, UN

• East Africa , Great Lakes , Latin America , South Asia
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admin April 29th, 2010

As a world, we rely massively on two liquids – oil and water.  Wars have already been fought over diminishing supplies of the one and it will not be long before wars are fought over the diminishing supply of the other.  And whilst it is relatively easy to see how we could replace oil – renewable energy sources, principally solar, changes in economic patterns, the death of globalisation – it is impossible to replace water.

Cue a row that has broken out over the ‘rights’ to the water that flows down the Nile.  River basins are one of the planet’s major communal assets – one of the great Commons, like the air – and also politically one of the most fraught.
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Tags: Congo Republic, DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nile, Ruaha, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambezi

• East Africa , North Africa
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admin April 23rd, 2010

You probably don’t come to this blog looking for theatre reviews, but Ruined, a play about the DRC has just opened at the Almeida theatre in Islington (north London) having transferred from the US and we’d like to bring it to readers’ attention.

Reviewing it in The Guardian Michael Billington writes, “Lynn Nottage’s play arrives in London laden with American honours.  And rightly so, since it offers a graphic portrait of women as perennial victims of war.  More than that, it reminds us of the continuing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which rarely makes the front pages but has led to 5.4m deaths.”
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Tags: DRC, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia

• East Africa , News
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admin April 19th, 2010

Imagine if an airport in a European or an American country (that’s North, South or even Central America) had been captured by rebel fighters and only regained after an assault by local army troops supported by UN peacekeepers in which several UN troops were killed.  What’s more, this is the airport where the world’s largest UN mission has aircraft stationed

It would lead the news for days.

But in the DRC, it would appear, it merits little more than a footnote.  In this action, three UN personnel, including a Ghanaian peacekeeper and a South African pilot, were reported killed, as well as four government soldiers, two police officers and nine rebels.
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Tags: Congo Republic, DRC, natural resources, UN

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