Archive for the tag 'Ethiopia'

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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Approach to dealing with famine and crises has to change say Oxfam and Save the Children

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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Take a time out for 15 uplifting African talks on TED

December 11th, 2011

If you are not already a fan of TED, you should be.  TED is a nonprofit organisation devoted to a concept it calls ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’ and there are some fabulous ideas on there, beautifully and succinctly presented.

Launched in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds, Technology, Entertainment and Design, its scope has since become a lot broader and embraces annual conferences – the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh each summer – plus the TEDx programmes that take TED conferences to a wide range of other countries.

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New HDI places Africa firmly at the bottom of the pile

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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East African famine blame game begins

August 2nd, 2011

Sadly for the people suffering in the Horn of Africa, the famine there is destined to become a case history of international inaction in advance of a known disaster, a ‘How not to do it’ of emergency preparation and response. And all of the key players – governments, aid agencies, UN organisations – are already lining up to say that it was not their fault, even before the much-needed aid has really begun to arrive.

The first jolt to the emergency relief system was delivered by the Tsunami at Xmas 2004 when the existing systems were found wanting.  In particular, too many organisations turned up to help with little or no coordination.  Chaos ensued.

Some progress had been made on this front by the time the earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, but there was still a fair amount of chaos.

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Drought warnings in the Horn of Africa ignored for a year – now 747s have to fly in with emergency goods

July 18th, 2011

‘Communication problems’ meant that warnings one year ago forecasting a drought in the Horn of Africa were ignored by planners who could have prepared a timely response.  The result is a massive airlift costing huge sums of money.

No one is in any doubt that the drought that is hitting the Horn of Africa at the moment is a major humanitarian crisis but compare and contrast these two stories that relate to it.

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Hundreds of thousands displaced in Sudan as North and South move towards separation

June 22nd, 2011

Two and half weeks before South Sudan’s independence – due on July 9th – hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, minor wars and disputes are simmering, and yet there has so far been less violence – and, surprisingly, less displacement – than once feared.

That said, over 60,000 people have fled violence in South Kordofan and more than 100,000 have fled Abyei for a similar reason.  One beacon of hope is that North and South Sudan signed a deal earlier this week to pull their troops out of the disputed Abyei region and bring in Ethiopian peacekeeping forces – a deal brokered by former South African President Thabo Mbeki at a conference in Addis Ababa.
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Drought in the North East, floods in the South West as La Nina tail wags hard across Africa

April 19th, 2011

Extreme weather events continue to hit Africa, with more than eight million people affected by drought in East Africa and 60,000 displaced by floods in Southern Africa, floods that are not likely to dissipate for up to six months.  Both are said to be tail-end effects of the latest La Nina – which should start to fade in May this year.

Drought, food shortage and water shortage follow on from the failure of the rains in late 2010 across Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and the Karamoja region in Uganda. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is reporting  that the drought has led to substantial harvest failure, deteriorating pasture conditions, decreased water availability and livestock losses. Lack of access to affected areas, high food prices, human and livestock diseases and the ongoing insurgency in Somalia are all exacerbating the situation.

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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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Climate change scientists predict that droughts in East Africa will increase

February 15th, 2011

Sometimes it does seem that the link between global warming and actual climate change is hard to establish.  We know from the massive evidence of the scientific literature that the earth is warming.  We know from our own experience that the climate is changing, but tying the two together can be hard.

But now Nature Climate Change has reported on an academic study that shows that spikes in Indian Ocean sea-surface temperature have changed the region’s weather patterns and triggered more frequent droughts in East Africa in recent decades.
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