Archive for the tag 'Haiti'

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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Ed Stourton calls the humanitarian industry to account

January 11th, 2011

‘Haiti and Truth about NGOs’ was an extraordinary programme on Radio 4 this morning.  If you didn’t catch it first time around, you can catch it again at 2130 tonight on Radio 4 or listen to it again here.

Described as an ‘Insight into the aid industry as it faces challenging times’, reporter/presenter Edward Stourton raises a lot of the issues that will be familiar to aid industry professionals – speed of response (or lack of it) in the face of massive disaster, the relative lack of Disaster Risk Reduction, the lack of any real stockpile of emergency goods, the ability of thousands of NGOs to land on a disaster and sometimes make things worse rather than better despite the best coordination efforts of the Clusters.

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Tortured questions in the thistle field of aid

November 18th, 2010

“Is Humanitarian Aid Bad for Africa?” asks Margaret Wente in the Toronto Globe & Mail.

And the Globe & Mail has been paying a lot of attention to this subject over the past month, with a news story on Oct 19th reporting that, “The Canadian government says it is ‘deeply concerned’ by a report that its foreign aid to Ethiopia is being used as a weapon to crush political dissent and bolster the power of the ruling party.”  This followed an editorial the previous day, which picked up on a Human Rights Watch report that alleged that aid distribution in Ethiopia was tied into loyalty to the ruling political party.

Well, the “Is Aid Bad for Africa?” question is a massive one that, in its bald form, is very hard to answer with a simple “Yes” or a “No”. What humanitarian aid are we talking about, in what circumstances, in which country?  Although it has to be said that Dambisa Moyo, in her famous book ‘Dead Aid’, clearly felt that the answer was “Yes” and argued that all aid to Africa should be run down and then stopped over a very short timescale.
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New HDI catalogues total failure of development in Africa

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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Floods make 100,000 homeless in Benin – Sadly, not a lot of people know that

October 27th, 2010

Largely unnoticed by the rest of the world – and certainly invisible when competing with stories from Pakistan or even Haiti, where cholera has now raised its ugly head – the West African state of Benin has been devastated by floods over the past two weeks.

Just over a week ago UNICEF reported that it was responding to mass flooding that had covered more that two thirds of the country.  Unseasonably heavy rains had caused the Oueme and Mono rivers to overflow and the resulting floods destroyed homes, schools and health centres, claiming 43 lives and leaving nearly 100,000 homeless.
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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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Humanitarian aid analysis Part 2 – Where does the money go?

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.
WFP delivers to Madagascar
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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Earthquakes – massive killers, but relatively little displacement

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.

Earthquake damage_Haiti

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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Don’t forget the forgotten – in Yemen and Goma

February 26th, 2010

Haiti, of course, dominates the disaster-related news, and with good reason.  But it also dominates the public perceptions of disasters and this means that donations are heavily skewed in a way that is probably helpful neither to the Haitians themselves, nor to the aid agencies that receive money specifically for Haiti, nor above all for the hundreds of thousands of people involved in other disasters around the world who get overlooked.

Yemeni IDP children

They get overlooked when it comes to money, and overlooked when it comes to the provision of relief services – so much time and effort is tied up in helping the people of Haiti.
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